Memorializing Individuals, Seeking Justice for Communities: The Epidemic of Systemic Violence Against Indigenous Peoples and the Role of Art and Public Response in Bringing About Social Change

Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas are often targets of violence stemming from settler colonial societies that would position Indigenous peoples on the outskirts of mainstream, often Eurocentric societies. For Indigenous people, the systemic violence against them works to erase all Indigenous identities from dominant non-Indigenous societies. Even as Indigenous identities in general are targets of systemic violence, there are two subgroups within a larger Indigenous community that are targeted for violence more often than the overall Indigenous community-Indigenous women and those individuals who identify in ways that deviate from the dominant society's preferred heteronormative and gender-binary identities. Queer Indigenous people and Indigenous women represent the minority of a minority who are hunted in an effort to erase their divergent identities entirely. Through the examination of prose, film, poetry and social movements, I will address the question of how these Indigenous peoples can begin to recover from this systematic violence against two of their subpopulations through the creation of memorials to the victims. Through memorialization, Indigenous populations return power and agency to these victims and continue a quest for justice that will offer psychological healing for victims, their families, and a larger Indigenous population. Through the process of memorializing the divergent and individual identities of these victims of sexuality, gender, and gender expression driven violence, art and social media begin the process of obtaining justice through rediscovering and revalidating these identities. Chapter One explores questions of jurisdiction in crimes against Native women as presented in Louise Erdrich's novel The Round House. The jurisdictional challenges faced by Geraldine Coutts and her family following her sexual assault and attempted murder prevent justice from being served against her attacker. Without justice, Geraldine and her family are not able to heal fully from the trauma of the crime. Chapter Two discusses the documentary Finding Dawn and Canada's Indigenous women. Christine Welsh, the film's director, tells personal stories of some of the victims of violence against Indigenous women in Canada in an effort to begin a larger conversation about the systemic attacks against Indigenous women and the lack of attention these victims receive from the Canadian government. Welsh's documentary gives faces to a few of the names on Canada's list of missing and murdered Indigenous women and memorializes the victims in very personal ways so that their families may begin to heal. Chapter Three addresses the poetry of Qwo-Li Driskill, and explores hir use of memorial to heal psychological wounds in "Love Poems for Billy Jack", "Chantway for FC," and "Gay Nigger Number One." Driskill's representation of queer Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and the systemic violence against them re-humanizes the victims in an effort to return power to the powerless. Chapter Four explores the ongoing social movements guided by the hashtag #MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) on social media and by public protests in the United States and Canada as global attention is drawn to the violence against Indigenous women and communities. Social media, protests, and ongoing conversations with governments show that the violence against queer Indigenous people and women is not isolated to the pages of literature or the frames of a screen - it is a situation that must be addressed in order to begin to change the settler colonial system that seeks to erase Indigenous identities by violently attacking populations. Like the works of Erdrich, Welsh, and Driskill, the social movements seek to bring wider attention to the violence against Indigenous women and queer Indigenous people. The combined efforts of literature, film, and social movements draw attention to the injustice these people face and demand social change