Beyond Safety: Refusing Colonial Violence Through Indigenous Feminist Planning

Introduction

In December 2017, a group of Indigenous women known as the Green Corn Collective—led by Kimberly Robertson (Mvskoke), Jennell Navarro (Cherokee), Gem Lobarto (Navajo), and Michaelle Bernardino—beaded the frame of a prison bed, covering it with incarceration statistics, infographics, and regalia style ribbonwork. The women were motivated by their responsibility to their Indigenous community and sisters and sought to draw attention to issues of violence against Indigenous women and girls. Through its placement and design the bed highlights the relationship between Indigenous incarceration and colonialism. The installation was accompanied by a zine that further explained the link between imprisonment and colonialism. In this zine, Stormy Ogden, Member of the Tule River Yokuts Tribe, explained,

With the enforcement of these “foreign” laws Native people began to be “locked up” in many different kinds of institutions such as: military forts, missions, reservations, boarding schools, and today, increasingly, in state and federal prisons. It is seen that historically, the most brutal methods of social control are directed at a society’s most oppressed group. The people most likely to be sent to jail and prisons are poor people and women of color. In North America, a very high proportion of this group are American Indians and for them the use of incarceration functions as an extension of the history and violent mechanisms of colonization. (Green Corn Collective n.d.)

On Christmas Eve, the bed was dropped near the soaring Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. The women chose that location to remember and reappropriate space that was once the site of Indigenous Slave auctions. The Jail Bed Drop was curated by Cecilia Sweet-Coll and organized by Justice LA, an organization that is mobilizing against the expansion of the Los Angeles County prison system. The bed was one of more than fifty steel-frame prison beds placed throughout Los Angeles County to draw critical attention to plans for a US$3.5 billion expansion of this system. Already the largest prison system in the world, people with mental illness, homeless people, and people of color are incarcerated in LA’s prison system at much higher rates than others. The beds created for this project were the work of a collective of artists and community activists, who aimed to problematize mass incarceration and its effects on communities. One of the authors of this paper, Laura Harjo, participated in the development of this project and is a co-organizer of The Green Corn Collective, a group that participates and writes on anti-violence work and fosters connections to other forms of community-based organizing such as Walking With Our Sisters.

As the Jail Bed Drop seeks to highlight, policing and incarceration are part of an ongoing process of colonization. Patrick Wolfe argues that settler colonialism calculates the acquisition of territory according to a “logic of elimination,” which aims to remove Indigenous peoples from their territories to meet requirements for land (Wolfe 2006, 387). This elimination results not only in the physical dispossession of Indigenous peoples, but also the denial of Indigenous political authority and the erasure of Indigenous cultural and social life. The proliferation of the logic of elimination across multiple social, economic, and political aspects of settler society means that settler colonialism is best understood as a structure rather than as a singular historic event (Wolfe 2006). According to this definition, both Canada and the United States are settler colonial states and continue to be structured by settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism targets Indigenous women in specific ways. The imposition of sexist and heteropatriarchal logics are central to settler colonial governance and purposefully produce the vulnerability of Indigenous women. Violence that targets Indigenous women can be traced to the ability of Indigenous women to reproduce Indigenous peoples and political orders. Audra Simpson (2016) explains that due to their role in the reproduction of social and political orders, Indigenous women are signifiers of Indigenous sovereignty and as such threaten the settler colonial regime. Consequently, as Dian Million notes, “it is actually gender violence that marks the evisceration of Indigenous nations” (Million 2013, 7). The violence experienced by Indigenous women, including the problem of missing and murdered women and girls explored in this paper, is symptomatic of processes of settler colonial dispossession and the erasure of Indigenous political orders. Yet, the violence faced by Indigenous women and girls has often been positioned as a safety issue, rather than a consequence of ongoing settler colonialism. For instance, Canada’s 2010 federal budget included CAD10 million to address violence against Indigenous women. However, much of this funding was directed toward programs that would better track missing persons and increase police surveillance, rather than addressing the root causes of violence.

