During the International Women’s March, UNC’s Dawn Knickerbocker presented on the realities of Indigenous women. Dawn speaks to her audience in Cincinnati, Ohio, a place where removal happened not once, but twice. In Ohio there are no reservations, reserves or boundaries. Ohio is a land where the council fires have been smothered.

Dawn discusses what allows Native women to be targeted and treated as disposable without consequence in the United States. She addresses underlying dynamic promoted by Colonization. Colonization is an ideology that supports the dehumanization of those living on the land and their dispossession, murder, and forced assimilation. And this is ongoing - not something for the history books.

Daily, cis and transgender women, femme-identified, and non-binary people encounter violence at the hands of institutions and workplaces that continue to perpetuate inequities and injustice. While we claim to be progressing forward, thousands of Indigenous, Black, and trans women are missing or have been murdered. The number of women and children who are evicted from their housing is soaring while at the same time, they are plummeting further into poverty. Women are dying from being denied reproductive rights and from receiving culturally incompetent health care. Women with disabilities are twice as likely to be poor as compared to women without disabilities. Working class women continue to suffer from sexual harassment, gaps in pay, and inadequate health insurance. The number of Black and Latinx women who are being incarcerated is growing faster than any other population. Women are being denied access to clean and unleaded water due to environmental racism.