Epistemic Injustice and Indigenous Women: Toward Centering Indigeneity in Social Work

Intersectionality and Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives

Indigenous or aboriginal feminisms bring together multiple critiques: including feminism, anticolonialism, antiracism, and challenges to heteropatriarchy. Indigenous scholar Bonita Lawrence (2005) observes that antiracism and postcolonialism discussions, while relevant to her life, nevertheless fall short of fully capturing her experience. She notes that “antiracism does not begin with and reflect the totality of Native peoples’ lived experience—that is, with the genocide that established and maintains all the settler states within the Americas” (p. 121). For example, liberal multiculturalism discourses assume that all minority groups are devoted to a form of social justice which is founded on equity and inclusion but “the issues facing Indigenous women [are] as inseparable from the issues facing Indigenous peoples as a whole, and are resolved via decolonization and sovereignty, not (just) parity” (Arvin et al., 2013, p. 10). The feminist issues confronting white women, women of color, and Indigenous women are in part shared and in part very different, even potentially in conflict. For Indigenous feminisms, colonial dispossession is central to an analysis of systems of oppression. Indigenous scholar Audra Simpson described Indigenous feminism as “acting in good relation” and being responsible to her Mohawk community (cited in Green, 2007, p. 2).

Indigenous women who politicized women’s issues have a long, yet not well-documented, history: They have been criticized from within their own communities and have usually remained outside mainstream feminist organizations. Indigenous women continue to be subject to multiple colonizations and persisting external systemic oppression as well as internalized and systemic colonial heteropatriarchy. For example, Mohawk activist Mary Two-Axe Early lost her status under the Indian Act and began to lobby for change in the 1950s. She eventually appealed to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1968 and created the “Equal Rights for Native Women” association. Her work was then continued by the Tobique women’s group in New Brunswick who after 10 long years of lobbying and activism succeeded in having the Indian Act amended in 1985, with the passing of Bill C-31 which reversed the ruling that Indigenous women lost their status if they married a non-Indigenous person and furthermore reinstated those who had lost their status (Green, 2007; Silman, 1987).

Indigenous feminisms are multiple and may not always adopt the language of Western feminisms, but they consistently “take account of how racism and sexism fuse when brought to bear on Aboriginal women” (Green, 2007, p. 23). Gender-based analysis against heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy is located contextually within Indigenous communities. While current tribal governments and national chiefs do recognize that one of the results of violent colonial dispossession is the presence of lateral violence (Bailey, 2020; Wingard, 2010) in Indigenous communities, they view it as an internal matter which can be addressed once Indigenous autonomy has been achieved. This seeming conflict between Indigenous women’s rights and Indigenous self-determination has long been a source of dissension within the Indigenous community. Indigenous feminists are accused of being corrupted by “Western feminists” and male Indigenous leadership assumes that self-government will address women’s concerns (Kuokkanen, 2012; Maracle, 2015). The Assembly of First Nations which was formerly the National Indian Brotherhood opposed Indigenous feminist activism as selfish individual interests which they believed should be subsumed into the collective agenda of sovereignty (Barker, 2006).

Feminist Indigenous scholar Lee Maracle (2015) identifies Indigenous women as not only targets of stranger violence within Canada but also targets of lateral violence within their own communities. She observes that “the issues facing women are ignored at both tribal and government levels” (p. 129). Maracle challenges the shortcomings of Western human rights legislation to end violence against Indigenous women. At the same time, she differentiates herself from the many Indigenous men who see human rights legislation as a political invasion from outside and makes the point that her objection is that these measures mask the subnormative conditions that entrench the lives of most Indigenous people and which are themselves potent grounds for the violence that plagues Indigenous communities. Maracle asserts that poverty subsumes the problem of violence within Indigenous communities, which is furthered through the masculine internalization of stereotypical colonial myths about Indigenous women so that both non-Indigenous and Indigenous men do not respect Indigenous women and both stranger and lateral violence are committed against Indigenous women. From her position of intersectional feminism, Maracle poses a poignant question: “why have Indigenous women become the most violated, the least educated, and the most overworked and unprotected human beings in the history of Turtle Island?” (pp. 130, 131). We suggest that this question demands answers from all of the residents of Turtle Island, especially from social workers.