Indigenous women resist settler colonial violence and recognize that policing and surveillance are inadequate to address the forms of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls. Indigenous communities engage in a variety of activities including teach-ins, critical education, media-arts, and transformative justice projects designed to resist carceral violence (Palacios 2016). The bed created by the Green Corn Collective for the Jail Bed Drop is one example of how Indigenous women are theorizing the relationship between settler colonialism and violence against Indigenous women, while also mobilizing against violence in ways that do not rely solely on action from the same settler state that promotes and sanctions this violence.

In this paper, we trace the relationship between settler colonialism and violence against Indigenous women and explore what Indigenous feminist theorizing offers to an understanding of planning. In doing so, we build on a growing body of literature that examines how Indigenous feminist theorizing can expand planning theories and practices (Sweet and Escalante 2010, 2015, 2017). We show how Indigenous theory complicates understandings of community safety that have been positioned as a potential outcome of planning by providing a deeper understanding of the context of settler colonial violence. We also show how Indigenous women practice resistance to settler colonial violence and argue that if community safety is to be pursued as a planning outcome, planning must include an analysis of settler colonial violence and an understanding of how this violence can be resisted. We begin by outlining the ways settler violence governs Indigenous bodies while failing to fully “protect and serve,” creating the conditions that render the bodies of Indigenous women and girls violable. Next, we outline how Indigenous feminists and scholars in the field of critical Indigenous studies have theorized colonial violence and pathways for resistance. Finally, drawing on examples from community activism and organizing, we consider how Indigenous feminism might be applied to planning and suggest approaches to planning that do not replicate settler colonial violence.

Understanding the Problem: Indigenous Women and Settler Colonial Violence

The World Health Organization defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (Krug et al. 2002, 5). This definition of violence includes violence perpetrated by individuals, as well as violence perpetrated by collectives, such as states (Krug et al. 2002, 6). Settler colonialism is by nature a violent process, with settler colonial violence often directed toward women. Sarah Hunt (2015, 32) observes that colonialism has been “facilitated by, and worked to entrench, racist and sexist ideologies in which Indigenous people are dehumanized in ways that excuse or even encourage violence against Indigenous girls and women.” Consequently, sexual violence is “a hallmark of colonial progress and is a central force in creating racial and gendered hierarchies through colonial legal categories” (Hunt 2015, 32). In the context of settler colonialism, Indigenous women face both public and private forms of violence, perpetrated by individuals as well as institutions.

A colonial legal framework structures the vulnerability of Indigenous women and girls and shapes their experience of violence. This legal infrastructure can be traced back to the founding of Canada and the United States. In Canada, the Indian Act was created in 1876 as a legal mechanism for facilitating the assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, by determining who had the right to claim Indian legal status as well as rights to territory. As federal legislation that survives to this day, the Indian Act operates by determining who is legally entitled to Indian status and community membership. These arbitrary legal distinctions between Indian and non-Indian created by the Act to expedite land transfers and resource extraction now also dictate the ability of people to participate in Indigenous political and community life (Lawrence 2003). For instance, as a consequence of sexist provisions within the act, Indigenous women who married non-Indigenous men were stripped of their status, as were their children. While Indigenous women successfully fought to have these provisions of the Act removed, the Act continues to strip status from children if both parents are not “status” Indians. These provisions undermine Indigenous governance structures and principles such as kinship, which have traditionally formed the basis for community membership and belonging. Through these provisions, the Indian Act limits the ability of Indigenous women to decide for themselves where they will live and the extent to which they can participate in the governance of their communities (Lawrence 2003; Maracle 2013).

Processes of assimilation that focused on governing Indigenous identity and citizenship also reshaped the ordering of Indigenous communities away from a wide range of gendered consciousness and practices and toward policies that enforced a gender hierarchy predicated on heteronormativity and patriarchy. The ability of Indigenous women to reproduce Indigenous peoples and political orders has meant that the imposition of sexist and heteropatriarchal logics is central to settler colonial governance. In the United States, evidence of this heterosexism can be found in allotment records, where men are identified as the head of household, a source of tension in those Indigenous communities where women have domain over the household and agricultural land. These structures are also reflected in imposed property regimes. According to Cherokee scholar Theda Perdue, Cherokee women were the primary farmers and the produce they farmed belonged to them and shared at the Green Corn Ceremony. However, through the imposition of land privatization and signing deeds conveying title to the Proprietors of Carolina, Cherokee women were slowly shut out of treaty, and land negotiations and the nation-state looked to the men regarding land decisions (Perdue 1989). In this way, gender has been mobilized in law to weaken Indigenous political and territorial authority, while producing women’s vulnerability to violence.

