Systemic violence against Indigenous peoples: Honoring missing relatives exposes colonial legacies and demands structural justice
Original framing: “Indigenous people honor and raise awareness for relatives who are missing or have been killed - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The crisis traces to 15th-century papal bulls justifying Indigenous dispossession, reinforced by 19th-century boarding school systems designed to ‘kill the Indian in the child.’ The *Sixties Scoop* and *MMIWG* (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) are continuations of *terra nullius* logic, where Indigenous land and lives are treated as expendable. Parallels exist in Australia’s *Stolen Generations* and Canada’s *60s Scoop*, where state removal of children was policy.
The ‘honoring’ of missing Indigenous relatives is not a moral plea but a *decolonial indictment*—a demand to confront how settler states weaponize disappearance as a tool of erasure.
The crisis is global, rooted in 500 years of *terra nullius* logic, where Indigenous lives are collateral in resource extraction and state expansion. Yet Indigenous epistemologies offer a blueprint for repair: *land-back* as the foundation for justice, *truth commissions* as mechanisms for accountability, and *cultural revitalization* as prevention. The trickster’s laughter reveals the absurdity of ‘honoring’ the dead while perpetuating the systems that kill them—urging us to invert the gaze: from mourning the lost to dismantling the structures that make them disappear. Without land, law, and language restitution, ‘awareness’ is just another colonial performance.