Paper short abstract:

The UN High Commissioner declared a hidden genocide of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. This paper discusses how white feminism becomes a form of settler-humanitarianism that governs the frontlines of gender-based violence programs that perpetuates Indigenous genocide.

Paper long abstract:

The United Nations High Commissioner has declared that the prevalence of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada is a hidden genocide. In 2019, the Final Report into the National Inquiry of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was released, which includes 231 calls to justice to prevent the genocide from continuing. The report indicates a large span of land in the province of British Columbia called the Highway of Tears, where a high percentage of Indigenous women go missing. The provincial government funds transition house programs for women to access emergency housing when fleeing violence. Beginning in the 1980s, transition houses and crisis lines in BC were founded on feminist humanitarianism, which continues to underscore the sector that is now provincially funded. A high percentage of Indigenous women use transition houses across British Columbia. Under the premise of feminism, when do the actions of transition house workers become a neoliberal articulation of "settler-humanitarianism" (Wolf 2006)? In this paper, I argue that BC transition houses not only give an impression that the neoliberal government is trying to ameliorate violence against Indigenous women, transition houses play a part in sustaining a settler-state through its policies, protocols and paperwork that co-terminously create and monitor subjects of the neoliberal settler-state constellation. Furthermore, I show how white feminism becomes a form of settler-humanitarianism that governs the frontlines of gender-based violence programs that thwart Indigenous women from accessing safe shelter, and thus can play a part in unsafe system that perpetuates the genocide.