Civil statistics tell a chilling story about the multiple forms of violence which Indigenous women and girls endure. In both Canada and the United States, Indigenous women face domestic violence and sexual assault at rates higher than the rest of the population. In 2015, 24 percent of homicide victims in Canada were Indigenous women. Indigenous women are more likely to be murdered or missing than other women in Canada (The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 2017, 8). The cumulative effects of this violence are striking. It has been estimated that between eight hundred and 1200 Indigenous women and girls have been murdered or gone missing between 1946 and 2012. After years of advocacy by Indigenous women and community groups, the Government of Canada announced that it would launch an inquiry into the problem of historical and ongoing systemic violence affecting Indigenous women. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls began in December 2015 and was tasked with conducting hearings in communities across Canada. As the Interim Report of the Inquiry notes, Indigenous women experience violence at far higher rates than other women and determined that “simply being Indigenous and female is a risk” (The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 2017, 8).

In the United States, Indigenous women face similar degrees of violence. According to the Center for Disease Control, Indigenous women in the United States are subjected to the highest rates of homicide (Emiko et al. 2017), with 83 percent of Indigenous women experiencing violence in their lifetime (Rosay 2016). Moreover, an Indigenous woman will likely experience multiple forms of violence across her lifetime. In a study on sex trafficking in Minnesota, 72 percent of the Indigenous women interviewed reported experiencing childhood sexual abuse by an average of four perpetrators, while 92 percent of women interviewed had been raped (Farley et al. 2011). Indigenous women in the United States report experiencing multiple types of violence, with more than half experiencing sexual violence, physical violence by an intimate partner, stalking, or psychological aggression by an intimate partner (Rosay 2016).

State-sanctioned forms of violence are central to settler colonialism. In both the United States and Canada, Indigenous peoples are incarcerated at rates significantly higher than average. In Canada, Indigenous women are incarcerated at even higher rates than Indigenous men. Despite comprising only 4 percent of the female population, Indigenous women account for 38 percent of admissions to provincial and federal prison. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Indigenous women comprise 73 and 76 percent of the total prison population, respectively (Statistics Canada [2015] 2016). Incarceration is just one of the ways that Indigenous peoples are placed in continuous state custody. Indigenous children are taken from their families and placed into state care at far higher rates than other children (Blackstock 2016). Continuous incarceration is a feature of settler colonial rule that fulfills the territorial and economic aims of settler colonialism (Stewart and Berge 2019). Kelly Lytle Hernandez (2007, 1) observes that “mass incarceration is mass elimination [. . .] Incarceration operates as a means of purging, removing [. . .] and eliminating targeted populations from land, life, and society.” Some researchers have used the term “transcarceral continuum” to describe the ways that carceral logics impact Indigenous women and girls in different spaces, including ones designed for their care. Lena Palacios explains that the transcarceral continuum includes “local mental health agencies, welfare agencies, child protective services, professionalized social services, as well as individualizing, pathologizing, and self-responsibilizing educational and therapeutics projects” (Palacios 2016, 144). These spaces “blur the boundaries between the prison’s “inside” and “outside”” extending state control well beyond the borders of the prison (Palacios 2016, 144) and speak to the need to find responses to violence that look beyond increased services, or policing and instead, seek to addresses the historical and political causes of violence.

