Settler-Colonial Violence and Commodification of Indigenous Bodies: Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Marie Clements’ Play The Unnatural and Accidental Women and Carl Bessai’s Film Unnatural & Accidental

The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) phenomenon has taken monstrous proportions in Canada, having become a national concern, with many organizations, institutions, communities, and individual groups dealing with missing loved ones in their midst. The state of Canada, academic studies, books, documentaries, short and feature films, art as well as theatre plays have taken on this phenomenon – all with the purpose of raising awareness in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups to wake up the nation to systemic rape and killing of Indigenous women and girls, and also to warn and train such women and girls to consciously work on not becoming the next victim. This article looks at the sexed and raced colonization and commodification of Indigenous women’s bodies and the genealogy of white male views on and stereotypes of Indigenous women in Canadian history and North American film history. Tied in with these discussions, the article analyzes and compares Marie Clements’s play The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2000) and Carl Bessai’s film Unnatural & Accidental (2006) and looks at how both play and feature film expose the confluence of racist stereotypes and settler-colonial male violence and critically contextualize one mass murder case as emblematic of the MMIWG phenomenon.