Murdered and Missing Women: Performing Indigenous Cultural Memory in British Columbia and Beyond

Abstract

In ‘“You Are Here’: H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance,” a chapter inThe Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor locates the intergenerational transfer of traumatic memory relating to Argentina's Dirty War geographically with a map—identifying, for example, where tens of thousands opposed to the country's military dictatorship (one-third of them women) were made to disappear—but she also locates this transfer genealogically and even genetically, in terms of the bodies of surviving relatives who remain as visible evidence (quite literally, through family photographs) of the material existence of their missing parents and children. Like Taylor, I attend to both the physical geography and the embodied genealogy of cultural memory in this article, which is concerned with making connections between the hemispheric traffic in missing and murdered Indigenous women of the Americas. I want to begin by acknowledging some of the sites of individual trauma and various sights of collective protest and witnessing related to this topic.