Reproductive Justice Is Land Back: What It Means in the Context of MMIWG2S+

May 5 is recognized as the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit and gender-diverse people. It is a day shaped by grief, by ongoing searches, and by the reality that many families are still waiting for answers that systems have failed to deliver.

The violence that Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people experience is often spoken about as disappearance. Disappearance is not the beginning of the violence. It is one point within a much longer pattern that is lived over time. It is present in the moments where safety is eroded, where systems fail to respond, and where those failures are normalized instead of treated as preventable harm.

These conditions are tied to autonomy of both body and land. They shape who is made vulnerable to going missing, and whose cases are not taken seriously when they do.

Colonialism as an Ongoing Structure

Colonialism continues through policies, institutions, and everyday interactions that impact Indigenous life. It organizes whose safety is prioritized and creates the conditions where disappearance and death occur without urgency or accountability.

State systems continue to regulate Indigenous bodies in ways that are both overt and subtle. Indigenous children are removed from their families at disproportionate rates. Indigenous people are overrepresented in prisons. Healthcare systems continue to be sites where Indigenous patients report dismissal, coercion, and forced or pressured sterilization.

Community members described ongoing barriers to reproductive healthcare, including long travel distances, financial costs, lack of culturally safe providers, and stigma shaped by colonial and Christian influences. These barriers function as gatekeeping mechanisms that limit autonomy and reinforce who is allowed to access care safely.

Policing and justice systems play a role in shaping these conditions. Families have consistently described delays, inaction, and a lack of urgency when loved ones go missing. Delays in action reduce the chances of people being found. These responses are not neutral. They are part of how people become missing, and part of why they remain missing.

These systems operate together. They reinforce each other in ways that structure risk, concentrate harm, and make violence predictable.

Gender, Power, and Targeted Violence

Colonial systems imposed rigid gender roles that displaced many Indigenous understandings of gender, including the roles and responsibilities of Two-Spirit people. These systems often devalued matriarchal leadership and disrupted kinship structures that had historically supported community safety.

At the same time, Indigenous women and gender-diverse people continue to hold roles as caregivers, knowledge keepers, and land defenders. These roles can place them in direct relationship with the impacts of land dispossession and environmental change.

Violence emerges within this context. It is shaped by racism, by misogyny, by transphobia and homophobia, and by the ongoing devaluation of Indigenous lives. It is enforced by state systems that fail to respond, fail to protect, and, at times, directly contribute to harm, including the conditions that lead to disappearance and the lack of resolution once someone is gone.

MMIWG2S+ is systemic because disappearances and murders follow patterns shaped by policy, governance, and social conditions. These patterns can be disrupted, but only if the systems producing them are changed.

Land Back and Community Safety

The Fireweed Project emphasizes that Indigenous-led, culturally grounded approaches to care already exist and are effective when communities have the resources and autonomy to lead them. These approaches already function as forms of prevention, intervention, and response to violence.

Land creates the conditions where those approaches can be practiced and sustained. It supports community-based systems of care that are rooted in relationship rather than surveillance. It allows for the continuation of knowledge systems that include reproductive care, parenting, and healing. These systems are also connected to how communities respond when someone goes missing, including search efforts, collective care, and ongoing support for families. They demonstrate that safety does not have to be built through policing, but through relationship, accountability, and community control.

Control over land shapes decision-making. When communities have authority over what happens on their land, they are better positioned to respond to harm and prevent violence. This includes creating conditions where fewer people go missing, and where responses are immediate, resourced, and community-led when they do.

Land as Ground of Reproductive Life

Reproductive justice is often understood through healthcare systems. It is discussed in terms of access to abortion, contraception, or clinical services. Those conversations remain incomplete when they are disconnected from land, governance, and community control.

Participants in the Fireweed Project described abortion and reproductive decision-making as connected to culture, land-based knowledge, and community relationships, including the use of traditional medicines and practices that predate colonial healthcare systems.

These perspectives place reproduction within a broader system of relationships. Land holds knowledge about how to care for the body, how to support pregnancy, how to end a pregnancy, and how to raise children within community. It holds language, ceremony, and governance systems that shape how care is practiced. It shapes whether future generations are able to exist safely, or whether they grow up within conditions that increase their risk of violence and disappearance.

When land is inaccessible or controlled by outside forces, those systems are interrupted. Reproductive decision-making becomes routed through institutions that are often unfamiliar, unsafe, or inaccessible. The loss of land restructures how care is given, how knowledge is shared, how people understand their own bodies, and whether communities have the power to keep their people safe.

Reproductive Justice in Practice

Reproductive justice demands people are able to live within systems that support their decisions and their wellbeing.

This means being able to access care without stigma or harm. It means being able to make decisions about pregnancy within a framework that respects culture and community. It means being able to parent without the risk of family separation. It means being able to move through the world without facing disproportionate violence. It means being able to raise children without the ongoing risk of going missing or being killed.

For many Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people, these conditions are uneven and often unsafe.

The crisis of MMIWG2S+ reflects these conditions. It shows how safety, care, and autonomy are structured, and it makes clear that these structures must be changed, not managed.

Ongoing Responsibility

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls outlined Calls for Justice that address these issues across systems, including healthcare, policing, and child welfare. These calls remain a central framework for change, and outline responsibilities that have yet to be fully met.

Community voices continue to emphasize the importance of Indigenous-led solutions, particularly in healthcare and reproductive services, where culturally grounded approaches are necessary for safety and trust. These solutions are central to preventing disappearances, reducing harm, and ensuring that when violence occurs, it is met with urgency, care, and accountability.

Supporting this work requires action. It requires shifting resources, returning land, supporting Indigenous governance, and dismantling the systems that continue to produce harm.

Reproductive justice, when understood in full, requires land, safety, and sovereignty. It requires conditions where people are not made vulnerable, where disappearance is not normalized, and where every life is treated as one that must be protected.