Date

12-2025

Document Type

Capstone Project (Open Access)

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Department

Social Sciences and Global Studies

Major

Global Studies

First Advisor

Sriya Shrestha

Abstract

The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S) across the United States and Canada represents a manifestation of ongoing settler colonial violence. This paper examines the MMIW crisis through the frameworks of settler colonial theory and Indigenous feminist scholarship, arguing that contemporary patterns of disappearance, assault, and murder are structural outcomes of colonial law, governance, and heteropatriarchal control. Drawing on historical analysis, legal critique, and participant observation from the 2025 MMIP Training Conference in Monterey, California, this study traces how the settler colonial logic of elimination operates through jurisdictional fragmentation, bureaucratic neglect, data erasure, resource extraction, and the criminalization of Indigenous kinship systems. It demonstrates how colonial legal regimes systematically undermine tribal sovereignty and produce the conditions of impunity that enable gendered and racialized violence. At the same time, the paper highlights Indigenous feminist resistance as a powerful site of resurgence, emphasizing community-based justice, relational accountability, cultural revitalization, and land-based healing. By centering Indigenous epistemologies and survivor knowledge, this research reframes the MMIW crisis as both a contemporary expression of colonial domination and a struggle for sovereignty and decolonial futures. Ultimately, the paper argues that meaningful responses to MMIW require structural dismantling of settler colonial institutions and the restoration of Indigenous self-determination, relational governance, and community-led systems of care and justice.

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