Indigenous women and girls are murdered or missing at alarmingly high rates in the U.S. and Canada. Social media activism surrounding this epidemic of violence first emerged in 2012 after Sheila North Wilson, the former Grand Chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, created the hashtag #MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women). Since this time, Indigenous-led social justice activism has expanded on Twitter, which has become a key platform for the expression of anti-colonial politics on a global stage and to facilitate peaceful protest action surrounding the MMIW crisis. As part of a broader effort to curate data surrounding the MMIW crisis, this dataset contains identifiers for historic tweets associated with the movement collected between November 2018 and October 2020. 

Tweets were collected from Twitter's Premium Search API using twarc. Historical tweets between November 2018 - October 2020 were collected within dates that were chosen based on events or legislation in the U.S. related to the MMIWG movement, including Savanna’s Act, the Not Invisible Act, and investigation into the death of Joyce Echaquan. Tweets contained one or more of the following hashtags: mmiwg, mmiwg2s, nomorestolensisters, notinvisible. In searches related to Savanna’s Act, the hashtag SavannasAct was also included. Tweets can be “rehydrated” with Documenting the Now’s Hydrator.