Unsettling Spaces: Grassroots Responses to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women During the Harper Government Years

Abstract

In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 4.5 times more likely to become victims of homicide than other women. Over the last 30 years, more than 1000 women identified as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis were murdered in Canada, and more than 100 are still missing. However, the Canadian government has not acknowledged the economic, social and environmental colonialism that has allowed this violence to become naturalised. Focusing on activism around the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada during the years of the Conservative Harper Government, this article examines how these grassroots initiatives challenge Canadian politics, reclaim streets and liminal zones, and make space for sacred commemoration. Specifically, Twitter campaigns, memeing, the REDress Project, and Walking With Our Sisters are studied. Engaging with scholarship that analyses spaces of violence, this article, in turn, discusses how activism can disrupt violence by transforming physical, virtual and affective spaces.