Care About Climate? Then Advocate for Indigenous Women and Girls
May 5th is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
Years ago, I was a volunteer at a gathering in support of Native women’s health and wellness. During a talking circle, women began by sharing about ties to their traditional lands and plant medicines, and how access to them was changing over time. Some plants were getting harder to access, others becoming more scarce.
And then the conversation shifted to grief, as women spoke to the pain of past trauma, or the sorrow they held for lost sisters and daughters. It was a hard conversation, but also deeply moving as these women surrounded each other with support and care.
That conversation reflects something that’s become increasingly clear to me over my years as a professor teaching at the intersection of religious studies, Indigenous studies, health, and environmental studies: that the roots of our environmental crisis lie within our history of settler colonialism. And because of this, restoring our relationship with the Earth will require healing the soul wounds of colonialism.
Red Dress Day
One way we can all contribute to healing the soul wounds of colonialism is by supporting Indigenous communities this Sunday May 5th, which is the National Day of Awareness for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit People.
It’s also known as “Red Dress Day.”
Across the United States and Canada, supporters are encouraged to wear red, attend marches, hold prayer circles and vigils, and organize commemorative runs, walks, and fundraisers to raise awareness and demand justice.
The day calls attention to the fact that Indigenous women and girls in North America are five times more likely to be victims of homicide and four times more likely to experience sexual assault than the general population. According to the CDC, homicide is the sixth leading cause of death for Indigenous women and girls in the United States, and the third leading cause of death among Indigenous men. In some jurisdictions, Indigenous women are killed at ten times the national average.1
First Nations women in Vancouver, British Columbia held the first Women’s Memorial March in 1991. It was an expression of grief and anger, and the beginning of a movement to call attention to the violence that Indigenous women face. It took fifteen years of prayer, protest, and determined effort, but they finally began to gain national attention.
In 2016, the Canadian government initiated the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. The multi-year investigation drew on interviews with over 2,380 individuals and fifteen community hearings, eventually resulting in the final report, Reclaiming Power and Place. (I recommend their website, which includes a stunning collection of works by First Nations, Inuit, and Metis artists.)
The report concluded that:
“Persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights violations and abuses are the root cause behind Canada’s staggering rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people… colonial and patriarchal policies displaced women from their traditional roles in communities and governance and diminished their status in society, leaving them vulnerable to violence.”2
In the United States, the Not Invisible Act was signed into law on Oct 20, 2020. Introduced by four Indigenous US representatives, and led by then-representative Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) the legislation established the Not Invisible Act Commission tasked with improving processes for reporting, investigation, coordination and communication between different law enforcement agencies.
Washington State, where I live, has the second highest rates of missing Indigenous women and girls in the nation, following closely behind New Mexico. In 2021, Washington State initiated the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People Task Force, and in 2023 the task force’s recommendations led to the creation of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Girls and People Cold Case Unit.
This is essential work.
And at the same time, change requires reckoning with our history of settler colonialism, with the violence it has wrought on Indigenous communities and their lands, and the very gendered nature of that violence.
There’s a reason I’m writing about Red Dress Day in a blog titled Climate Anxiety and Spiritual Resilience. Because this history of violence is in fact inseparable from our climate crisis.
Environmental Violence and Indigenous Women
In their powerful piece, “Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence,” the Women’s Health Alliance and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network make clear that the extractive economies of settler colonialism devastate landscapes and enact violence on the bodies of Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people.3 They quote Iako’tsi:rareh Amanda Lickers (Turtle Clan, Seneca):
“If you’re destroying and poisoning the things that give us life, the things that shape our identity, the places that we are from and the things that sustain us, then how can you not be poisoning us? How can that not be direct violence against our bodies, whether that be respiratory illness or cancer or liver failure, or the inability to carry children.”
