Natural Violence, Unnatural Bodies: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Human in MMIWG Narratives

Abstract

Released in 2019, the final report on the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) terms the high rates of murder and disappearance an ongoing genocide. The connected forms of violence that Native American women in the United States experience, however, remain largely unacknowledged. This essay considers how two contemporary cultural narratives attempt to render violence against Native American women speakable, through a focus on the film Wind River (2017) directed by Taylor Sheridan and the novel The Round House (2012) by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich. By analyzing these texts, this essay examines how cultural narratives mediate the boundaries of human life, emphasizing the extent to which such borders are framed by racial and gendered experience. Placing Mel Y. Chen’s understanding of animacy hierarchies into dialogue with Judith Butler’s work on ungrievability, I argue that animalistic associations can alternately work to reproduce or disrupt normative conceptualizations of the human. I contrast the dehumanizing rhetoric that is produced in Wind River with The Round House, which I argue disrupts the boundaries between human and nonhuman through the recovery of Ojibwe ontologies. Through this comparison, I locate the pervasiveness of a discourse that de-animates Indigenous women in the public sphere, as well as consider the potential for cultural narratives to disrupt this violent logic.

Keywords:

• nonhuman animals
• Indigenous
• missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls
• Native American literature
• settler colonialism

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the early readers of this article, especially Naminata Diabate, without whom this piece would not have come into being. Thanks also to Robert Young and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and encouragement.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The initialism MMIWG is increasingly being expanded to MMIWG2S by activists to highlight the experiences of Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ persons, who are disproportionately affected by these issues. The term “two-spirit” is used across many Indigenous cultures to refer to people who traditionally would fulfil a gender-variant ceremonial role within their community.

2 While the scope of this essay is the United States, there has been much written about the issue of MMIWG in Canada, where it has received more attention in recent years following the National Inquiry established in 2016. For further reading on the Canadian context, see Simpson (2016) and de Finney (2017), García-Del Moral (2018), which places the Canadian issue within a wider context of femicide in Mexico and Latin America.

3 Despite this, legislators are working to tackle the issue. In September 2020, the House of Congress passed Savanna's Act and the Not Invisible Act in response to MMIWG. If signed into law, this legislation would require better coordination between law enforcement organizations at tribal, local and federal levels.

4 The Major Crimes Act (1885) places certain crimes under federal jurisdiction if they are committed by a Native American on Native territory, including rape, manslaughter and murder. This followed the General Crimes Act (1817), which prevents tribal courts from prosecuting non-Native suspects. For a comprehensive discussion of how Federal Indian law impacts Indigenous sovereignty, particularly in the context of violence against women, see Cheyfitz and Huhndorf (2017).

5 While Sheridan is a non-Native filmmaker of Irish-American descent, it is notable that Wind River received a substantial investment from the Native-owned Tunica-Biloxi Economic Development Corporation: a tribal business based in Louisiana that has a stated interest in investing in films that raise awareness about Native American issues.

6 As the 2019 Canadian National Inquiry into MMIWG found, there is substantial evidence that the geographic proximity of male-dominated oil drilling sites to reservations directly contributes to a rise in incidences of sexual violence towards, and sex trafficking of, Indigenous women. See the full report, “Reclaiming Power and Place”, for details.

7 In November 2017 Sheridan announced that the film’s future royalties would be donated to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the safety of Native American women and children. This pledge followed Sheridan’s demand that the film’s ties to the Weinstein Company be severed, in light of the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein that surfaced in October 2017 and which, in February 2020, resulted in a conviction.

8 In Ojibwe culture a Wiindigo is a monstrous cannibalistic figure.

9 For a detailed discussion of Indigenous practices of gender fluidity in relation to two-spirit people, see Miranda (2010).