Natural Violence, Unnatural Bodies: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Human in MMIWG Narratives.

Released in 2019, the final report on the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) terms the high rates of murder and disappearance an ongoing genocide. The connected forms of violence that Native American women in the United States experience, however, remain largely unacknowledged. This essay considers how two contemporary cultural narratives attempt to render violence against Native American women speakable, through a focus on the film Wind River (2017) directed by Taylor Sheridan and the novel The Round House (2012) by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich. By analyzing these texts, this essay examines how cultural narratives mediate the boundaries of human life, emphasizing the extent to which such borders are framed by racial and gendered experience. Placing Mel Y. Chen's understanding of animacy hierarchies into dialogue with Judith Butler's work on ungrievability, I argue that animalistic associations can alternately work to reproduce or disrupt normative conceptualizations of the human. I contrast the dehumanizing rhetoric that is produced in Wind River with The Round House, which I argue disrupts the boundaries between human and nonhuman through the recovery of Ojibwe ontologies. Through this comparison, I locate the pervasiveness of a discourse that de-animates Indigenous women in the public sphere, as well as consider the potential for cultural narratives to disrupt this violent logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]