Indigenous territories are home to, or adjacent to, enormous deposits of oil, gas, low sulfur coal, uranium, and other minerals. As the authors of Violence on the Land make painfully clear, wherever natural gas and oil extraction increase, so too do incidents of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people.
Extractive economies rely on drilling, mining, and fracking, industries that have a devastating toll on local land, water, and air. Indigenous women and girls are disproportionately impacted by these forms of ecological violence because of the impacts of the resulting waste and chemical pollution on their reproductive health and that of their children. And there is indisputable evidence that the establishment of large encampments of transient male laborers (“man camps”) lead to a dramatic increase in violent crime, assault, and harassment of Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people.
Women Warriors and Water Protectors
Many historians and Indigenous Studies scholars have affirmed that pre-colonial North American Indigenous societies provided women with both safety and access to social, spiritual, and political power.4 These were communities of gender complementarity—in which genders occupy different social spheres and have different responsibilities, but enjoy a balance of power that ensures mutual respect and safety.
For instance, among Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities, men served as chiefs, and women served as clan mothers—who had the power to appoint and depose said chiefs.
At the same time, Indigenous cultures and languages also recognized multiple genders (often four and sometimes many more), making space for gender diversity, where each person was endowed with sacred responsibilities and seen as essential parts of the community. In traditional communities, no one is expendable.5
However, settler colonialism upended these traditional systems, imposing patriarchal hierarchies and a strict gender dualism that subjected women and Two-Spirit people to terrible violence.
Despite this history, many Indigenous women remain inspired by their traditional teachings and are leading the way in resisting extractive economies that devastate landscapes and directly contribute to climate change.
Women Water Warriors have been on the front lines battling pipelines and fracking expansions, protesting the threat they pose to their water and their children’s safety.
Women were among the leaders of the Standing Rock protests in South Dakota.
Two Anishinaabe grandmothers founded Mother Earth Water Walkers, a growing movement to prayerfully walk around the Great Lakes, demanding their protection.
In Secwepemc territory in British Columbia, women founded Tiny House Warriors, literally building solar powered tiny homes right in the path of proposed pipelines.
And at Oak Flat, Apache women are helping to lead a lengthy battle against Resolution Copper, whose proposed new mine would destroy an ancient ceremonial site where centuries of Apache people have held their girls’ coming of age ceremonies. If the mine goes forward, Oak Flat will collapse within a crater 2 miles wide, and a 1,000 feet deep. (Using spurious logic at best, the 9th circuit court voted 6-5 last month that having their sacred ceremonial center devoured by a copper mine somehow does not pose a “substantial burden” to their ability to practice their religion. There’s a lot I want to say about this!)
Colonialism and Climate Change
Edgar Ibarra (Chicano/Yoeme/Tarahumara) describes the climate crisis as the “inevitable consequences of colonial thinking and behavior,” that prioritize mobility, profit, individualism, accumulation of wealth, and reduce the natural world and other human beings to resources for extraction and exploitation. As Ibarra explains,
“As a society we’ve been moving from one place to the other being very detached. Everything is a resource. Everything is expendable. We’re cruel to one another, being able to consider each other ‘trash.’ When we’re able to do that, unconsciously, to each other, then we’ll do that to anything we don’t even think is alive.”6
In a similar way, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg) argues in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance that “colonialism is by its nature gendered.” She calls upon non-native people who seek a more just and sustainable world to “learn that their great country has been and is a death dance for Indigenous peoples. They must learn to stop themselves from plundering the land and the climate and using Indigenous peoples’ bodies to fuel their economy, and to find a way of living in the world that is not based on violence and exploitation.”7
The simple truth is that if the destruction we are facing have its origins in colonialism, our solutions must center decolonization. And this week is an opportunity to consider how those colonial systems disproportionately impact Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people.
What Is “Decolonization”?
For Indigenous people, decolonization has everything to do with reclaiming lands, cultures, languages, ways of being, sovereignty over their territories, and access to traditional First Foods.
