Four out of five Native women are affected by violence today. #MMIWG is to shine a light on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. The infographic below gives some high level statistics regarding this issue.
Urban Indian Health Institute published a report in 2018 regarding the U.S. related data.
In Indian country, families sometimes wait days for the authorities to respond, and frequently lead the only search parties. What’s worse, sometimes the record of that missing indigenous person isn’t documented, leaving questions unanswered for decades, leading to gaps in information, missing person cases unsolved and perpetrators roaming the streets.
Debra Haaland
Not Invisible
Native American women and girls face an epidemic of violence and indifference in the US. Over recent decades, thousands are believed to have disappeared, but the exact number and their fates are unknown because there is no single federal database tracking the missing.
Red Dress Project
The REDress Project, focuses around the issue of missing or murdered Aboriginal women across Canada. It is an installation art project based on an aesthetic response to this critical national issue. The project seeks to collect 600 red dresses by community donation that will later be installed in public spaces throughout Winnipeg and across Canada as a visual reminder of the staggering number of women who are no longer with us. Through the installation the artist hopes to draw attention to the gendered and racialized nature of violent crimes against Aboriginal women and to evoke a presence through the marking of absence. The image below is a portion of an installation at the National Museum of American Indian in Washington, DC.
