Informatic tactics: Indigenous activism and digital cartographies of gender-based violence

ABSTRACT

The impact of crowdsourced data visualization in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) movement over the last decade reveals how institutional systems of organizing and representing space present a key obstacle to the cause. Activists’ digital crowdmaps express an ethos of Indigenous data sovereignty, or self-determination in data collection and application, that interrogates settler data procedures relative to gender violence. These tactical maps resonate with the circulation of location-tagged photographs via social media campaigns like #ImNotNext and #RedDressProject to similarly critique the datasets of government agencies. This article conceptualizes both media forms as informatic images that intervene in settler cartographic practice as part of an ongoing decolonization of digital mapping tools. Informatic images precondition the ways that users interact with data through hypermediated visual systems. Here, digital mapping and locative media practices focalize a relationship between violence, biased data and space, through various methods of layering, compositing and linking. Settler computational structures undergird these affordances, yet in a tactical context mapped images are reconstituted by user interaction with an oppositional dataset to intervene in that framework. Users’ emergent data of presence and absence plot a distributed landscape of settler violence in accordance, instead, with relational Indigenous knowledges.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous media
• counter-mapping
• digital cartography
• data sovereignty
• settler colonialism
• gender violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Amnesty International (2004).

2 Among the major events that mark the MMIW movement, 1991 saw the first Women's Memorial March in Vancouver, BC. The U.N. also passed its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Gladys Radek began her first 3000-mile Walk4Justice in 2008. Finally, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House (2012) put the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women on the public radar in the United States when it won the 2012 National Book Award. The creative responses continue to this day: among them, the 2016 launch of Cree journalist Connie Walker’s Missing & Murdered podcast and Kim O’Bomsawin’s (Abenaki) documentary Quiet Killing (2018).

3 For more on the subject, visit The United States Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network at https://usindigenousdata.org. USIDSN "provide[s] research information and policy advocacy" on behalf of Indigenous nations in the area of data sovereignty.

4 For more on tactical mapping and counter-maps, see Dee Morris and Stephen Voyce’s Countermap Collection at http://countermapcollection.org.

5 Finally, a landmark RCMP report, ‘Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview,’ confirmed in May 2014 the findings of the Native Women’s Association of Canada ‘Sisters in Spirit’ initiative: nearly 1200 such women from 1980 to 2013.The report (2014). The RCMP report states, ‘Police-recorded incidents of Aboriginal female homicides and unresolved missing Aboriginal females … total 1,181 – 164 missing and 1,017 homicide victims’ (3); the same report lists 225 unsolved cases of missing or murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. The RCMP was compelled to do their study by the NWAC, with whom they cross-referenced their data. ‘Sisters in Spirit’ was the first government-funded database of cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, begun in 2006. Canada's federal government stopped funding the program in 2010. Critics of the cut say it was meant to silence the Native Women's Association of Canada, the group behind the database. The final report released by NWAC made clear connections between violence and landlessness, colonial child welfare policies, and poverty resulting from exploitation of resources and bodies. More information at http://www.itstartswithus-mmiw.com/background.

6 For a critique of positivist quantitative methods and work toward a new Indigenous paradigm, see Maggie Walter and Chris Anderson (2013).

7 The Save Wįyąbi Project crowdmap went inactive at https://missingsisters.crowdmap.com/, and the group relaunched ‘an updated and revitalized map and database of missing and murdered Indigenous women’ at the 2015 South by Southwest festival, in a panel called ‘Technicians of the Sacred.’

8 As a paradigm, tactical cartography also centers "operational value" in its confrontation of systems of power (Institute of Applied Autonomy, 2009, p. 29).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua D. Miner

Joshua D. Miner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at the University of Kansas, where he codirects the Indigenous Critical Media Lab and Indigenous Arts Initiative, an annual residency that supports emerging Indigenous filmmakers and digital artists. His research draws together perspectives on settler digital culture, Indigenous film and media theory, digital aesthetics, and interactive design. His current book project explores the deep settler structures at work in digital image synthesis across a range of media forms [email: [email protected]].