Critiques of White Settler Colonialism

White settler society scholarship studies the commonalities between the settler societies established by the British Empire, particularly Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. The existence of Indigenous people challenges the claimed legitimacy of the settler state. An agenda of elimination of Indigenous people was strategically set in the white settler governance structures. Enforced removal and confinement on reservations preserved Indigenous sovereignty but banished it to a separate realm. Indigenous people were conceptually erased by being positioned “in the past” and by being represented as wandering people who did not “use” the land. Assimilation or absorption (disappearance) was enacted with the residential school program and administrative tactics such as the legislation of Indian status and citizenship which was entrenched in the Indian Act (Lawrence, 2002; Razack, 2002; Wolfe, 2016).

Cree scholar Michelle Good (2018) ponders the dissonance surrounding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was declared in 1949 against the backdrop of World War II and the liberation of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. The declaration of “Never Again” was seen as a promise of a better, more tolerant world that would stand against dehumanization. Good speculates that for settlers to continue on their path of destroying Indigenous peoples, they needed to dehumanize the targets in order to rationalize their brutality. She draws from the recent archival work of historian James Daschuk. In his book, Clearing of the Plains, Daschuk (2019) documents “how Indigenous women were reduced to items of ransom and barter as their families struggled with the horrors of famine conditions created intentionally to establish economic supremacy for the newcomers and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples” (p. 92). Daschuk describes how British traders of the Hudson Bay Company routinely took women as collateral for debts and sold them to company employees. If any attempt was made to stop this by fathers, husbands, or family members, violence was used to ensure submission. Not only that, but slave trafficking (and often sex trafficking) of Indigenous women was perpetuated by the Department of Indian Affairs employees. It was known to the superiors and supervisors of these agents that half of their men were engaged in predatory relationships with young Indigenous girls. Rations were withheld unless Indigenous women provided sexual favors to the Indian Agents (Daschuk, 2013).

Good (2018) comments that “the legacy of this dark chapter of colonialism is that Indigenous women are still seen as disposable and even as commodities to be used as members of the non-Indigenous society see fit” (p. 95). Good further argues that generations of non-Indigenous Canadians have been weaned on these pervasive dehumanizing discourses, which embrace intersecting misogyny and racism and position Indigenous women as objects to be used and discarded: “50 years after Confederation, these images are still superimposed on our women, and it is killing them. These images are like a permission slip for rape and murder” (p. 98). Thus, she theorizes MMIWG as an intersecting oppression that is rooted in white settler colonialism.

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (2016) pinpoints the slow, corrosive violence of cultural genocide and links this toxic colonial legacy with the widespread violence and despair in Indigenous communities:

White supremacy, rape culture, and the real and symbolic attack on gender, sexual identity and agency are very powerful tools of colonialism, settler colonialism, and capitalism, primarily because they work very efficiently to remove Indigenous people from our territories and to prevent reclamation of those territories through mobilization. These forces have the intergenerational staying power to destroy generations of families, as they work to prevent us from intimately connecting to each other. They work to prevent mobilization because communities coping with epidemics of gender violence don’t have the physical or emotional capital to organise. They destroy the base of our nations and our political systems because they destroy our relationships to the land and to each other by fostering epidemic levels of anxiety, hopelessness, apathy, distrust, and suicide. They work to destroy our relationality by making it difficult to form sustainable, strong relationships with each other. (pp. 218, 219)

Epistemic Injustice and Indigenous Feminist Resistance

Fricker (2010) suggests that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice which is a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. She states that “to be wronged in one’s capacity as a knower is to be wronged in a capacity essential to human value” (p. 44). Fricker identifies the capacity to reason as fundamental to the distinctive value of humankind and thus to be wronged in this capacity is dehumanizing. She identifies a social aspect to this form of injustice as the person is not only degraded as a knower of one’s own experiences but is represented as being less than fully human. And if this denial of credibility is public, then they are also a victim of social humiliation.

