A pattern of violence: Muscogee (Creek Indian) women in the eighteenth century and today’s MMIWG–the missing and murdered indigenous women & girls

Abstract

This article details how the current epidemic of violence against Indigenous women in North America–as well as Native-led movements like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls (MMIWG)–is connected to and rooted in the historical past. Using the case of the Muscogee (Creek) peoples and their interactions with the Spanish, French, English, and Americans in the eighteenth-century, this manuscript grapples with the acts of sexual violence enacted by Euro-Americans, how Muscogee men and women responded to such violence, and the legacies of such violence today. The author intends to spark a conversation among historians, particularly scholars of the American South, to finally extend the conversations about sexual violence to the history of Indigenous Peoples.