Indigenous Trauma Is Not a Frontier: Breaking Free from Colonial Economies of Trauma and Responding to Trafficking, Disappearances, and Deaths of Indigenous Women and Girls

Abstract

This paper maps colonial economies of trauma as they pertain to trafficking, disappearances, and deaths of Indigenous women and girls, and argues that we have a collective responsibility to dismantle these structures by uplifting the expertise and leadership of the most marginalized of Indigenous women and girls. In this way, this paper asks, if we shift our value system to one that acknowledges experiences such as sex work or incarceration as additional credentials that enhance capacity to design creative and effective efforts to account for and address violence, rather than barriers to success, what might that do for our organizing and our research, for our communities, and for Indigenous women and girls themselves?