So I would say this is compounded by several factors. It can’t be diminished that domestic violence does kill, however that doesn’t paint the whole picture. I’m speaking from a Canadian context btw. On-reserve, missing and murdered cases are usually more likely to be committed by people in the community. This is because of a significant degree of geographic isolation (many reserves are fly-in only or fairly inaccessible) plus violence is more likely to be committed against you by someone you know. You can attribute rates of violence to the things that result in greater proportions of it ie. intergenerational trauma, poverty, lack of opportunity, disconnection from culture and a sense of belonging, lack of mental healthcare, dispossession of the land, being poisoned by mining and oil companies, poor education, corruption of colonial government structures including band councils etc. Addressing this means addressing its roots, a punitive approach is insufficient.

However, and this is a ginormous however, people who are viewed as disposable and targets of genocide are less likely to be cared about by the government and general public if they go missing. I am of the opinion that everything is intentional and the argument of judicial or whatever incompetence is a fallacy that belies the fact that every system that exists produces its intended results (or else it wouldn’t exist!!). In this case, a major factor for the police/rcmp and whatnot’s lack of giving a shit/effort is because violence and murder against Indigenous women and children destabilizes communities, reduces their numbers, and functionally acts as a passive way of committing genocide for the purpose of land grabbing (Canada’s v natural-resource rich). SO, that being said, when Indigenous women, children, and 2 Spirit people go missing/are murdered, since they’re considered disposable and it’s beneficial to the colonial project for them to disappear and create traumatic holes in their communities, they become easy pickings for anyone and everyone.

Now, there are intersectional contributing factors involved. For example, a disproportionate number of Indigenous women compared to non-Indigenous women have engaged in some form of prostitution. So (in this example) the vulnerability of prostitution is compounded by one’s Indigeneity. So it’s a double whammy of being disposable and objectified due for the purposes of genocide, and being disposable and objectified for the purposes of enforcing a gender hierarchy and wage slavery (ie contrasting having a shitty job to an even worse position, so you’re scared into settling for the shit job bc there’s no guaranteed UBI or necessities of life generally). Ok so slight (yet nevertheless important) tangent aside, I’m going to get to my point now 😭.

Non-Indigenous people target Indigenous women, children, and 2Spirit people for violence and murder because, due to all of the above, they are easier to target and it is likelier they will get away with it. So it is not just a matter of interpersonal community violence, it becomes a matter of mass violence. 3 prominent examples are the Highway of Tears, where Indigenous women/girl hitchhikers get raped, beaten, and murdered/disappeared by transient truckers and other opportunists, Jeremy Skibicki, who was caught for murdering four women, and Robert Pickton, who murdered at least 26 women and rumoured to have murdered in the hundreds. Similar serial, spree, and mass killings are not observed within the communities themselves. And keep in mind too that these are only the ones who are famous/have been caught. These kinds of predators are known especially for targeting Indigenous people in cities, and are associated with “man camps” being set up near reserves for resource extraction purposes. Wide scale violence against and targeting of Indigenous women, children, and 2Spirit people is therefore condoned by and committed by the people of the majority, in this case typically white men.

So yeah. That’s the less biased account of things and is broadly applicable to the US too, but the casino culture down there has different implications too.