Disappear/ance

by Malia Chung-Paulson

Disappearance has become a perennial albatross in so many North-American Native communities that it has earned a separate moniker within the lexicon of Indigenous studies. The mammoth weight behind the word “disappear” in the context of this discipline is multifaceted, ubiquitous, and endemic to Indigeneity. While ontological pedagogy may provide an infinite number of discussion avenues for the word “disappearance” in the context of Indigeneity, the word can be cleaved broadly into the metaphysical and the cultural. Land disappears, people disappear. Whether the former precedes the latter or vice versa, the reality for Native peoplehood has historically involved complete geographic and cultural encroachment. At the center of physical disappearance was the largest man-made genocide in American history, the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the tribal and First Nations across the United States and Canada, the cartographic engineering of space to further dilute Indigenous land, the social engineering of blood quantum to dilute Indigenous populations, the attempted extinction of buffalo in the Western hemisphere, and dozens of other insidious methods to make the visible invisible. Western governments targeted cultural disappearance largely through education, literature, and the arts. “Disappearance” in Native American and Indigenous studies has fatal implications that will cease only when the same Western desire to deny existence is met with and replaced by the stronger desire to resist such ignorance.

In its most direct translation, “to disappear” literally means “to vanish.” Disappearance within Native studies has become inexorably affiliated with the amount of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) on the North American continent. It is the consequence to which the word most often refers. The National Institute of Justice’s annual report[1] of federally recognized tribes has consistently found that murder is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs concludes that Native women are at least ten times more likely to be murdered than any other racial group in the US[2]. They are also far more susceptible to stalking, rape, and physical abuse and violence of any kind. Perhaps the most perverse statistics, though, are the ones that don’t exist. The true number of missing and murdered Indigenous women is, in reality, innumerable, and the most the American government can extrapolate are underestimated ballpark figures[3].

Colonization is indisputably broadly responsible for such disproportionate rates of violence–the genocide that wiped out millions of Native-Americans via first contact with European settlers constituted the first moments in Indigenous history of mass disappearance. And while it would not be wrong to defer to assigning blame to the institution as a whole, such a facile approach omits several legislative watershed moments that have specifically targeted the vulnerability of Native women while simultaneously protecting those who commit violence against them. The 1830 Indian Removal Act, succeeded by the 1851 Indian Appropriations Act, uprooted and killed thousands of Cherokee Nation members as a first step in President Andrew Jackson’s ethnic cleansing policies[4]. Congress echoed such rhetoric roughly twenty years later with the establishment of the reservation system in efforts to further corner the fraction of remaining Indigenous peoples into becoming wards of the state. The paternalist subordination of North American reservations has left the vast majority of them with little funding and oversight to provide an adequate police and judicial system.

In response to such damning federal legislation codified into law largely to protect perpetrators of violence against reservations, scholars of Indian law have met these judicial injustices with prescriptive methods to install Indigenous jurisprudence that protects women within the reservation system. Among the foremost of these scholars is lawyer and activist Sarah Deer. In her seminal text The Beginning and End of Rape, Deer rejects the traditional American adjudication of rape cases and proposes an alternative, tribalcentric approach to securing retribution through conviction. She posits that Indian Law can protect and avenge women only through a new “Indigenous theory of rape,” which conceives rape as an “unlawful invasion of the mind, body, and spirit.”[5] Reformed procedural law necessitates a holistic understanding of how deeply and internally rape poisons Indigenous womanhood.

Other scholars have supplemented the work of Deer and other legal academics with theoretical and artistic frameworks for expressing the Indigenous theory of rape. Investigative journalist Jessica McDiarmid, for example, has covered the aftermath of each disappearance along the “Highway of Tears” (Highway 16), a 447-mile stretch of highway in British Columbia marred by an innumerable amount of kidnappings and femicides[6]. Her work highlights how, even outside of reservations and within the Canadian police jurisdictions, Indigenous women remain especially vulnerable to disappearance and violence and rarely are their perpetrators found or punished. The searing testimonies of the families of the missing women are punctuated by candid photography, and they call on readers to say and to know the names of the women whom we know have been lost to Highway 16.

The disappearance of people is also infinitely tethered to the disappearance of land. We cannot speak of one while omitting the other. We also cannot speak of Indigeneity without recognizing the sanctity of land. To be “Indigenous,” is, by nature, to be Indigenous to land.

