Mother Earth Remembers: Violence Against Indigenous Women in New Mexico

• In Event: Crime and Justice in the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico)

Abstract

Violence against Indigenous women in New Mexico is egregious and appalling. New Mexico is identified as the state with the highest number of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women cases and Albuquerque is identified as the city with the second most cases in the nation (Lucchesi & Echo-Hawk). Violence is narrated through veils of victim-blaming and is complicated by multiple factors, including land, media, politics, and identity. Deeper levels of disrespect are endured by grieving communities through narrative violence enacted via social narratives that devalue women’s worth and character. It is said that what societies are willing to do to the land, we are willing to do to women of that land. The ways that women are treated are often paralleled with the ways that the Earth that they walk on is treated. New Mexico is considered an “environmental sacrifice zone” due to the harmful and toxic industry that profits from raping Mother Earth. Toxic and extractive industries are attached to environmental violence, which encourage “man camps” and a transient workforce which houses workers who usually have no cultural ties to the communities where they work. Native women are overpoliced and underprotected. Methods for self-protection that are place-based and community generated are needed. Data justice is also political. It is difficult to get a true understanding of the depth and scope of violence in New Mexico due to issues related to data justice, underreporting and misidentification (Lucchesi and Echo-Hawk, 2018).

DeMaria builds on her recent work on Albuquerque’s West Mesa murders, which went discovered in 2009 (in Eguchi et al. 2020). She will explore similar phenomena in various other parts of the state as they pertain to Native victims in particular. Her work illustrates the violence faced by these marginalized women and the deeper levels of disrespect their communities endure via social narratives that devalue their worth and character. DeMaria’s work is decidedly decolonial and transdisciplinary, intending to uplift strengths-based community narratives of justice, histories and cultures in New Mexico. Her chapter will focus on the intentional aspects of narrative shift, making use of photography and oral history as part of the methodology.

Author

• Jaelyn deMaria, University of New Mexico