Colonial and Indigenous Representations of MMIWG in the Media

Canada's Indifference towards Indigenous Stories: 

A Critical Analysis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

MMIWG Hand Print
Figure 1: '#MMIWG' on top of red handprint

        As a female from a marginalized community, I feel a sense of empathy and understanding when it comes to issues regarding murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) residing in Canada. I became involved with this topic because of my own childhood and current events surrounding my birth country, India. While I’ve maintained a strong bond to my culture and language to preserve my identity, I have also severed my ties with the religion I grew up in, that is Hinduism. As a developing third world country, India is known for its high rates of poverty, corruption, an outdated caste system, and other problems which have stunted its development (Human Development Reports). Despite Hinduism being the most prominent religion in India and an advocate for feminine leadership and safety, India has some of the highest rates of violence against women. According to Step Up for Rights of Females, “in a survey with young men and women in India, 57% of boys and 53% girls accept women beating by husbands is justified”. Even though I feel proud to be from a rich colorful culture, I can not condone cruelty against any gender or sex because of my heritage. Thus, after learning about the violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada, I felt ashamed and guilty of continuing to be part of a land which is indifferent towards these crimes. I’m thankful to this class for giving me the opportunity to learn, research and spread my knowledge within my network of friends and families, thus helping to create awareness and allyship. So, in this paper I will show the effect of law and policy on the way Indigenous women are perceived in current day Canada and offer a comparison between colonial and Indigenous representations of violence against women in Canada. To expand I will show that written laws such as the Indian Act denied women status and severed their connection to their community and land. Also, I will construct my comparison analysis by illustrating the difference between colonial and Indigenous representations of MMIWG in the media which then offers an explanation for the marginalization of native populations within Canadian society and justifications for further state interference into Indigenous lives (Hargreaves 103). By combining law and policy, and MMIWG through a colonial and Indigenous lens, I will show the importance of centering the Indigenous story.

        One of the earliest government policies issued was An Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in the Province passed in 1857 as a state effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples to the economic and social customs of European settler society (Robinson). By disenfranchising the Indigenous body, The Gradual Civilization Act (GCA) required the Native communities to want to be assimilated into the colonial society and by choosing to be “enfranchised” they would no longer be deemed an “Indian” (as referred to then) and could be treated like European citizens within the Canadian society. The colonial state recognized the power of the female through accounts such as Joseph-Francois Lafitau’s interpretation of women’s power in the Iroquois nations:

Nothing is more real, however, than the women’s superiority. It is they who really maintain the tribe . . . In them resides all the real authority: the lands, the fields, and all their harvest belong to them; they are the soul of the councils, the arbiter of peace and war . . . they arrange the marriages; the children are under their authority; and the order of succession is founded on their blood. (Woolsey 22)
 
The Act stripped them of their rights and privileges through law as clause 8 in the GCA states that “the wife, widow, and [children] of an Indian enfranchised under this Act, shall be also enfranchised ... and shall not be deemed members of [their] former tribe”. By offering enfranchisement for the denial of their Indian status, the government used the law to ‘breed out the Indian’ and adopt the heteronormative patriarchal European practices where the male was the head of the household. Interestingly, only one person voluntarily franchised under the GCA which shows that Indigenous response to colonial law was always met with resistance on behalf of Indigenous people and their communities (Robinson).

        The GCA served as a base for many future pieces of legislature which worked to codify the system and disrupt Indigenous traditions. It was later fine tuned into the Indian Act which is a “piece of legislation that structures all aspects of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the federal government and that defines “Indian status” under Canadian law” (Hargreaves 87). It is an evolving, paradoxical document that has enabled trauma, human rights violations and social and cultural disruption for generations of First Nations peoples (Henderson). The Indian Act “reordered gender relations to subordinate women” (Suzack 5) by promoting and normalizing male dominated forms of political organization, and consolidated the discriminatory provisions of earlier legislation and enshrined in the Gradual Civilization Act (Hargreaves 88). By centering society to heteronormative patriarchal ideals, altogether the colonial state reduced the female body to a commodity and “disrupted traditional kinship systems, matrilineal descent patterns, and matrilocal, post-marital residency patterns” (Dua & Robertson 68). Past government policy has resulted in a history of violence against women and the effects of colonial subjugation of Native women are seen today through the states indifference towards the MMIWG of Canada.


Figure 2: Billboard along the Highway of Tears
Photograph credit: Bob Friel

        One of the most underrepresented cases of violence against Indigenous women takes place along the Highway of Tears or Highway 16, a highway in northwestern British Columbia which is named after the high number of Indigenous women who disappeared along its path. The province’s response to these acts of violence is targeting the behavior of Indigenous women who hitchhike instead of providing safe alternatives to those who need to use the road for essential travel. The billboards shown in Figure 1 and 2 use words like “ain’t worth the risk sister” and “Killer on the loose!” to position hitchhiking as a dangerous choice made by Indigenous women. The images and paintings along with the written text try to show that girls who don’t hitchhike, will not become targets of the “killer”. This alludes to the Indigenous woman being a ‘willing victim’ which is a direct result of systemic racism and sexism emerging from gender binaries and Western patriarchal influence which have been affecting Indigenous law and policy in Canada since the Gradual Civilization Act. In addition, by referring to a singular “killer” the billboard attempts to erase the link between “colonization, residential schools, land seizures and displacement with contemporary mobility issues for Indigenous people” (Morton 305), and blames a singular unknown assailant for the issue of violence against Indigenous women. While both billboards show the dangers of hitchhiking across the Highway of Tears, these government funded designs do not offer alternatives for those who need to use the road for essential services. Thus by implementing solutions which try to convince Native women to change their behaviors, the colonial state’s billboards attempt to regulate, constrain and police the mobility of Indigenous peoples, similar to when Indigenous individuals could not leave their reserves without a permission slip under the Indian Act.

