Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: Historical or Public Health Issue?

Indigenous Nations each have their own iteration of how the world was created.

Robin Wall Kimmerer opens her book Braiding Sweetgrass with the oral tradition of Skywoman. As Skywoman falls from Skyworld, geese work together to catch her fall in the darkness, and a great turtle offers his shell as a place of refuge until the animals can find a home for Skywoman. Loon, Otter, Beaver, and Sturgeon each dive below the darkness to see what they can find for Skywoman. Muskrat, the weakest diver, offers his services to help the human. And even though Muskrat’s lifeless body returns to the surface, his tiny hand is clamped around mud. Skywoman takes this mud and spreads it over the Turtle’s back, thus creating ᏧᏴᏢ ᎠᎹᏰᏟ (tsuyvtlv amayetli/Turtle Island) and Earth. Skywoman brought a bundle of plants and trees with her from Skyworld, and she planted them in the mud to sustain life.

source: http://christibelcourt.com/

For the Cherokee Nation, our creation story begins when Dâyuni'sï, Water Beetle, came from Gälûñ'lätï, the sky realm. Dâyuni'sï scurried along the water and could find no place to rest. Unaffected by the natural laws of cause and effect, Dâyuni'sï dove below the surface of the water and brought up mud that created Earth. Other animals from Gälûñ'lät came to explore Earth, but the mud remained soft. Buzzard was sent to find a place for animals to live, but as he grew tired, his wings flapped close to the mud, and he created valleys and mountains where the Tsalagi people called home.

Creation stories not only speak of where we came from, but how we can go forward. Cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. First Nations utilize these stories to understand their relationship to the land. In many ways, creation stories illuminate human relationships with non-human entities. Wall Kimmerer illuminates the differences between the Potawatomi Nation’s story of Skywoman falling and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. She states, “one story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”^[1]

A single thread that can be pulled out of these two stories is the construction of gender. By studying these cosmologies, scholars can trace the fundamental differences of gender in Native American and Euro-American communities. 

source: Samantha Manz

Instead of viewing men and women as balancing or complementing one another, Euro-Americans regarded gender as hierarchical with women subservient to men.^[2] Nancy Shoemaker contends that, “In Europe, patriarchy ordered social relations under a hierarchical system: women and children were the obedient dependents of the patriarch who, ideally, used his power benevolently to protect them but who also had the uncontested privilege of forcible coercion.”^[3] For the most part, Indigenous communities determined gender based on the labor needed. Each Indigenous nation had its own justification for gendering people, and it did not mean that Indigenous tribes were necessarily gender neutral. Sarah Deer (Muscogee) points out, “gender was often explicitly prescribed in the division of duties, based on dualistic scheme with a significant emphasis on balance.”^[4] In Indigenous communities, gender relied on balance and prevented sexual violence from occurring prior to European arrival. 

In European society, women had no freedom of sexuality and had to remain subservient to their husbands in the home. Europeans constructed sexuality around female inferiority and shame, where sex before marriage was intolerable. Deer argues, “Because American perspectives on sexuality (especially in the late nineteenth century Victorian era) contrasted sharply with indigenous perspectives on healthy sexuality, many European and American policies served to penalize Native women for engaging in consensual sexual activity.”^[5] European gender expectations were not met by most Indian cultures. Where a Native woman made an individualized decision to engage in sex with men, Europeans could interpret this decision two ways: promiscuity or prostitution. Either way, the individualized decision for Native women to engage in sexual activity justified later rape and sexual violence against Native women. In addition to conquering Native lands, colonialism is about the conquest of bodies—particularly the bodies and sexuality of Indigenous women. 

source: The New York Times

As Indigenous women go missing and are murdered in the United States, Canada, and worldwide, this represents a health epidemic in Indian country, as well as ongoing systemic processes of exploitation, domination, and settler colonialism. Statistics show that one in three Native women will be raped in her lifetime, and unlike reported rape cases outside Indian Country, one in three Native women will be raped by a person of a different race than her.^[6] This soundbite, as Deer refers to it, demonstrates that Indigenous women experience high levels of interracial rape, whereas non-Indigenous women experience intraracial rape.

Deer argues, “trafficking in the U.S. long predates the current legal regime in power; the tactics used by sex traffickers today were used against Native peoples from the moment of contact. These tactics were pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese, the French and the English, the Dutch and the Russians.”^[7] Indigenous women are disproportionately overrepresented in numbers of prostitution and sexual violence. Prostitution and sexual violence are used as colonial tools to violate Indigenous women’s bodies and sovereignty. Violence against Indigenous women began during the high level of colonial penetration, but this violence is ongoing, and the violence is intimate and gross. This colonial violence demonstrates how settler colonialism is a historical and contemporary structure that infringes on Indigenous women’s sexuality sovereignty. 

source: The Daily Cardinal (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Deer disagrees with the usage of “epidemic” for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit (MMIWG2S), because epidemics are biological and blameless, whereas violence against Indigenous womxn is historical and political. The term “epidemic” emphasizes a public health issue and reproductive right injustice. In 2016, over 5,700 MMIWG2S cases were reported in the United States—but only 116 cases were reported to the Department of Justice.^[8] Meanwhile up to 4,000 Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit are killed or missing in Canada, and the numbers are possibly higher due to lack of reporting.

Canada assembled a protocol task force (Native Women’s Association of Canada) and put forth a 1,200-page report on MMIWG2S. The Seattle Urban Health Institute produces reports to monitor the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, as well, but the violence against Indigenous womxn has been recorded in academic scholarship as scholars analyze the historical and contemporary structures of settler colonialism. Until the publication of these reports, many people outside of Indian Country did not know about the MMIWG2S epidemic and do not recognize the extent of the trauma that Indigenous communities experience and continue to experience.

As historians delve into Indigenous oral tradition and histories, gender must play a critical role in comprehending the impacts of settler colonialism and the value of Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit in Indigenous communities. Legal scholars and public health officials have the language to discuss violence and understand how sexual violence is embedded in legal structures. The MMIWG2S epidemic is both a public health and a historical issue; historians, legal scholars, and public health officials must work together to stop violence levelled against Indigenous womxn. 

About the author: Samantha Manz is a first-year MA student working with Dr. Linda Heidenreich and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Originally from Lubbock, Texas, she received her BA in English and history from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and conducted research for two years. Her research interests include how Indigenous women experience violence in structures of settler colonialism in a historic and contemporary context. She also is interested in how Indigenous women artists use art as a form of resistance while responding to the historic legacies of photographers, such as Edward S. Curtis.

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013) 7.

[2] Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 62. 

[3] Nancy Shoemaker, Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York: Routledge Press, 1995), 3.

[4] Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 19. 

[5] Sarah Deer, “Relocation Revisited: Sex Trafficking of Native Women in the United States” William Mitchell Law Review 36, no. 2 (2010), 652.

[6] Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, 1. Deer notes, “the original statistic is derived from a 1998 report examining data from the National Violence Against Women Survey.”

[7] Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, 62.

[8] Urban Indian Health Institute, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report, Annita Lucchesi and Abigail Echo-Hawk eds. Second report, Seattle: Seattle Indian Health Board, 2019.