This week, May 4-8, is national week of action for MMIW. Here’s a few facts:
1: Homicide is roughly the third leading cause of death among Indigenous women ages 10-24.
2: 56.1% of indigenous women have experienced sexual violence, 55.5% have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner, and 48.8% have experienced stalking.
3: The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that there were 10,248 missing Indigenous persons reports in 2024. 5,614 were women, and 4,626 were men. Most women (girls) reported missing were under the age of 18.
4: The 10 states with the highest rates of American Indian/Alaska Native missing persons cases in 2025 were AK, AZ, OK, WA, NM, CA, MT, NC, SD, and TX.
5: Because of limited data, there is no reliable nationwide count of how many Native women go missing or are murdered each year.
And finally:
Indigenous women are murdered at 10x the national average in the United States alone.
All of these facts and more can be found at
Welcome | NIWRC
Please. See us. Our women, our children, our people deserve justice.
Today felt like a gut punch. A woman from the Pueblo of Pojoaque, one of the 23 reservations here in New Mexico went missing, as unfortunately many Native women do. I share her missing poster, and check the comments to see if there’s any additional information and I see this.
The visceral reaction I had, the drop in my stomach. The slap in the face of “oh right these issues go hand in hand.” The Native Woman’s experience is being cautious, never going out alone, sharing locations with family members at all times. And now there’s an extra layer to be afraid of. That we could be detained on our own lands and no one ever knowing what has happened to us. That our government can add us to an MMIW database meanwhile we could be held at a Government level detainment camp.
Her name is Eliana Savannah Critzer, she’s 5’2”, 90lbs and was last seen in a black jacket, blue jeans, and white shoes, and she needs to come home safe.
when I drew this comic 3 years ago I had NO idea how far it would reach. I'm happy to finally share a corrected version with proper abbreviations, and even MORE state names of indigenous origin ♥️
however, the goal of this comic was to inspire people to do your OWN research on indigenous history. To question everything we have been taught, and everything that has been pointedly left out. This erasure, this “forgetting”, of history is not just of the past… it is happening now.
- Across so-called Canada, the US, and US-occupied islands, native women are victims of murder at 10-12x the rate of non-native people, and are the most likely to go missing without being searched for by the law.
- Native reservations have the highest rates of poverty in the US, with over HALF of tribal homes with no access to clean water (with more joining this list by the year)
- Native people are 6-10x more likely to be unhoused than the rest of the population, and native teens suffer suicide rates higher than any other demographic.
This list of modern day genocide goes on (thank you for compiling @theindigenousanarchist <3) and yet take a look at those environmental stats!
Native people manage to do SO much for the planet as a whole - thanklessly - and with all this stacked against them. Don't even get me started on kin fighting in south america. Could you imagine if there was help? #landback is resistance to genocide, and it is the key to saving our warming earth.
So look into it and the other hashtags, cuz a cartoon goose ain't a substitute for a proper education.
Love to my grandparents who always kept a map of tribal territories of turtle island on their wall, to speaking on our Tsalagi & Saponi heritage. Love & solidarity forever, happy research, and
happy #indigenouspeoplesday
LANDBACK.ORG
(Also, if you care to support the artist, I'm publishing a book ! and writing another - a fantastical afroindigenous graphic novel - that I post exclusively about with tons of other art on my patreon.)
Long before there was Jeffrey Epstein and his repulsive rape ring, there was the terror of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
Article text:
Long before there was Jeffrey Epstein and his repulsive rape ring, there was the terror of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
The MMIW crisis spans decades, arguably centuries, and involves 1000s of cases in the US and Canada, and yet, even as the Epstein story captures mass media attention and builds pressure for more prosecutions, Indigenous women and girls and women-identified people continue to turn up dead, or simply don’t turn up at all – and only native activists seem to care.