“Disappearance” in Native Studies frequently refers to settler colonialism’s expedient invasion and occupation of land throughout much of the past millennium. In a joint statement by scholars Kēhaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe, they address how the inception of Western nations is anchored in offensive colonial infringement on territory[7]. Cartographic evidence provides much of the context for how the Louisiana Purchase, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and the Treaty of Tordesillas became just a few key moments in American, Canadian, and Australian history (respectively) that sanctioned the seizure of extensive amounts of Indigenous land and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples from such land[8]. In the United States, the American military later ordered troops to kill all buffalo on the North American continent as a means to starve Plains Indians into surrender. As part of the ongoing effort to clear the American West for railroad expansion in the latter half of the 19th century, the US narrowly avoided complete extinction of buffalo. Colonel Dodge’s infamous words well reflect the American spirit of extermination: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”[9]

Unmitigated dominion of territory precipitated ethnic cleansing in each of these nations and others, and it expedited the parasitic relationship between geophysical reconstruction of land and cultural erasure of people.

African-American scholar and anthropologist Vincent Brown coined the term “social death” in his studies of the Middle Passage to the Americas, and while his work centers on the forced identity evolution of “Indigenous African” to “African-American” through genocide and cultural intimidation, “social death” is a term conceptually pertinent to Native-American and Indigenous studies[10]. The murders and deaths of slaves on the slave ships bound for the Americas constituted one of the largest instances of human erasure the world had seen thus far, and the term “social death” emerged in Brown’s studies of the enslavement as a reference to social manipulation of human records. The number of slaves lost to violence and murder along the Middle Passage, the number of slaves lost to disease once they dropped anchor off coasts of the Americas, and the number of slaves lost to hundreds of years of the sinister plantation system are all estimates. They do not reflect death tolls. They reflect the same colonial ignorance that erased Indigenous populations centuries before and after the arrival of slavery to the New World, first through physical genocide and later through the social engineering of blood quantum quotas. In many Native nations across the US, the concept of blood quantum is unfounded. The US government, however, imposed genetic stipulations in the early 20th century in efforts to redefine Native peoplehood on Western terms and subsequently dilute Indigenous populations[11]. It is a prime example of social death. Brown’s theoretical framework for examining how settler colonialism’s sinister eradication of human injustice has become integral to the identity of Black America provides insight into how trivialized disappearance in and violence against Indigeneity has become.

The censorship of such violence against Indigenous peoples complements its dismissal. While public entities retain their ignorant laissez-faire attitude towards remedying an issue their own governments introduced, they are, however, quick to stifle press and publication. Media conglomerates continue to intimidate whistleblowers who have traced Western governments to previously-censored instances of genocide and ethnic cleansing[12]. The recent declaration of the Israel-Hamas War has, for example, refocused public attention on the greater Israeli-Palestinian conflict which, with the help of the West, successfully co-opted and exterminated facets of Palestinian culture for decades[13]. While the Zionist ethos explicitly targets the eradication of the Palestinian state, this physical disappearance of Indigenous people and land is bookended by the suppression of Palestinian culture. Because it predominantly concerns territorial rights and who remains the true custodians of such land, the lore of the conflict has resembled the narratives of Indigenous nations in the New World. Tessa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro’s photography collection titled “Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba”represents the dwindling journalistic integrity regarding this conflict. Censorship of forced occupation has become a marker of solidarity between Indigenous nations oceans away; the US may not recognize the State of Palestine, but its federally recognized tribes do[14].

Literature has also emerged as a preeminent avenue for exploring disappearances in Native communities. In what is now largely recognized as a great American novel, Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich tells the striking story of how a harrowing case of grief and loss evolved into exoneration and tribute on an Ojibwe reservation in her 2016 book LaRose [15]. Erdrich’s storytelling is stunning; the way disappearance is mended through traditional Indigenous views on energy transformation provides a very real and humanistic glimpse into Native perspectives on death.

