Abstract
Indigenous people are often part of the “fourth world”—a subaltern community whose members experience poor social outcomes despite living in a first world context. In North American, fourth world status has resulted in a “crisis” of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. Activists have successfully garnered attention to the issue of “MMIW,” pressuring Canada to launch a National Inquiry and prompting US policymakers to introduce legislation. This study considered how Twitter has facilitated MMIW (cyber)activism by cultivating a collective indigenous identity. It considered how participants in #MMIW framed the nature of indigenous trauma in contrast to mass media framings of indigenous issues. The researchers conducted a thematic analysis of 481 tweets sampled from May-July of 2019. They found that hashtag participants framed indigenous trauma as (a) personal and pervasive, (b) systemic and structural, and (c) continued injustice, mobilizing a nation-building discourse.