Mapping geographies of Canadian colonial occupation: pathway analysis of murdered indigenous women and girls

This paper builds on scholarship within life course studies, particularly notions of pathway analysis, to demonstrate how such analysis can be combined with cartography in order to be applied to studies of missing and murdered indigenous women, as a means to better understand the geographies of violence they live and die in. In this sense, this work utilizes the theoretical underpinnings of pathways analysis but transforms it into an indigenized tool for narration and analysis, by linking the pathways studied with relationships to land, colonialism, and intergenerational violence. By telling the narratives of the women studied in this paper in this way, this paper demonstrates that the binaries that are frequently applied to missing and murdered indigenous women create popular knowledge on this violence that is not necessarily reflective of reality, and that when we look beyond or between these binaries, different patterns and sites of violence emerge.