Indigenous girls’ resilience in settler states: Honouring body and land sovereignty

abstract

In this article I explore colonial violence targeting Indigenous girls in Canada, an active settler state in which the European colonisers “never left” (Tuck and Yang, 2012:5). In settler states like Canada, sexual violence has been a common practice rooted in colonial logics of the objectification and dehumanisation of Indigenous women and girls. Despite living in one of the world’s wealthiest countries with a global reputation for upholding women’s rights, Indigenous girls in Canada experience the highest rates of poverty, incarceration, sexual exploitation, and gender violence, and are currently being disappeared and murdered at “epidemic rates” (Anaya, 2013:9). In a context of sustained colonial violence, understanding how Indigenous girls embody dignity and self-determination requires us to reject limited, overly Eurocentric psycho-social notions of resilience. Indigenous analyses instead foreground the systemic political, historical, economic, and sociocultural inequities that structure colonial heteropatriarchy and sexualised violence under settler regimes. Looking beyond a bio-psycho-social model of individual functioning and aptitudes, I document the entanglement of Indigenous girls’ body sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination. This conceptual shift takes Indigenous girls’ resilience out of its individualised definition and locates it instead in complex kinship networks, across generations, and in relationship with ancestors, lands, and all relations.

keywords:

• Indigenous girls
• sexualised violence
• settler colonial violence
• Indigenous resilience and resurgence

Notes

1. Fourth world describes how Indigenous peoples across the world “today are completely or partly deprived of the right to their own territories and [their] riches” (Manuel 1974, cited in Griggs, 1992:3).

2. Available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/tina-fontaines-death-shows-how-little-is-being-done-for-indigenous-women/article20138787/ (site accessed 22 March 2017).

3. Available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/missing-and-murdered-womens-inquiry-head-says-there-is-hope-for-the-commission-amid-delays/article35068891/ (site accessed 7 July 2017).

4. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/dogs-recovering-from-porcupine-quills-1.3301295 (site accessed 5 March 2017).

5. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/franklin-expedition-ship-found-in-arctic-id-d-as-hms-erebus-1.2784268 (site accessed 5 March 2017).

6. Available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/tina-fontaines-death-shows-how-little-is-being-done-for-indigenous-women/article20138787/ (site accessed 22 March 2017).

7. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/stephen-harper-s-comments-on-missing-murdered-aboriginal-women-show-lack-of-respect-1.2879154 (site accessed 5 March 2017).

8. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/first-nation-suicides-bc-1.3532929 (site accessed 22 March 2017).

9. For more information about Sisters Rising, visit www.sistersrising.uvic.ca. See also de Finney S et al (forthcoming) ‘Sisters rising: Shape shifting settler violence through art and land retellings’ in C Mitchell & R Moletsane (eds) Young People Engaging with the Arts and Visual Practices to address Sexual Violence, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

10. See http://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com/index.html.

11. Available at: http://www.kamloopsnews.ca/opinion/columnists/wagamese-allmyrelations-about-respect-1.1237759 (site accessed 22 March 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandrina de Finney

SANDRINA DE FINNEY is an associate professor in the School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, located on unceded Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ lands in British Columbia, Canada. As a researcher with the Siem Smun’eem Indigenous Child Well-being Research Network (http://icwrn.uvic.ca), she focuses on recentring customary caretaking laws for Indigenous children who are displaced from their traditional territories, communities and families. Dr de Finney’s primary areas of research are child welfare, including child and family services and adoptions; girlhood and gender studies; and girl, youth, and community engagement in community-based research. Email: [email protected]