Fricker further elaborates this idea by describing two types of epistemic injustice, that of testimonial injustice and that of hermeneutic injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when a hearer gives reduced credibility to a speaker due to a hearer’s prejudice and dismisses the speaker’s capacity as a giver of knowledge. In the case of an incident of testimonial injustice where there is a prejudicial stereotype that the social group is humanly lesser (as in the case of Indigenous racism), then the injury is not only symbolic but also literal. Fricker observes “no wonder, too that in contexts of oppression the powerful will be sure to undermine the powerless in just that capacity, for it provides a direct route to undermining them in their very humanity” (p. 44).

Hermeneutic injustice refers to an even more fundamental injustice when a social phenomenon has not yet been identified, named, and conceptualized. This hermeneutic gap in understanding creates socially what Fricker calls a gap in the “collective interpretive resources” (p. 155). This gap puts someone at a disadvantage when it comes to making their own sense of their social experience but also makes it very difficult to communicate to others and thus creates hermeneutic isolation. The example Fricker gives to illustrate this concept of the hermeneutic gap is the phenomenon of sexual harassment. She explains that it was during the 1970s that second wave feminists gathered in consciousness raising groups and identified sexual harassment in the workplace and collectively named it such. Subsequently, they moved the concept into the public domain and regulations followed. Until this time, women had been experiencing sexual harassment but had difficulty naming what was happening, and even when they tried, the receptivity was limited as there was no public understanding of the phenomenon (i.e., a gap in the collective interpretive resource).

In the case of a structural prejudice (i.e., the presence of a hegemonic discriminatory discourse such as racism), hermeneutic injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutic resource” (p. 155). When this is present, the speaker is further silenced, and his or her own identity becomes objectified. As illustrated later, in the countless reports of MMIWG, demands for investigation were dismissed as “not credible” such as individual faults, mishaps, and nonrelated crimes, and the cries from Indigenous women to address the pervasive violence against them were not heard (i.e., testimonial injustice). Furthermore, there was a significant gap in the collective hermeneutic resource as there was no public recognition that Indigenous women had become targets of violence and there were few opportunities for Indigenous women to collectivize their stories. Thus, as we go on to argue, the testimonial injustice was ongoing and there was also a significant hermeneutic gap in the collective resource.

A critical feminist philosopher Medina (2013, p. 2019) attests that epistemic injustice calls for epistemic resistance. Epistemic resistance means going beyond simply designating “something of instrumental value or a transitional stage” (p. 4). It refers to “a mode of relationality” in the world we live in and “the central epistemic and political mechanisms and activities of contestation” that act to create friction and unsettle the status quo and thus contribute to a democratic approach to social transformation. The concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance have been taken up by Indigenous scholars, notably Rebecca Tsosie (2012, 2019) who applies the concepts to legal and policy structures. She describes the hegemony of discourses of science and technology as epistemic imperialism and argues that “forms of epistemic injustice permeate the legal system and reflect the longstanding cultural construction of Indigenous peoples as “others” (Tsosie, 2019, p. 360).

Therefore, in this research, we document Indigenous resistance to different forms of epistemic injustice and colonial and systemic violence. We illustrate how Indigenous women construct counterstories and close hermeneutic gaps to claim their epistemic knowledge/power while actively constructing Indigenous communities for healing and growth.

The Life Journey of Bridgett Perrier in Thunder Bay

Thunder Bay is a Northern Ontario city on the shores of Lake Superior in Canada. Hundreds of rivers converge on the lake, and these rivers were once the meeting place of the thriving Indigenous societies of the Cree and the Ojibwe. It became a hub where the fur traders and Indigenous trappers and traders met, and it was at this time that the French adopted the Ojibwe name of Thunder Bay. The Ojibwe of Fort William First Nation still live at the foot of Mt. McKay. Settlers arrived in the 20th century with the development of railway connections and shipping on Lake Superior. A residential school was created out of the Catholic orphanage which was established in 1870, and hundreds of Indigenous children were forcefully abducted and transferred to the city. It wasn’t until 1966 that St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School was demolished (Talaga, 2017).

