[3] The contious labling of missing indigenous women as sex workers, creates a stream of thinking that allows them to be blamed for their own disappearance. The neg doesn’t change the patriarchal framing of indigenous women, recreating the pushing out of indigenous women.

The Pickton murders disclosed at once the heightened vulnerability of Native women and the reasons why the racial dimensions of the murders escaped public notice.3 For many non-Indigenous people, it was impossible to see the Aboriginality of the missing women because they could not see Aboriginal people at all. Colonial discourses define “Indianness” as existing only in the historical past, doomed to disappearance or relegated to the anachronistic space of the reserve (reservation). Consequently, contemporary Native people confront nearly complete social invisibility, especially in cities. According to a statement by the Native Council of Canada, there remains “a strong, sometimes racist perception that being Aboriginal and being urban are mutually exclusive” (Native Council of Canada 1992, 10). The stakes of social erasure emerge from the unique legal and political challenges represented by Native communities. Two factors distinguish the status of Native communities from that of other racialized groups: claims to political autonomy that arise from historical status as independent nations, and territorial rights based on longtime use and occupation of the land (the foundation of the common-law doctrine of Aboriginal title). Because Native communities controvert the political authority and territorial claims of colonial nation-states, settler colonialism, explains Patrick Wolfe, depends upon the “logic of elimination,” a historical imperative that emerges from European expansion and remains “an organizing principle of settler-colonial society” (2006, 388). Contemporary violence, including gendered violence, enacted on Indigenous bodies extends from and repeats the colonial subjugation of Indigenous communities and their eviction from traditional homelands, the histories that transformed Indigenous territories into cities where Indigenous populations persist as small, often segregated minorities. As the social invisibility of Native people obscures the challenges that Indigeneity poses to the political order, so too does it conceal the violence that ensues from dispossession. In the political dynamics that surround the murders, then, Indigenous women’s bodies and land figure as intersecting sites of colonial power, thus underscoring the centrality of gendered violence in ongoing contests over territorial and political control. In representations of the Pickton murders, the Indigenous woman’s body became a site of contestation, its meanings bound up with the political significance of the killings. Media accounts sensationalized the murders by fixating on their brutality and, when the identities of the women eventually became clear, by playing on stereotypes about Aboriginal degeneracy. The dominant framing characterized the missing women as drug-addicted sex workers, as “blameworthy,” thereby deflecting attention from the structural dimensions of the violence (Jiwani and Young 2006, 901). This attitude extended even to those Aboriginal women who did not engage in sex work. The “conflation of Aboriginal woman and prostitute,” explains Sherene Razack, creates “an accompanying belief that when they encountered violence, Aboriginal women simply got what they deserved” (2002, 131). As the murders occupied front-page news, they became an urgent subject of Indigenous women artists who demanded attention to the Aboriginality of the missing women, the reasons for their vulnerability, and connections between gendered violence and ongoing colonialism. In the billboard created by Belmore, the fringe of red beads that cuts across the model’s back is a racial signifier that marks this body as Indigenous, and because the fringe resembles streams of blood, it also represents violence. Just as Indigeneity and violence are bound together in a single signifier, so too is it impossible to comprehend the murders apart from their racial dimensions. To explain why so many Aboriginal women fell prey to a serial killer, we must ask what drew these women to Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside where Pickton sought his victims, what led some to sex work and drug addiction, and why police and community members initially paid no heed to their disappearances and saw their lives and deaths as matters of little consequence. The questions alone expose injustices that create social marginality registered in the term “fringe.” The answers reveal how contemporary sexual violence is bound up with histories of dispossessing and disempowering Indigenous peoples. By representing brutality enacted on the body of an Aboriginal woman, then, Fringe condemns not only the murders themselves but also the colonial dynamics in which they are embedded. By elucidating connections among gendered violence, colonialism, and patriarchy, Native women artists, in my reading, advance an Indigenous feminist practice that centers on culture. Indigenous feminism, in Cheryl Suzack’s words, “represents a critical paradigm ... [that] focuses on the intersections between colonialism and patriarchy to examine how race and gender systems overlap to create conditions in which Indigenous women are subjected to forms of social disempowerment that arise out of historical and contemporary practices of colonialism, racism, sexism, and patriarchy leading to social patterns of ‘discrimination within discrimination’” (Suzack 2015, 261). Whereas the Pickton murders brought widespread public attention to Native women’s heightened vulnerability for the first time, subsequent S I G N S Spring 2021 y 565 Native community activism has given rise to social movements in Canada and the United States to demand justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The objective of an Indigenous feminist project, writes Suzack, “is to achieve ‘gender justice’” (261), and in the case of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the movement endeavors to address ongoing dynamics of colonialism and patriarchy that cause Native women to go missing, render their disappearances invisible, and preclude legal justice. Yet despite the acute social disempowerment and violence confronted by Indigenous women, Indigenous feminism, as critical paradigm and political practice, confronts accusations that it undermines more crucial struggles for land and sovereignty, the enduring centers of Indigenous politics, and thus contributes to ongoing colonization (Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; Suzack 2015). Within Indigenous studies, writes Joanne Barker, scholars have “frequently compartmentalized gender, sexuality, and feminism, bracketing them off from analysis of ‘more serious political’ issues such as governance, treaty and territorial rights” (2017, 10–11). By bringing to light the entanglements of patriarchy and colonialism, Indigenous women artists’ responses to the Pickton murders underscore intrinsic connections between the politics of gender and those of land and sovereignty. Attention to spatiality in their work, I argue, shows that gendered violence is not merely a consequence of colonial assaults on land, culture, and political power but is rather the very paradigm of those assaults. Because of the geographical ubiquity of violence against Native women, the fact that it cuts across boundaries of Indigenous communities and colonial nationstates, these artists’ work limns the distinctive contours of a transnational Indigenous feminist project while also facilitating a feminist rethinking of Native politics that insists on the urgency of gender. This Indigenous feminist critique in turn levels a forceful challenge to colonial nation-states by exposing the dire conditions they have created for Native communities, the presence of the “third world” within the “first world” that attests to colonialism as ongoing process. By exemplifying the power of culture to elucidate the political dynamics of the murders and connect them across time and space, these artists’ work discloses the neglected significance of culture as an Indigenous feminist practice.4 But as these artists intervene in a colonial history of representation by turning the Native women’s body into a figure of protest, they inevitably confront the enduring force of colonial discourses that threaten to mute subversive meanings. This includes a long history of images that conflate Indigenous women’s bodies with land in order to rationalize European expansion.