Today is Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Day.  A day of awareness and action.  Today we honor our stolen sisters and relatives. This day of observance is about acknowledging the unbelievably high number of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls that go missing each year.  These cases are often never reported or known about in our mainstream media which is why MMIW as a movement highlights this crisis every day. 

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “Native women face murder rates that are more than 10 times the national average murder rate, there are more than 5,000 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and that 55 percent of Native women have experienced domestic violence.”

The goal of MMIW is to raise this awareness on local, state and federal levels where real change in policy and jurisdiction can be made so that our women, trans women and girls can be safe.  

Resources and ways to support from UCSC link – https://airc.ucsc.edu/resources/mmiwg.html – below

Below are some resources you may utilize to learn more about MMIWG:

ORGANIZATIONS

• Urban Indian Health Institute
  • Tribal Epidemiology Center in Seattle, Washington. 
  • Led by Director Abigail Echo-Hawk 
  • Conducts research and evaluation, collects and analyzes data, and provides disease surveillance to strengthen the health of American Indian and Alaska Native communities.
• Sovereign Bodies Institute
  • Non-profit organization 
  • Led by Executive Director Annita Lucchesi 
  • Builds on Indigenous traditions of data gathering and knowledge transfer to create, disseminate, and put into action research on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous people.
• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center
  • Non-profit organization
  • Dedicated to ending violence against Native women and children, lifts up collective voices of grassroots advocates, offering culturally grounded resources, technical assistance, training, and policy development to strengthen tribal sovereignty.

BOOKS

• Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada by Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jennifer Brant 
• Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters edited by Kim Anderson, Maria Campbel, and Christi Belcourt
• Round House by Louise Erdrich
• Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence edited by Sarah Deer, Bonnie Clairmont, Carrie A. Martell, and Maureen L. White Eagle 
• Stolen Sisters: The Story of Two Missing Girls by Emmanuelle Walter 

FILMS

• Finding Dawn
• Our Sisters in Spirit
• Wind River 
  • available for rent or purchase on Youtube, Amazon Prime, Vudu 

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

• VOCES CRÍTICAS
• An interview with Dr. Hernandez and former AIRC intern, Rennea Howell (Class of 2019) on MMIWG