Within this historical backdrop, Bridgett Perrier was born in 1976 in Thunder Bay to an Anishinaabe woman and was adopted out when she was 5 weeks old. She was adopted by a non-Indigenous white family, which was very common at the time, and there was no regard to the implications of uprooting a child from family, community, and cultural ties. Perrier reports that her adoptive parents were good to her and she was settled in their care. However, when she was 8 years old, she was molested by a family friend and her subsequent acting out behavior resulted in her being placed with the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) when she was 11 years old (Johnson, 2019).

Later, this practice of transracial Indigenous adoption was dubbed “the Sixties Scoop” by Patrick Johnston (1983) who conducted a survey of Indigenous children and the child welfare system in the early 1980s. He noted that large numbers of children had been removed from their families and placed in foster homes and adopted out to white families, which was the path Perrier’s own life followed. In his study of the separation of Indigenous children from their families and placement in residential institutions, Indigenous social work scholar Ernie Crey (1997) characterized this splitting of Indigenous families through the child welfare system as “wolves in sheep’s clothing” meaning that the language of rescue and child well-being masked the harsh reality of the continued cultural and familial dispossession of Indigenous children (p. 81). He asserted that the effects of child welfare apprehensions were even more virulent in its impact on Indigenous families than the preceding era of residential schools. By no means was Crey supporting the practice of residential schools, but rather he was making the point that in the residential school system the students returned back to home and community for 2 months each summer, and in addition, they were living with other Indigenous children. However

in the foster and adoptive care system, Indigenous children typically vanished with scarcely a trace, the vast majority of them placed until they were adults in non-Aboriginal homes where their cultural identity, their legal Indian status, their knowledge of their own First Nation and even their birth names were erased, often forever. (Fournier & Crey, 1997, p. 81)

In the 2019 Canadian report, Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report on MMIWG which was the result of a 4-year public inquiry, Chapter 8 examined the sex industry, sexual exploitation, and human trafficking. The chapter begins by noting that gathering information about the involvement of Indigenous women in the sex industry is very difficult as stigma and fear hinder identification. Nevertheless, organizations working on behalf of sex workers report that Indigenous women and girls are the majority in street-level sex work in Canada. Reading this National Report, it is very evident that Bridgett Perrier’s story is far from unique. The National Report notes that there is a strong correlation between young Indigenous girls involved first with the child welfare system then become involved in sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, and survival/street-level sex work (street-level sex work is the exchange of sexual services for resources such as shelter, food, health care, and essential commodities; Hall et al., 2020). In the report, there are descriptions of many young Indigenous women being phased out of care with a paid bus ticket to a large city (such as Winnipeg or Montreal). Pimps are aware of this and they position themselves at bus stations, in airports, outside group homes and detention centers, and in medical travel areas watching for runaways or early discharged girls to recruit into the sex industry. They seem able to operate with impunity and are rarely observed, stopped, or questioned. Thus, the lack of infrastructure (such as available means of transportation, adequate staffing for wrap around care, safe housing, and income assistance) results in conditions that support sex trafficking and exploitation of sex workers (Reclaiming Power and Place, 2019).

This path that Perrier followed is a familiar story to social workers and the related care systems such as the CAS. And yet it seems that no effective action has been implemented. In her journey through the violence of racism, sexual exploitation, and abuse, Perrier experienced isolation and epistemic injustice. Did the CAS not know that pimps and predators were waiting outside their group homes to snatch vulnerable girls? Did Perrier and other girls report their experiences of violence or exploitation after returning from their first outing? Or was there little receptivity to the stories that they had to tell? Were social workers aware that pimps were waiting at bus stations watching for vulnerable young Indigenous women who were exiting from the system with a discharge plan that consisted of only a bus ticket? From Perrier’s testimony, it appears that her experience was ignored by those who had a duty to care for her, and she may have recognized that her insider knowledge of transracial Indigenous adoption, being a ward of the CAS and being a victim of sex trafficking, was not understood by her caretakers. That is all the phases of her journey are hermeneutic gaps in the collective resource. This means that she would not have had the vocabulary or conceptual tools to report what was happening to her to the persons who were responsible for her care.

