Where do you go to grieve when someone you love is missing? How do you mourn for someone stolen away, whose disappearance or murder has gone un- or under-reported, has not been solved, and whose murderer has gone unpunished? These questions have been faced by thousands of Indigenous people across North America during the decades-long crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirit people (MMIWG2S).

The capitalist market of death and burial is nothing new for North Americans. Overpriced caskets, expensive urns, and strangely specific rules in different cemeteries add an increasingly overwhelming price tag for which individuals must deal. The commodification of death as discussed by Jessica Mitford (1963) is a practice old enough in North America to have been the subject of study for decades.

Death is never easy. Not even in a country where millions celebrate Día de los Muertos surrounded by cheerful music and colorful decorations, as a means of remembering their deceased loved ones. For most, death is a journey of grief and sorrow that ends with resilience: “moving on” as we tend to call it.

In November 1912, Saveria Fidance Corleto (later renamed Sarah) swore in a Wilmington, Delaware court that her husband of seventeen years, Anthony Corleto had “treated her with extreme cruelty.” Saveria testified that the physical abuse started in September 1910. She went on to state that Anthony frequently hit her, knocked her down and that the beatings were so severe that they left visible marks and bruises on her body.