Indigenous Feminism, Abolition, and Generative Refusal

A growing body of literature within the field of planning responds to issues of safety and security. In the 1960s, Jane Jacobs famously lauded the density of Greenwich Village as enabling “eyes on the street” (Jacobs 1961) and saw design as a feature crucial for community safety. The 1970s saw the emergence of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), an approach which sought to promote safety in public space through design. Yet, this approach often failed to address gendered dimensions of safety (Sweet and Escalante 2010). Since then, a smaller body of planning literature has examined the specific factors that affect women’s safety in areas such as transportation (Loukaitou-Sideris 2006; Loukaitou-Sideris and Fink 2009), the design of public space (Whitzman 1992, 2002), and also cataloged a variety of planning procedures and interventions that can contribute to improving women’s safety (Wekerle and Whitzman 1995; Whitzman 2012). While filling an important gap in the planning literature, these approaches have often focused on securitization and physical dimensions of safety, while often ignoring important social factors affecting women’s safety (Beebeejaun 2009).

Focusing on the physical dimensions of safety and security runs the risk of positioning women as objects of planning, rather than as generators of planning theory and practice. Planning scholars have noted that women’s safety will be fostered only by “listening to women and being sensitive to the lessons of their own experience” (Klodawsky, Lundy, and Andrew 1994, 46). Loevinger Rahder (1999) similarly emphasized that women affected by violence must take a leading role in shaping alternatives. Moreover, these alternatives should acknowledge the systemic causes of gender violence and “address how gender violence functions as a tool of racism and economic oppression in different societies” (Sweet and Escalante 2010, 2134). Indigenous feminist scholars draw attention to the specific ways that Indigenous women experience settler colonial violence and provide an alternative to approaches that emphasize increased policing and surveillance as a response to gendered violence. In this section, we explore how Indigenous feminism has responded to settler colonial violence and identify some affinities between the ways Indigenous feminist and abolition feminists respond to violence.

The concept of Indigenous feminism sits somewhat un-easily within the field of Indigenous studies. Feminism is seen by many Indigenous scholars as a Western project and has been criticized for reaffirming racial hierarchies and colonial structures (Ross 2009; Goeman and Denetdale 2009). Western feminism has often aimed to advance equality for women. Yet, many Indigenous societies were traditionally matriarchal, and as such, equality is not always seen as a useful organizing principle for Indigenous women (Green 2007; Turpel 1993). While Indigenous feminism can take many forms, Indigenous feminism can be understood as a political project that seeks pathways to liberation that attend to Indigenous women, especially those women excluded from their communities through colonial legislation (Green 2007). Indigenous feminist scholars affirm the important role women play in the reassertion of Indigenous political orders and also seek to disrupt gender binaries and heteronormativity imposed by settler colonialism (Goeman and Denetdale 2009). Indigenous feminist scholarship is rooted in a commitment to community liberation and a refusal of settler colonial orders. Seen through an Indigenous feminist lens, community liberation prioritizes radical relationality and kinship with people and land (Navarro 2014). This orientation is also suggestive of a set of methods for political engagement, grounded in a refusal of settler definitions of subjectivity, politics, or forms of organizing. As Goeman explains, Indigenous feminists not only “define intellectual engagements from the site of their communities” but also create “practice that pays attention to the particularity of community needs on the ground” (Goeman 2017, 187). Indigenous feminism is a theoretical engagement with Indigenous history and politics, as well as a political engagement with contemporary social, economic, cultural, and political issues and thus provides a framework for conceptualizing and resisting violence.

Indigenous feminism theorizes violence from a standpoint that begins with the body, but also locates the body as belonging within a political order that includes relations to land and more-than-human kin. This informs an understanding that connects individual, sexualized violence to collective (political and economic) forms of violence. For instance, from an Indigenous feminist perspective, environmental exploitation is understood as closely connected to the violence that often targets Indigenous women and girls. Members of the Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network make this point clear in their report Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies. The report points to the relation between the damage to the environment caused by extractive industries (such as those that rely on the extraction of oil, gas, minerals, or other “natural resources”) operating on Indigenous territories and increased violence against Indigenous women and girls. They observe that resource extraction on Indigenous territories across North America is a form of environmental violence that also contributes to sexual and domestic violence, stemming in part from the emergence of “man camps” built to house workers for these industries. They note that the “impacts of the environmental violence this causes ranges from sexual and domestic violence, drugs and alcohol, murders and disappearances, reproductive illnesses and toxic exposure, threats to culture and Indigenous lifeways, crime, and other social stressors” (Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network 2016, 2). In other words, the territorial dispossession and environmental degradation work in tandem to produce sexual violence.