Fricker points out that hermeneutic impoverishment impacts differently on different groups as there is usually a power asymmetry at play. In this case, the injustice and harm were borne by Perrier and the social workers who had greater power were unharmed. Fricker says that hermeneutic injustice is a kind of structural discrimination: “the primary harm of hermeneutic injustice concerns exclusion from the pooling of knowledge owing to structural identity prejudice on the part of the hearer” (p. 162). Social workers and caregivers working in group foster care often work from a behavioral analytic perspective where a medical model meta-narrative (structural identity prejudice) explains running away in deficit-based narratives such as incorrigible, untreatable, and uncontrollable and this is the dominant discourse (Crosland & Dunlop, 2015; Hall et al., 2020; Lin, 2012; Reclaiming Power and Place, 2019). Interventions mounted by the caregivers are premised on a belief that they are the experts and their wards have nothing to offer. Listening to individual accounts and working collaboratively with these young women to better understand their experience and to build a hermeneutic resource base of shared understanding could contribute to generating shared solutions and preferred pathways. A reflective self-examination of their own internalized prejudices regarding Indigenous girls by the caregivers should also be part of the route to epistemic justice.

The social work profession has a long history of complicity in colonial violence in their work with Indigenous communities. Early involvement in residential school placements has been documented by the TRC (2016). Social workers took a prominent position in the transition from residential schools to what became known as the Sixties Scoop, where large numbers of Indigenous children were apprehended into foster care following the reduction in the use of residential schools (Johnston, 1983; Sinclair, 2009). Social workers became service actors in transracial adoptions and the foster care system as well as in carceral policing work, not just historically but up to the present (Sinclair et al., 2009). Social worker’s collusion with prevalent pervasive discourses of moral superiority and white civility blended with a belief in their own expert knowledge and helping expertise has justified this complicit participation in perpetuating colonial violence (Author 1, 2015; Chapman & Withers, 2019).

Indigenous Woman, Indigenous Resistance, and Indigenous Intelligence

Perrier exited the sex trade in 1999, and she entered transitional housing at Nekenaan Second Stage Housing. From there, she completed her high school diploma and enrolled in the social work program at George Brown College (Johnson, 2019). Perrier has now become an anti-sex trade advocate and is one of the founders of Sex trade 101, a Toronto-based nonprofit organization committed to protecting the rights of women who have been involved in the sex industry. The agency is staffed with women who have exited the sex trade industry including Natasha Falle, who was also forcibly prostituted as an adolescent girl and is a fellow graduate of the social services program at George Brown College. This organization is dedicated to supporting women to exit the sex industry and is politically active in an abolitionist campaign to end prostitution. Natasha Falle is a Canadian Professor at Humber College, and her organization works closely with the Toronto Police Services sex crimes unit and is active in public education, police training, and prevention work in high schools. In 2012, Perrier and Falle launched Restart in Owen Sound, a mentorship program modeled on Sex trade 101, set up to help women at risk of sexual victimization and to help women exit the sex industry. They recognized that rural communities are common settings for young women to be groomed into prostitution. Collectively, these women have begun to pool the knowledge from their lived experiences and to build a new hermeneutic resource as the foundation for the work they are doing. This kind of epistemic resistance opens the doors for change, new directions, and heightened awareness of not only the prevalence of sex trafficking in our communities but also the pathways that lead to this occupation.

Victories of Indigenous Resistance: The National Inquiry Into MMIWG

The NWAC was founded by a group of Indigenous women in 1974 with a mission to advance legislative and policy reforms to preserve Indigenous culture and advance the well-being of Indigenous women, girls, and gender diverse people as well as their families and communities. NWAC were concerned about the MMIWG in Canada, especially around both the absence of police response and the lack of public awareness and state responsibilities. They partnered with Amnesty International who were launching an antiviolence against women campaign. Out of this coalition came the Amnesty Report, Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights response to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada released in 2004. The publicity that this report generated resulted in the federal government financing the Sisters in Spirit Campaign which ran from 2004 to 2010.

