The Epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: A Conversation with Shannon Speed

**Content Warning: This episode includes discussion of sexual and domestic violence.
 

In this week’s episode of then & now, LCHP Assistant Director Dr. Rose Campbell is joined by Dr. Shannon Speed to discuss systemic violence against Indigenous women. According to a 2016 study, Indigenous women are 10 times more likely to be kidnapped or murdered than almost any other population group in the United States. Although murder is the third leading cause of death among Indigenous women, these cases often go unsolved and unreported and attract little attention outside of local communities. Shannon discusses the policies that render Indigenous women particularly vulnerable to violence and underscores the impact of settler capitalism—specifically white supremacy and patriarchal ideologies—not only in the U.S. but also in the colonial history of Mexico. Compounding these factors is the jurisdictional vacuum found in Indian country, where U.S. federal laws have severely limited the ability of tribal law enforcement and tribal courts to prosecute violent crimes. In order to address the deep-seated structural and ideological factors that generate and perpetuate this cycle of violence against Indigenous women, Shannon advocates for a tribal sovereignty framework informed by a concern for human rights that aims to interrupt the cycle of violence and focus on a restorative rather than a more punitive approach.


Dr. Shannon Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. Her recent work, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State (University of North Carolina Press 2019), won the Best Subsequent Book Award of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2019 and a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award in 2020. She has a new co-edited volume entitled Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press 2021). Dr. Speed was the President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) from 2019-2020. 


Further Reading
Native Hope; National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center; Violence Against Women Act (VAWA); Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe.