Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: The Legacy of Colonialism
For many, it’s an established fact that the Indigenous people of the United States and Canada were victims of genocide, but sadly, some people are still in denial. The truth is that white colonizers arrived in the America’s with diseases and weapons that worked simultaneously to eliminate the vast majority of the native population. They raped and abused the women, they enslaved and killed the adults, and they kidnapped and indoctrinated the children in residential schools. They stole their land, their culture, and their power. Now, the successors of the original colonizers are stealing Indigenous women.
Very few people cared hundreds of years ago when the Native population was being tortured and eradicated, and still people are in denial that their white ancestors had any part in the disappearance of an entire culture, but there is no question that the descendants of those same white ancestors are to blame for the resurgence of missing Indigenous people. Though, just like so many years ago, no one seems to care.
- Indigenous women are murdered at a rate ten times higher than all other ethnicities.
- Murder is the 3rd leading cause of death for Indigenous women.
It might be easy to dismiss this problem, saying that people from every group are kidnapped, but you would be wrong considering that it’s been proven that Indigenous women go missing and are murdered at an immensely disproportionate rate to other groups. You would also be wrong to say that these women put themselves in a position to be abducted. Though it’s true that many of the women go missing while hitchhiking or engaging in sex work, the only reason they are in those circumstances is again, because of the legacy that the settlers left behind. Almost a quarter of American Indians and Alaska Natives live on the reservations that the colonizers forced them onto, which are underserved and impoverished. This has led to Indigenous people leaving the reservations to find work which has put them in vulnerable situations wherein they are abused and many go missing.
To be clear, these disappearances and murders are not random; Indigenous women are targeted because of the racism and fetishization that has prevailed for years. They are taken because of the unfair treatment of Native populations that has made them vulnerable and thus, easy targets. They are taken because others, namely white men, feel entitled to what is not theirs to take, just like the white men of the past felt entitled to take the land and power that belonged to Indigenous people.
It doesn’t stop there; Indigenous people are being abducted and killed, but they receive no justice, which many Indigenous people attribute to police bias. For instance, Robert Pickton, a serial killer who murdered several Indigenous women and was able to continue his crimes because the police wouldn’t investigate missing Native women.
The executive director of Sacred Spirits First National Coalition, Lisa Brunner, explains that the US laws and policies have created “lands of impunity” that are like “playgrounds for serial rapists, batterers, [and] killers,” leaving Indigenous women and girls unprotected. The “playgrounds” for criminals that Brunner describes are turning into graveyards with empty headstones.
Too many cases lose momentum and go cold, evidence is mishandled and lost, and the names of the missing and murdered Indigenous women are forgotten because law enforcement does not put in the effort to find them that it would for another person.
Highway of Tears
Highway 16, better known as the Highway of Tears is a 450 mile stretch of road between Prince George and Prince Rupert, Canada. This infamous corridor got its name from the 80+ victims who went missing or were murdered along it, mostly Indigenous women.
The high rates of poverty in underserved Indigenous communities force many people to hitchhike which is the main reason why so many Indigenous women go missing or are found dead along Highway 16; they are picked up by drivers, mostly men of other races, and never seen again. Three from the multitude of victims of the Highway of Tears are cousins, Roberta, Cecilia, and Delphine Nikal.
Roberta Nikal was a 19 year old First Nations woman with brown hair, brown eyes, and a funny, caring personality. In August of 1988, while her sister was driving to visit her, Roberta left early from a camping trip she had taken with her friends near Cultus Lake. While she was on her way to the bus stop to go home, a witness saw her speaking to a man in a red sports car on the side of the road. That witness was the last person to see Roberta who is still considered missing and who’s sister is still searching for her almost 33 years later.
Cecilia Nikal was a 15 year old First Nations woman, with black hair and brown eyes, who has been missing for almost 32 years. Cecilia traveled to Vancouver in early August of 1989 to visit her mother but vanished in October, just two months later. Her family claims that she left her mother’s to go live on the street and was seen near Highway 16 before she disappeared. Authorities predict that Cecilia is likely dead.
The last cousin, Delphine Nikal was a 16 year old First Nations woman with dark, curly hair, hazel eyes, and a scar on her right temple. On June 13, 1990 she decided to go visit her friends in Smithers. She successfully hitchhiked there at 2:00 p.m and decided to return home to her uncle’s house at 10:00 p.m. She was last seen by her two friends hitchhiking in the eastbound lane of Highway 16. Delphine has been missing for 31 years.
Every day that another girl goes missing someone cries for her, and every day that she remains missing, more tears are shed. Over the years, Highway 16 has become filled with tears cried over the kidnapped mothers, daughters, and sisters. Every day that another girl goes missing, Highway 16 gets closer and closer to overflowing with the tears of her loved ones. The Highway of Tears was given its name in honor of all the tears that were cried over the missing and murdered women.
Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide as the destruction of a nation or ethnic group as cited in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry report. The Indigenous people of the United States and Canada were almost completely wiped out by genocide hundreds of years ago and are still under attack from the same force. Lemkin clarified that “genocide does not exclusively mean the “immediate destruction of a nation”, but signifies “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Ever since the beginnings of this continent, Indigenous people have been persecuted, victimized, and isolated. They have been pushed off of their land, onto reservations, forced to go to schools that specialize in indoctrination, experienced their territory being claimed by another race, and suffered through racism and ethnocentrism. They have gone from being the dominant population to being outnumbered by their invaders. The missing and murdered Indigenous women are not just coincidences, they are part of the actions aimed at destroying the group itself. What is occurring now is not what you imagine to be genocide; it is evolved and changed from what many of our ancestors did, but nevertheless it is senseless killing aimed at wiping out an entire population.