For non-native people, decolonization may look like actively supporting tribal sovereignty and treaty rights, partnering with tribes as they work to reclaim their territories, and taking a hard look at the institutions within which we have power, to dismantle systems that perpetuate the suppression, exploitation, and marginalization of Indigenous peoples and cultures.
For me, it’s meant committing my academic career to learning about, listening to, and uplifting the voices of Indigenous communities, authors, and culture bearers. And in recent years it’s meant joining local efforts in the South Puget Sound to protect and preserve Indigenous First Foods—camas and salmon in particular.
Because here’s the thing: I live and work in treaty territories. And because of that, I’m honor bound to ensure that those treaty promises are kept.
As Michelle Jacob, Yakama tribal member and University of Oregon professor writes in her wonderful book Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing:
“All peoples who live, work, learn, and play on Indigenous homelands have inherited the legacy of colonialism. In order to heal the soul wounds of intergenerational historical trauma, all peoples have an important role to fulfill.”8
If we care about our precious Earth, if we are concerned about climate change, then we need to get educated on the history of colonialism, and start thinking seriously about how we can help heal the soul wounds of colonialism and ensure the wellbeing of Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people.
This week, I encourage you to begin by learning more about the struggles that Indigenous people face: struggles to simply be safe, to have access to safe drinking water, and to be protected from environmental violence. Then commit to supporting Indigenous-led efforts to ensure the safety of their communities.
What We Can Do
Get Educated!
Check out the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, including their magazine Restoration https://www.niwrc.org/restoration-magazine, and the wonderful gallery of artists responding to MMIW.
Take the time to read Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies, or any of the other sources I cite in this piece.
Support!
Consider donating to organizations that support and empower Native women and girls. There are many! But here are just a few that I recommend in Washington State: Na’ah Illahee Fund, The Peacekeeper Society, Canoe Journey Herbalists, the Native Action Network, Chief Seattle Club, and the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.
Show up!
If you’re in the Seattle area, Daybreak Star Indian Center is hosting its Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and People Families Gathering on Saturday May 4th from 11am to 6pm at the Daybreak Star Powwow Grounds.
If you’re near Spokane, events will be happening throughout the day on Sunday May 5th on the Eastern Washington University Campus.
“Healing Together,” an event sponsored by Mother Nation will be held at the Intellectual House at the University of Washington Seattle campus on May 9th from 2pm-8pm.
Find out about other events around the country through Native News Online.
See for example Lilian Ackerman and Laura Klein, Women and Power in Native North America (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Beacon, 1986). Cutcha Risling Baldy, We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming of Age Ceremonies (University of Washington Press, 2018). Michelle Jacob, Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing (University of Arizona, 2013). Marla Powers, Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual and Reality (University of Chicago, 1986).
There is a growing body of research on this topic! Three excellent books to check out are: Gregory Smithers, Reclaiming Two Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal, and Sovereignty in Native North America (Beacon, 2023). Ma-Nee Chacaby, A Two Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of Lesbian Two-Spirit Elder (University of Manitoba, 2021). Qwo-Li Driskill, Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two Spirit Literature (University of Arizona, 2011).
Interview with Edgar Ibarra in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (The New Press, 2024).
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Michelle Jacob, Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing (University of Arizona Press, 2014).
I can feel the power of this before I even read it, like the air before a storm. Also the spirit of the thing held me even though I scrolled away, read five other articles, even though I have a frustrating adhd burnout enhanced memory problem. I wanted to let you know this before I got too embarrassed to mention such things - these things are not accepted in industrial thinking, but live and speak in the real world nevertheless. There is an amazing quote to this effect from an artist in the Tanami desert, a bit too long to include here, but it speaks, to me, of the fiery and watery need for language activism. But that's my thing, and I take that thing and stand in listening and present respect. You're writing to the core of something essential for our times.
Shit, and this is just my reaction before I start. Hoping I'm humbled enough to walk this canyon so I can hear properly.