Indigenous girls’ resilience in settler states: Honouring body and land sovereignty

Abstract

abstractIn this article I explore colonial violence targeting Indigenous girls in Canada, an active settler state in which the European colonisers “never left” (Tuck and Yang, 2012:5). In settler states like Canada, sexual violence has been a common practice rooted in colonial logics of the objectification and dehumanisation of Indigenous women and girls. Despite living in one of the world’s wealthiest countries with a global reputation for upholding women’s rights, Indigenous girls in Canada experience the highest rates of poverty, incarceration, sexual exploitation, and gender violence, and are currently being disappeared and murdered at “epidemic rates” (Anaya, 2013:9). In a context of sustained colonial violence, understanding how Indigenous girls embody dignity and self-determination requires us to reject limited, overly Eurocentric psycho-social notions of resilience. Indigenous analyses instead foreground the systemic political, historical, economic, and sociocultural inequities that structure colonial heteropatriarchy and sexualised violence under settler regimes. Looking beyond a bio-psycho-social model of individual functioning and aptitudes, I document the entanglement of Indigenous girls’ body sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination. This conceptual shift takes Indigenous girls’ resilience out of its individualised definition and locates it instead in complex kinship networks, across generations, and in relationship with ancestors, lands, and all relations.