By TAYTYN BADGER
This article is based on a speech delivered by the author at a Palestine solidarity rally in Saskatoon on Oct. 4.
Good afternoon! My name is Taytyn Badger. I’m a two-spirit Nehiyaw man from Sucker Creek First Nation, and I hope folk could figure out from the placard, a member of Workers’ Voice. I’d like to start by thanking all of you for taking the time to come out today, on Oct. 4, 2025, in opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinian peoples, and its vast escalation over the past two years.
But Oct. 4 also marks the National Day of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people. So, I would like to speak for a moment on gender-based violence against Indigenous people, and its connections with Zionist gender-based violence against Palestinians.
Indigenous women and Queer folk on the land occupied by Canada face far higher rates of violence than the general population. Just going by the data available, Indigenous women are murdered at more than five times the rate of non-indigenous women, are more than three times as likely to go missing, and more than four times as likely to experience sexual assault. Verbal, physical, and sexual violence against indigenous women and Queer folk by settlers is considered socially acceptable and tolerated by law enforcement when they aren’t the ones committing it. Rather than incidental, this gender-based violence originates from ongoing settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our land.
So long as Indigenous peoples continue to exist, we are seen as a real or potential obstacle to settler capitalist exploitation and occupation by both the state and the settlers won to their side by a cut of the loot.
Indigenous women who do not fit the “Indian Princess” stereotype of normative settler beauty and submission to settler desires are stereotyped as promiscuous, subversive, and potentially threatening. Thus, they are transformed into valid targets of settler discipline and violence to perpetuate our subjugation and Indigenous genocide.
Gender-based violence’s roots in settler-colonialism are especially clear on the front lines of extraction. Witness the wave of sexual abuse, harassment, and sex trafficking that accompanies the arrival of settler extraction workers in man camps. See the Highway of Tears, built to facilitate the exploitation of the land via resource extraction. Look at the joint violence by settler workers and law enforcement targeting Wet’suwet’en land defenders and matriarchs.
But Palestinians on the land occupied by Israel are also Indigenous peoples. Palestinian Women and Queer folk, before and after Oct. 7, have been subjected to constant settler-colonial violence, abuse, and murder. Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, on patrol, and in detention centers subject Palestinian women to humiliating strip searches accompanied by verbal, physical, and sexual violence. Israeli settlers are given free rein to berate, assault, and murder Palestinian women and Queer folk with the aim of terrorizing them into submission or expelling them from their homes. All that before considering the tens, likely hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women and Queer folk that lie buried under the rubble of Gaza.
Some people will attempt to justify settler violence by saying, “What about the violence that Indigenous men commit against Indigenous women?” Zionists take a similar tact with insane claims that Palestinians are inherently misogynistic or Queerphobic, unlike supposedly progressive Israelis. I’ve lost track of the number of times someone’s asked me, “Why do you support Palestine? Don’t you know what they would do to you?” One starts to wonder whether they think the IDF is firing missiles that only hit straight men, or that Queer folk don’t need to eat during a famine.
But even this violence within our communities is shaped by and develops from the imposition of settler-capitalist patriarchy and gender norms. According to these norms, men are breadwinners, possessing dominion over their families, women provide food and shelter to their families free of charge, and anything else simply doesn’t exist. We’re told these roles are traditional, but they’re more often pseudo-traditional, used by those who occupy and exploit us to blame their victims for oppression.
Someone can’t be a breadwinner when they can barely support themselves. When you can’t find or afford food and shelter, it’s impossible for anyone to provide it. But the expectation that men must maintain financial and social dominance, and that women and those constructed as feminine are to blame for shortfalls in the necessities for life—food, shelter, and home care—serves to redirect rage and violence inward, driving the victimization of women and Queer folk within our communities.
So, I invite folk, on one hand, to see the violence against Indigenous women and gender-nonconforming folk here in the same light as the violence against those in Palestine, and on the other, to extend our definition of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Queer Folk to include Palestinians. Both are rooted in ongoing settler-capitalist projects, Canadian and Israeli, and their perpetual need to exploit, expropriate, and eliminate Indigenous peoples and lands for profit, and both can only be resolved by ending these projects and returning control of the land to Indigenous peoples on their terms, via right of return, land back, and decolonization.
