by Lawrence Cox, LSPC Regional Advocacy and Organizing Associate
We have known the state through its hardest language.
We’ve known it in shackles, in lettered clothing, in the daily humiliations of confinement that teach us who power belongs to, and how it moves against us. We know it in a system that conflates violence to order, discipline, and public safety. We know it in the silence surrounding caged women, especially poor women, Black women, and Indigenous women, whose suffering is too often treated as background noise. And we know it from the other side of those walls, as impacted movement leaders who have worked to expose the hidden injustices inflicted on us and our incarcerated siblings.
That history matters because the pattern is not new: this country has always made some communities bear the burden of disposability. Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people know this with devastating intimacy.
The disappearances, murders, and neglect faced by our Indigenous relatives are not isolated failures. They are the result of structures built through colonial theft, racial domination, captivity, and abandonment that tell us people are only worthy of life, dignity, and respect if they push forward the capitalistic, colonial apparatuses designed to erase them. May 5, the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives, is therefore not only a day of remembrance, but a day of reckoning. It confronts us with the truth that under this order, some lives become grievable only after they are gone.
I carry that truth personally as much as politically.
Even while confined, I searched for the Indigenous roots buried within my own family line. That search was not simple. History had broken our story apart. My Granny could not fully tell it. She lost her own mother when she was barely a toddler. What should have been inheritance became fragments. What should have been memory became void. And still, beneath that rupture, the blood remembered.
That memory taught me something essential: identity is not only what is handed down whole. Sometimes it is what survives erasure, what is gathered from ruin, what calls across generations even when the record does not.
That understanding drives my work through coalition movement building. We are not naming separate injustices, but an interlocking order. Capitalism, colonialism, and the prison-industrial complex are mutually reinforcing systems of extraction. They decide whose labor can be stolen, whose land can be occupied, whose body can be caged, whose pain can be ignored, and whose family must live with disappearance as an ordinary fact of life.
This is why the struggles of incarcerated people cannot be separated from the struggles of workers, or from Indigenous sovereignty movements. The same system that cages the poor and compels forced labor as punishment is the one that stole land, broke treaties, criminalized Indigenous survival, and normalized the disappearance of Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.
That is why our fight for abolition must be both materially and rhetorically waged. We must include ending involuntary servitude and fighting for reparations. And we must do so without illusion: the same state logics of conquest, exploitation, and racial hierarchy have brutalized Black, Indigenous, and Asian communities alike. The blood of empire runs through all our lineages.
History has shown that when Black people win, everyone wins. Not because Black struggle is the only struggle, but because it has necessitated the confrontation of the problem’s foundation and roots rather than just its symptoms. At its best, it does not narrow solidarity. It demands it.
In May, we honor our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives. To honor Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives is to refuse disappearance as policy or practice. It is to insist that safety without sovereignty is not safety at all.
Our dead deserve more than mourning. Our lives deserve more than management. Our bloodlines deserve more than accidental survival.
They deserve repair. They deserve sovereignty. They deserve a world where no one is caged for profit, worked through coercion, disappeared through neglect, or erased by the state and told to call that justice.
Because even after all this country has taken, the blood remembers. And it is still calling us forward. ✦
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