The overarching objective of this collective of Indigenous women was to stop the violence and they set out estimating the number of women who were missing or murdered and documenting their lives. They wanted to raise public concern and provide public education which they hoped would prompt constructive action from those who could make a difference such as police, social workers, courts, medical officials, and Indigenous leaders (Saramo, 2016). However, when their funding agreement ended in 2010, the conservative federal government stopped the funding. In 2011, the House of Commons and the Standing Committee on the Status of Women produced an interim report on violence against Indigenous women, stating that the root cause was poverty, racism, Canada’s colonial history, and systemic police failure. This report stimulated the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, an alliance of more than 80 Canadian women’s organizations, to take up the baton. They submitted claims of the federal government’s violation of the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and initiated an inquiry with the Convention on the Discrimination against Women. In 2013, Human Rights Watch released a report, which documented the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s failure to investigate disappearances and suspected murders of Indigenous women. Calls for a national inquiry began mounting up, and in April 2013, Canada’s provincial Aboriginal affairs ministers said that a national inquiry must examine why Aboriginal women were 7 times more likely to die of violence than other Canadian women. In the last 15 years, several United Nations human rights treaty committees, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all written critical reports on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, and many of these advocates called for a national inquiry (Nagy, 2016).

However, the former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2007–2015) insisted that “we should not view this as a sociological issue” but as “crime”: “It is a crime against innocent people” he stated and “it needs to be addressed as such.” Then, in a radio interview in December 2014, he stated that the issue of MMIWG “isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest” (cited in Bourgeois, 2018, pp. 65, 66). He clearly denied the existence of systemic violence (dismissed it as a sociological issue) and reframed it as individual bad luck or a few bad people committing crimes. Fricker (2010) identifies that persistent cases of epistemic exclusion such as this clear example can severely injure the identity of an individual and that in many cases these persons do not have access to a community to find resources for resistance. Furthermore, she states:

A culture in which some groups are separated off from that aspect of personhood by the experience of repeated exclusions from the spread of knowledge is seriously defective both epistemically and ethically. Knowledge and other rational input they have to offer are missed by others and sometimes literally lost by the subjects themselves; and they suffer a sustained assault in respect of a defining human capacity, an essential attribute of personhood. Such a culture would indeed be one in which a species of epistemic injustice has taken on the proportion of oppression. (pp. 58, 59)

In the news release for the final report presented to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on June 3, 2019, Commissioner Michèle Audette states that

To put an end to this tragedy, the rightful power and place of women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people must be reinstated, which requires dismantling the structures of colonialism within Canadian society. This is not just a job for governments and politicians. It is incumbent on all Canadians to hold our leaders to account. (news ref. 2019)

In his book Narrative Social Work: Theory and Application, Baldwin (2013) notes that our personal stories are our linguistic capital and that “if one has only a few isolated stories then these may not be sufficient to challenge the meta-narrative of a dominant group, but if one has access to many stories this may position one strongly in such a challenge” (p. 43). Like the TRC’s inquiry into residential schools, the National Inquiry into MMIWG assembled multiple stories of grief, loss, and despair from Indigenous families across Canada. This pooling of stories has created a collective hermeneutical resource, we suggest, beginning the work of filling in the hermeneutic gap and opening discussion, analysis, and reflection on the hidden intersectional crisis of MMIWG in Canada. These many stories are providing a new knowledge resource to challenge the pervasive dominant colonial meta-narratives that deny a history of violence and egregious wrongdoing and victim-blaming.

Our analysis has drawn from the recent collections of scholarly writing on this topic that have been published since the Inquiry began with many submissions written by feminist Indigenous scholars (Anderson et al., 2018; Levell-Harvard & Brandt, 2016). This article is another example of a narrative construction to join with the meta-narrative of resistance to demand social justice for Indigenous people and all women who have been subject to violence.