Figure 3: Another billboard along the Highway of Tears
Photograph credit: Bob Friel
        
        While the media is helpful in raising public awareness, the tone and subtle racial rhetoric affirm stereotypes which do harm to the Indigenous identity. Whereas Indigenous texts go beyond raising public awareness and use the remembrance as an active process of reclamation that affirms Indigenous presence. The director of the film, Christine Welsh, purposefully remembers missing and murdered women to the territories and familial networks from which they have been violently removed. By “humanizing” the faceless or nameless women, Finding Dawn positions stories of MMIWG in relation to each other to promote broader public awareness, honor their memory and assert sovereign Indigenous presence and resilience through the traditional Indigenous story-telling process. By moving from Vancouver’s Downtown East side to the Dawn’s traditional territory, “Welsh positions Dawn in relation to both her tribal ancestry and her immediate family, thus showing the importance of location and of situating the self” (Hargreaves 100). By showing the broader ancestral network from which Dawn is missing, the film shows the direct impact on the Stó:lô Nation’s past and future as her ancestors had been living on the land for as “long as nine thousand years” (Welsh). By breaking free from the colonial representations strategies which pathologize accounts of mental illness, poverty, sex work, and addiction, Welsh’s film offers coverage to these crime cases by showing the women as belonging to a family and being missed from a broader network of community relationships. Finding Dawn reinforces that women are not responsible for their disappearances and by justifying the violence done to them due to their “poor lifestyle choices” is acting indifferent to the historical and ongoing invasion imposed on Indigenous societies by the settler colonial nation-state. Through laws and policies, the Native people, especially Native women have been ‘dehumanized’ through state-sponsored conditions of marginalization and displacement. By making their eligibility to attain status different from their counterpart, Canada began the process of “othering” the Indigenous female body in 1857 with the Gradual Civilization Act.

        Another story shown in the film is that of Ramona Wilson’s, a sixteen-year-old girl who disappeared from the Highway of Tears during the summer of 1994. Her mother, Matilda Wilson arranges an annual walk in honor of her daughter’s memory, and the community members trace the last known steps Ramona had taken along the highway to “feel closer to her” (Welsh). Matilda explains that “[they] are showing people [they] are not afraid and that [they] are here. [They] will always be here…. I will always be here. This face will always be here” (Welsh). Through the future tense and focus on survivance over victim-hood, “Matilda’s statement articulates remembrance as an active process of reclamation and vision that affirms Indigenous presence” (Welsh). In “Nishnaabeg Anti-capitalism” Leanne Simpson states that “people will participate in all the processes settler colonialism sets up for [them] to have a voice in [it], except the processes, are set up to reinforce settler colonialism, not disrupt it” and this shows that similar to the government-funded billboards, the film also adopts the practice to promote awareness. Although the difference between blaming the disappearances on one serial killer compared to Welsh’s exploration of the female’s lives and livelihoods shows that the Indigenous lens cultivates a healing movement of being reconnected and remembered from the dismemberment and disconnections created by colonial policy and actions such as the Indian Act and residential schools (Hargreaves 102). In fact, many Indigenous texts capture an empowering atmosphere and strength to recognize the importance of subverting colonial processes to sustain Indigenous society. The poem “tipiskāwi-pīsim 1 - the dark moon” from Burning in This Midnight Dream gives importance to the celebration of femininity and childbearing through the sexualization of nature, things which were previously not allowed. These unspoken policies which normalized violence and gender bias in residential schools under the Indian Act have resulted in a loop of revictimization and poems such as this one help to empower the Indigenous body (as shown in Figure 3). 

Figure 4: A screenshot of the last passage from a poem in
Burning in This Midnight Dream by Louise Halfe

        Through critical analysis, this paper has shown the effect of past government policy on Indigenous women’s identity today. Through assimilative practices, the Indian Act has resulted in physical acts of violence or violent misinterpretations, which are both gendered and colonial in their origin and expression. By providing a contrasting perspective on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the critical argument provides the audience with blatant differences in the portrayal of these crimes through a colonial and Indigenous lens. In colonial representations, the focus of attention is conflicting as crime against Indigenous women is interwoven with victim-blaming, “high-risk lifestyles” and framing women out to be “Others”. By doing more than raising public awareness, films like Finding Dawn emphasize the hope, continue to search for the missing, and call them home. Indigenous representations of their own stories shine light on Canadian soil being entrenched with violence against Native people and ignorance towards the importance of Indigenous life. This paper works to show how the media (eg. billboards) uses denial to represent violence against Indigenous women as anticipated and normal. Whereas Christine Welsh’s film causes the audience to bear witness and create empathy and representation within the society. Canada’s state of indifference towards MMIWG show that little has changed and crisis has remained “unfortunate and unresolved extension of past practices of injustice and discrimination” (Singh 52). However Indigenous communities have continued to raise their voice and make a difference and by doing research for this paper, I too have learnt about the injustice against Indigenous women and the importance of relying on a primary source who has experienced an event directly. Previously I have made the mistake of trying to understand the Indigenous experience and trying to relate to everything, but through this journey I came to realize early on that I was wrong for thinking that way. The Indigenous identity is unique to Indigenous people and after learning about the effect of law and policy, it is my responsibility to spread this information within my communal network and form an allyship so the government takes these issues seriously and is held responsible for this systemic issue of violence. As CBC’s Connie Walker emphasizes: “We can't ignore the patterns that are being repeated again and again in the lives of these women. Until the root causes are addressed, the violence will continue.”



Works Cited
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