Hollywood has also intermittently expressed performative vested interest in Native disappearances. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a 2023 western with screenplay adapted from David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The book and film cover the real-life story relating to the discovery of oil on Osage Nation land and the subsequent series of murders of Osage Nation members in the 1920s. While its reception with white America was outstandingly positive and “fresh,” the film’s attempt to co-opt Native stories through the glitzy, impenetrable, and generally false Hollywood lens was not popular with American Indigenous audiences. The film’s outstanding impetus, like most other blockbuster movies, undeniably prioritizes profit rather than truth, but it is also books and movies like these that will force people to see and to try to understand a version of the reality that many of their forebears have created. Is it the best avenue to educate the average Joe about a grave and arresting truth? No. Is it better than sheer censorship? Perhaps.

“Disappearance” is a bombshell in the vernacular of Native American and Indigenous Studies. Its translations and implications are infinite, as they contextualize the violence and erasure so pertinent to Native tribes and communities across the globe. Disappearance and Indigeneity exist in a cyclical, perversely symbiotic relationship–while one does not necessitate the other, where there is one, generally, we’ll see the other.

Works Cited

“An act to provide for an exchange of land with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi, May 28, 1830.” U.S. Congress, 28 May 1830.

Barakat, Rana. “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–15. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.5.2.0001. Accessed 1 June 2024.

Brown, Vincent. Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, The American Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 5, December 2009, Pages 1231–1249, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.5.1231

Deer, Sarah. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt17w8gfr. Accessed 1 June 2024.

Erdrich, Louise. LaRose. First edition, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2016.

Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani, editor. Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv8j71d. Accessed 1 June 2024.

Keller, Christian B. “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal Indian Removal Policy.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 144, no. 1, 2000, pp. 39–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1515604. Accessed 1 June 2024.

LaVelle, John P. “The General Allotment Act ‘Eligibility’ Hoax: Distortions of Law, Policy, and History in Derogation of Indian Tribes.” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 1999, pp. 251–302. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1409527. Accessed 1 June 2024.

 McDiarmid, Jessica. Highway of Tears : A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. First Atria Books hardcover edition., Atria Books,an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2019.

“Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis.” Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis | Indian Affairs.

Moral, Paulina García-Del. “The Murders of Indigenous Women in Canada as Femicides: Toward a Decolonial Intersectional Reconceptualization of Femicide.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 929–54, https://doi.org/10.1086/696692.

Smith, Roger W. “Genocide Denial and Prevention.” Genocide Studies International, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 102–09. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26985995. Accessed 1 June 2024.

Smits, David D. “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883.” The Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3, 1994, pp. 313–38. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/971110. Accessed 1 June 2024.

Urban Indian Health Institute, Seattle Indian Health Board (2016). Community Health Profile: National Aggregate of Urban Indian Health Program Service Areas

[1] Urban Indian Health Institute, Seattle Indian Health Board (2016). Community Health Profile: National Aggregate of Urban Indian Health Program Service Areas.

[2] “Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis.” Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis | Indian Affairs.

[3] Moral, Paulina García-Del. “The Murders of Indigenous Women in Canada as Femicides: Toward a Decolonial Intersectional Reconceptualization of Femicide.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 929–54, https://doi.org/10.1086/696692.

[4] “An act to provide for an exchange of land with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi, May 28, 1830.” U.S. Congress, 28 May 1830.

[5] Deer, Sarah. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt17w8gfr. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[6] McDiarmid, Jessica. Highway of Tears : A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. First Atria Books hardcover edition., Atria Books,an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2019.

[7] Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani, editor. Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv8j71d. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[8] Keller, Christian B. “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal Indian Removal Policy.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 144, no. 1, 2000, pp. 39–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1515604. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[9] Smits, David D. “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883.” The Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 3, 1994, pp. 313–38. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/971110. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[10] Vincent Brown, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, The American Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 5, December 2009, Pages 1231–1249, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.5.1231

[11] LaVelle, John P. “The General Allotment Act ‘Eligibility’ Hoax: Distortions of Law, Policy, and History in Derogation of Indian Tribes.” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 1999, pp. 251–302. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1409527. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[12] Smith, Roger W. “Genocide Denial and Prevention.” Genocide Studies International, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 102–09. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26985995. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[13] Barakat, Rana. “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–15. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.5.2.0001. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[14] Barakat, Rana. “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2018, pp. 1–15. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.5.2.0001. Accessed 1 June 2024.

[15] Erdrich, Louise. LaRose. First edition., Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2016.