Indigenous feminist scholars have grappled with the question of to what extent it is useful for Indigenous communities to engage the justice system to secure justice for Indigenous women when that same system is implicated in perpetuating violence. Colonial legal frameworks have severely limited the ability of Indigenous communities to govern themselves and address systemic violence against women. Sarah Hunt explains that settler legal systems are implicated in perpetuating colonial violence and have “been used to create categories through which the lives, rights, and humanity of Indigenous people can fit neatly into normalized colonial power relations” (Hunt 2015, 27). Thus, rather than looking to the legal system or to the settler colonial state, Indigenous feminists have instead turned to community-based practices to enact alternatives forms of social and political organization that do not rely on the power of the settler colonial state. As Val Napoleon argues “to be effective, the aboriginal political project must go beyond the struggle against colonization. [. . .] Such a political project is about aboriginal people discovering, imagining, and defining themselves” (Napoleon 2009, 7).

Indigenist feminist theorizing explains not only how gendered violence is linked to settler colonialism, it also seeks to mobilize the strengths of Indigenous women and communities in resurgent practices. In emphasizing the resurgence of Indigenous communities, Indigenous feminism must be understood in relation to broader discussions within critical Indigenous studies, which position resurgence an anti-colonial praxis. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates a vision for Indigenous resurgence grounded in the revitalization and resurgence of Indigenous culture and traditions and rejects the necessity of the state in this process. She explains that such a resurgence needs to be based on Indigenous processes and should take place “on our own terms, without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory or the opinions of Canadians” (Simpson 2011, 17). Resurgence, as described by Simpson, requires turning away from approaches that rely on state-led practices. In this way, resurgence requires the enactment of a politics of refusal. Refusal can be understood as a rejection of both modes of theorizing and practices that position Indigenous peoples as objects of governance, rather than political actors in their own right. Audra Simpson has argued that refusals are generative as they “tell us something about the way we cradle or embed our representations and notions of sovereignty and nationhood; and they critique and move us away from statist forms of recognition” (Simpson 2014, 113). This refusal of state-led practices is generative of alternatives that do not rely on recognition. As Coulthard explains, although the politics of recognition seek to reconcile expressions of Indigenous political authority with the sovereignty claims of the settler colonial state, it fails to transcend the colonial relationship (Coulthard 2014). Similarly, Leanne Simpson argues that when Indigenous movements “reject the politics of recognition and center generative refusal [it] inherently creates Indigenous bodies more connected to each other and the land, and that act out, through relationality, Indigenous thought” (Simpson 2017, 178). Applied to planning, refusal positions Indigenous peoples and knowledges as generators of planning theory. Refusal thus provides a means for developing approaches to planning that do not rely on the state, which instead actively resist settler colonialism while imagining futures beyond colonialism.

As a response to state-sanctioned settler colonial violence, refusal has several features in common with abolition feminism. Abolitionist feminists point out that the systemic violence of the prison system often facilitates violence against racialized women rather than preventing it (Thuma 2015) and have recognized that an intersectional analysis of the ways gender and race work to produce violence provide a more productive avenue for organizing against and preventing violence. Much of this work has focused on the abolition of the prison system and thus stands in stark contrast to approaches that emphasize the expansion of surveillance, policing, and increased incarceration as a response to gender violence, a practice that Sweet (2016) refers to as “carceral feminism.” Carceral feminism, she explains, “relies on the criminalization of the perpetrator,” to address violence against women, thus reinforcing carceral logics that “dole out punishment” through the penal system (Sweet 2016, 202). Abolitionist feminism, however, entails

a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance—and the ideological structures of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy that shape institutional violence—and creating lasting alternatives to the nation-state, citizenship, militarized policing, mass incarceration, and border fortification. (Palacios 2016, 151)

Abolitionist feminists reject law and order tactics designed to promote women’s safety and seek more than a reform of the existing prison system. Instead, they envision a remaking of the political and social orders that produce racialized gendered violence. Indigenous feminist responses similarly reject law and order tactics and respond to the specific colonial conditions which produce violence. Together, abolitionist and Indigenous feminist responses to violence invite us to consider not only the ways that multiple forms of violence and oppression are linked, but what the pathways toward liberation might have in common.

