Archiving Futurity Within the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Crisis

Abstract

In this article, we examine how settler colonization and gendered violence against Indigenous women are remembered and recorded in two archival registers: 18th-century records from the Massachusetts Archives Collection (MAC) and a 21st-century corpus of posts using the hashtag MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) on X (formerly Twitter). These archives are shaped by distinct temporal logics and contain multiple projections of settler and Indigenous futurity. The MAC is dominated by the colonial logic of recursive dispossession; a temporal perspective of declension that acknowledges Indigenous lands only after they are taken, and Indigenous people only after they are “disappeared.” A close reading of these documentary sources also reveals how Indigenous peoples worked within this system to maintain social relationships and connections to place. We contrast settler visions of futurity with contemporary social media articulations of vibrant and emancipatory Indigenous futures grounded in hope and presence. Through this comparative discussion, we demonstrate how different documentary modalities encode time, define events, and shape informational flows in ways that enable and constrain Indigenous futurity.