Challenging Colonial Norms and Attending to Presencing in Stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Abstract

Scholarship related to missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada has highlighted community resistance in response to traumatic losses. While sympathetic to other scholarship, I offer a different approach. I take on the challenging task of documenting resistance by missing and murdered women during and beyond their physical lifetimes. I attempt to engage in the delicate work of tracking what Leanne Simpson called “presencing” in her 2011 publication, Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence, in two fatalities. This is accomplished through a close examination of the death in 2013 of Kinew James, an Indigenous woman held in federal custody, and the homicide of twenty-year-old Alberta resident, Amber Tuccaro, in August 2010. In her qualitative studies on Indigenous girlhood, Sandrina de Finney encourages scholars to take up presencing to illuminate ways in which Indigenous girls' are actively engaged in anti-oppressive strategies. With her scholarship in mind, I examine news articles that report on Amber Tuccaro's and Kinew James' last words and actions to pinpoint their resistant strategies. Finally, I draw from the work of socio-legal scholars to explore presencing as a pathway to more transformative legal inquiry.