Enacting Generative Refusal and Pathways for Planning

Planning is implicated in colonialism through the forms of knowledge it mobilizes and the practices it engages in the management of land and territory (Dorries 2017; Porter 2010). Planning scholars have looked to a variety of discursive, ethical, and rights-based approaches that might be deployed with the aim of decolonizing planning (Porter 2006; Ugarte 2014), with some planners looking to the role which state-led practices might offer in recognizing the rights claims of Indigenous peoples (Porter and Barry 2016). While it is important for planning to tackle the injustices that are produced by state-led planning processes, we suggest a response to settler colonial violence, as it is understood by Indigenous feminists, demands an approach that looks beyond state-led approaches.

In looking beyond safety measures that rely on state-led processes, Indigenous feminist approaches may have some commonalities with insurgent planning. Insurgent planning has emphasized the role of activities which occur outside the “formal” planning framework (Meth 2010, 241) and been positioned as a form of radical planning that is “counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative” (Miraftab 2009, 32). Insurgent planning provides a useful framework for thinking about how grassroots action can be positioned in relation to and inform planning and expand understandings of participation in planning (Miraftab and Wills 2005). While some have criticized insurgent planning for being about both everything and nothing (Alexander 2011), we understand insurgent practices to be specific in their orientation. The practices we describe here apply Indigenous feminist perspectives to inform and extend an analysis of the specific settler colonial context in which planning takes place and are motivated by a desire to create practices that support Indigenous resurgence. In this section, we address how Indigenous women have enacted refusal in forms of social and political organization that contest colonial relations and address the problem of violence. We argue that these practices, exemplified in the community-based art projects Jail Bed Drop and Walking With Our Sisters, provide a means of understanding gender violence and also represent embodied practices that support the flourishing of Indigenous women and communities.

The challenges faced by Indigenous women and their communities are often framed in terms that focus on damage. Eve Tuck explains that “damage-centered research” focuses on hardships experienced by Indigenous communities and mobilize narratives of pain and loss. Although stories of damage can be useful in underlining real harms of colonialism, damage-centered narratives make it difficult for communities to think of themselves as other than broken. Tuck writes, “without the context of racism and colonization, all we’re left with is the damage, and this makes our stories vulnerable to pathologizing analyses” (Tuck 2009, 415). Damage-centered narratives naturalize the effects of colonialism when an analysis of colonialism is not part of these narratives.

Damage-centered narratives are often reflected in initiatives designed to improve “safety” in Indigenous communities through increased policing and surveillance, as policing initiatives that target Indigenous communities are premised on the idea that Indigenous communities are “too damaged to manage their own affairs” (Dobchuk-Land 2017, 416). Yet, increased policing and surveillance initiatives purportedly designed to protect Indigenous women often have the opposite effect. For example, the report Those Who Take Us Away released by Human Rights Watch (2013) provides an account of multiple forms of violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls at the hands of police northern British Columbia. The report documents a pattern of police brutality—including physical and sexual violence—against Indigenous women during moments in which they have called upon the police for help. Similar patterns of abuse have been identified in other provinces and demands an analysis of the relationship between policing and racialized and gendered colonial violence (Dhillon 2015; Dobchuk-Land 2017). The report calls into question the assumption that increased policing can address colonial violence

Indigenous feminist theorizing refuses dehumanizing damage narratives and offers alternatives, by focusing on Indigenous women as members of families, communities, and nations. Indigenous feminist theorizing also seeks to recuperate and claim space in ways that serve the needs of Indigenous women and girls. In doing so, it gives rise to embodied forms of praxis, exemplified in the work of Indigenous artists. The work of Métis visual artist Christi Belcourt is exemplary of the ways that Indigenous women and communities engage in practices that refuse damage narratives while reclaiming space for Indigenous women. Walking With Our Sisters is a work conceived by Belcourt that draws on the work of more than 1800 volunteers. The work consists of more than 1800 pairs of beaded vamps (decorative moccasin tops), each representing one of the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing in Canada. Originally hoping to collect six hundred vamps, after putting out a call for vamps through social media, within a year Belcourt had collected more than 1600 vamps. Each pair of vamps features a unique design. The work has traveled to more than twenty-five locations including art galleries and community halls across Canada since 2012, with plans to visit more before the end of 2019.

