Where Are Our Sisters? The Ongoing Legacy of Gendered Colonial Violence
May 5 marks the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S) It's a day when we must reckon with the ongoing reality that Indigenous women, girls, and 2-Spirit people continue to go missing and be murdered at disproportionately high rates. But one day isn’t enough when the violence is daily. When the systems causing it are still in power.
We believe that reproductive justice is impossible without safety, sovereignty, and land. There is no justice on stolen land. There is no bodily autonomy when the state decides which bodies are disposable. And there is no freedom to choose when Indigenous people are denied the right to live, raise families, and thrive in safety.
Colonialism Is Ongoing
Gendered colonial violence didn’t end with residential schools or the Sixties Scoop. It lives on in underfunded investigations, indifferent policing, and social systems that continue to devalue Indigenous lives. Still today, indigenous people are sterilized without their consent or knowledge.
Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people have been targeted not in spite of their gender, but because of it. Their disappearance and deaths are not isolated tragedies—they are symptoms of a colonial structure that has always depended on controlling Indigenous bodies, severing community ties, eliminating matriarchal power, and controlling the land.
This injustice is deeply intersectional, collecting in the entanglements of class, gender, ethnicity, identity, queerness, and autonomy.
Reproductive Justice Means Justice for MMIWG2S
Reproductive justice, a framework developed by Black women in the U.S. South and embraced by Indigenous and racialized communities across Turtle Island, asks us to look at more than just access to abortion or contraception. It asks:
Do you have the right to have children?
The right to not have children?
The right to parent those children in safe and sustainable communities?
The right to bodily autonomy and dignity, regardless of race, class, or gender?
When Indigenous communities face forced sterilizations, family separations, criminalization, and systemic violence, the answer to those questions is no. (this needs to be made stronger)
Why Land Back Is Reproductive Justice
Colonization began with land theft—and it continues with every barrier to self-determination. But land isn’t just geography. It’s healing. It’s tradition. It’s safety. And for many Indigenous cultures, land is also where reproductive and gender roles are defined, supported, and celebrated.
When Indigenous land is stolen, poisoned, or sold to resource industries, violence against the land is mirrored by violence against Indigenous people—especially those whose gender and sexuality challenge colonial binaries.
To address the crisis of MMIWG2S, we must address the root causes. That means not only prosecuting perpetrators, but dismantling the very systems that allow this violence to continue: racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism.
What We Must Do
We must stop treating MMIWG2S as an unsolvable mystery. This is not a puzzle—it’s a pattern.
And we already know what solutions look like. Indigenous communities have been demanding them for generations:
Support Indigenous-led safety initiatives, healing lodges, and family programs.
Fund Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA+ organizations.
Listen to the families of the missing and murdered.
Push for full implementation of the National Inquiry’s Calls for Justice.
Support Land Back movements—because true safety and sovereignty are impossible without land and culture.
Acknowledge and fight against anti-Indigenous racism in policing, health care, education, and the reproductive justice movement itself.
No Justice on Stolen Land—No Silence From Us
May 5 is a day of awareness. But for settlers and allies, it must also be a day of responsibility. At Pro-Choice YQL, we are committed to amplifying Indigenous voices and challenging the systems that cause harm.
We honour those who have been taken. We commit to fighting for a world where they never would have gone missing in the first place.
Land Back. Justice now.