The work confronts the problem of violence against Indigenous women while also moving beyond damage-centered narratives. Rather than focusing on the status of missing women and girls as victims or as subjects of the colonial state, this work memorializes these missing women and girls as sisters, daughters, mothers, and focuses on their status as loved and missed family members. It provides families with an opportunity to grieve, by creating a space where Indigenous communities can reflect, talk, engage in ceremony, and be safe while doing so (Harjo, Robertson, and Navarro 2018; Tabobandung 2014). Moreover, the exhibit is rooted in community processes that center and value Indigenous women and cultivates community strength through ceremony. The success of the work is a testament to the efforts of individuals and communities that has enabled the creation of the work and its display in numerous communities. Volunteer participation was integral not only to the creation of vamps but to the mounting of the exhibit in the museums and communities where it is shown. As it travels, the installation is brought to life by the communities who host it, with community members taking responsibility for preparing the exhibit and conducting ceremony during the exhibit. Belcourt explains,

everything we do follows traditional protocols, we bring Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous ceremonial practices into this space, because what we’re doing here is not an exhibit. Even though I use the word exhibit, it’s a memorial, it’s a commemoration and its ceremony. It’s ceremony from the very start to the very end of each and every display. (cited in Tabobandung 2014)

In performing ceremony, organizers were also forced to confront colonial notions of gender and sexuality, and grappled internally with some traditions, such as the practice of female persons wearing skirts in ceremonial spaces as a sign of respect (McGuire 2008). Indigenous scholars have similarly wrestled with these questions, noting that rigid notions of gender and heteropatriarchy obscures community from envisioning other possible worlds (Simpson 2017). Walking With Our Sisters ultimately decided that no one had to wear a skirt if they did not want to. Walking With Our Sisters provides one example of how Indigenous women are enacting insurgent feminist practices and reflects a form of feminist organizing that seeks remedies beyond those offered by the settler colonial state. Indigenous feminist theorizing points toward practices that generate Indigenous political strength and that pivot away from pathologizing the experiences of Indigenous women and girls.

In contrast to Walking With Our Sisters, the Jail Bed Drop discussed at this paper’s outset served as an oppositional tactic to proposed carceral community development—it is a discrete and direct action against prison expansion in Los Angeles. By placing the bed next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA on Christmas Eve, the action re-appropriates space at the hub of capitalism in a world city on what is arguably the most significant Christian and capitalist holiday. Like Walking With Our Sisters, however, the Jail Bed Drop can also be understood as a project of remembering; it reminds consumers that Los Angeles sits on Tongva lands and the site of Indigenous slave auctions. In doing so presents an Indigenous history of the site. As Linda Tuhiwai-Smith notes, bearing witness and remembering can function as community projects of decolonization (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999, 144–46). Through engaging practices of remembrance, this project created a space in which community knowledge is fostered.

The labor that produced the Jail Bed Drop also strengthened a far-reaching network of care. Million argues that collective forms of action can disrupt the individualism of coloniality and are also a form of care (Million 2013). Indigenous feminisms seek to reconceive of and remake networks of power through radical relationality to one another, the land, and plant and animal nations and by recovering Indigenous governance traditions (Navarro 2014). Laura Harjo was actively involved as a thought partner in the initial planning of the Green Corn Collective’s bed to Justice Now’s Jail Bed Drop project. She observes that community members with different abilities, as well as a number of people involved, some were mothers, and their children were present and active in creating the art of the jail bed. Others constrained by time, distance, family, work obligations, or physical abilities were able to through other means, such as providing content for the zine that accompanied the work or by participating a zine making session.

Both Walking With Our Sisters and the Jail Bed Drop enact refusal to generate alternatives to the settler colonial order. These projects refuse imposed notions of community and instead formulate Indigenous women’s visions of community. These projects also enable processes of remembering and grieving multiple forms of settler colonial violence and demonstrate a turning away from the colonial state and its failure to recognize its complicity in gender violence. At the same time, they enact practices grounded in the intelligence of their lived experience. Furthermore, they create a safe space for engaging with kin and perhaps making new kinship connections, demonstrating some of the multiple ways that “First Nations women have carved out . . . spaces by organizing informal meeting groups in order to create support networks and work out cultural survival strategies” (Peters 1998, 678).

These projects have something to tell us about the strategies and tactics that might address gender violence and are also instructive when it comes to formulating insurgent or anti-colonial planning praxis. These approaches suggest how an Indigenous feminist approach to planning for safety might be understood as an approach that plans with and for Indigenous women and girls, while using community knowledge to refuse damage-focused narratives and draw attention the sources and forms of violence, connecting these to a larger set of settler colonial processes. In doing so, an Indigenous feminist approach also challenges the public–private divide which places women’s experiences of violence outside of the public sphere and remove these experiences from the purview of planning action. Responses to violence and approaches to safety that reinforce divisions between public and private space have been shown to perpetuate violence and limit possibilities for planning intervention (Sweet and Escalante 2010, 2015). The projects we have explored here suggest an alternative mapping of space, drawing a line from state-sanctioned violence to other forms of violence. In short, they offer a broad understanding of the problem of violence safety while also expanding possibilities for action.

Read in tandem, the Jail Bed Drop and Walking With Our Sisters ask planners to consider the intricate relationship that exists between incarceration, violence against women, and colonial dispossession and serve as important reminders of the ways that incarceration and colonial violence target Indigenous women. They highlight the ways the settler colonial state has sanctioned such violence and call into questions practices that reaffirm state power. The Jail Bed Drop and Walking With Our Sisters activate the transformational power that is located within Indigenous communities and rooted in Indigenous sovereignty. In short, they demonstrate that challenging carceral logics and gender violence requires abolishing the colonial frameworks that constitute incarceration and violence as the territorialization of colonial sovereignty.

Conclusion

Indigenous women and girls theorize and enact resistance, pointing toward anti-violence as a praxis that resists the gendered, sexualized, carceral violence of the settler colonial state. Moreover, they emphasize the importance of centering practices that contribute to resurgence in Indigenous communities. Indigenous feminist theorizing provides important lessons for planning, suggesting alternative means of conceptualizing community safety and responses to violence. It also envisions ways of organizing social relations and responses to violence that do not rely on the state, but instead affirm the strength and authority of Indigenous communities. Thus, Indigenous feminism decenters the state and looks to community as a source of power, rather than drawing on the expertise of outsiders to promote change (Harjo 2019). When applied to an analysis of Indigenous women’s safety and security, Indigenist feminism places an analysis of violence within historical and political contexts. It provides a tool for understanding how settler colonialism creates and is sustained by carceral logics, linking both incarceration and violence targeting Indigenous women to processes of settler colonial dispossession. It helps to see carceral violence as one of the ways in which the settler state territorializes its sovereignty. It sees decolonization as the primary means of addressing violence against Indigenous women and girls. Thus, planners interested in addressing gender violence and improving safety for Indigenous women and girls would do well to consider how Indigenous feminist perspectives might help inform an anti-colonial practice.

In this article, we have examined how settler colonialism targets Indigenous women, rendering them vulnerable to gender violence, incarceration, and policing. We have shown how Indigenous feminist theorizing offers a means of disrupting settler violence and points toward modes of praxis that do not replicate the violence of the state, but which instead invert settler colonial structures of domination. Looking toward the work of the Green Corn Collective’s contributions to the Jail Bed Drop and Walking With Our Sisters, we have demonstrated how Indigenous feminists have drawn from their lived experiences to envision forms of social organization that do not replicate settler colonial violence. Finally, we have argued that these practices offer important lessons for planning.