I felt the ice of that terror freeze a new friend once, in a Holiday Inn parking lot off a flat highway in Minnesota. We’d pulled in, just before dark, after a hot, dusty pipeline protest followed by some earnest pleading from two happy, helpful, just-barely teenage girls. Brave before cops and mobs, I saw the skin around the eyes of their mother, my new friend, tighten. An experienced native organizer, her smile squeezed to a clench as she saw white men with trucks milling about. One swim. In my eyesight. No leaving your room – for any reason. We left early. I got it: terror. Happy indigenous girls are an endangered species in America.
In 2022, the National Crime Information Center reported 5,487 cases of missing Native American and Alaska Native women and girls in the United States, where the majority of missing persons cases involved girls aged 0-17 years old. It is estimated that Indigenous women are murdered at a rate at least ten times higher than the national average in some counties, but the data is hard to nail down and record-keeping has always been weak.
Not long ago, a record four Indigenous women managed to get themselves elected to Congress where they did something historic. They passed the Not Invisible Act, authored by then-Rep. Deb Haaland, and signed by President Trump, which created a Commission to study the problem and lay out an action plan.
“The federal government must act now; not tomorrow; not next week; not next month; and not next year. Once and for all, the federal government must end its systematic failure to address this crisis, and react, redress, and resolve this,” declared the Not Invisible Act Commissioners.
In one virtual, and seven in-person hearings in places including Billings, MO, Tulsa, OK, and Anchorage, AK , Commission members heard testimony from tribal leaders, law enforcement officers, service providers, and family members. Motivated by the same righteous rage that moves the relatives of Epstein’s trafficked girls, the family members of murdered and missing Indigenous people made often arduous journeys to testify.
With heroic nerve, Indigenous survivors of human trafficking stood in front of strangers and recalled the worst horrors of their lives. America’s indigenous survivors shared their warnings with the same mix of gratitude and skepticism that we’ve heard from the victims of Epstein. (Someone is finally listening, but will anything, ever, be done? )
Commissioners heard several versions of the same witness sentiment: “I don’t want anyone else to have to live through this nightmare.”
After 260 witnesses and hours of testimony, the Not Invisible Act Commission produced a report. It described in damning detail the many sources of the problem: longstanding white racism, a limited tribal justice system, jurisdictional cracks – more like chasms — into which most MMIW cases fall. Above all, they expressed the urgent need for adequate funding for investigation, prosecution, prevention and care.
The Not Invisible Act Commission Report was posted on the Justice Department’s website in November of 2023.
By February of this year, that link was dead. The report disappeared soon after Donald Trump resumed office, along with nearly half of all federal funding allocated to federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native nations, and massive cuts to hundreds of safety and justice-related grants. Today, the website of the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women (a primary source of support for MMIW- and MMIP-related resources) features a warning to applicants about falling “out of scope”. Under the administration’s new “anti-DEI” and “anti-woke” regulations, it’s a violation, for example, to “frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues rather than criminal offenses” or “addressing missing or murdered indigenous persons (MMIP) unrelated to domestic violence or sexual assault.” ) As of November, 21, the site reads “There are no FY 2025 open notices of funding opportunity at this time.”
Where’s the outcry? A bi-partisan Congress has voted to force Trump’s DOJ to release the full Epstein files. Now, how about making the Not Invisible Commission Report visible once again, and implementing its recommendations? Funding for prosecution, prevention and healing in Indigenous communities was never sufficient. It’s in tragically short supply now.
Blaming and shaming the elite and the powerful people around Epstein is necessary and satisfying, but justice for victims of gender-and-race-based violence requires much more than a few high-profile perp-walks. When it comes to the use and abuse of women, we as a nation need a fundamental culture shift, and that demands turning our collective conscience to the colonial cruelty at the heart of so much of our story.
Finally cherishing Indigenous women and girls would be a good way to start.
May 5 is the Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People. (Also known as Red Dress Day.)
Show your support and pass on your strength by wearing red on May 5, and raising awareness. And if you have never read the Reclaiming Power and Place report, you can do so here.
Additionally, while the day is typically centred in Turtle Island, let us also not forget our international cousins, especially in Palestine and Sudan.
May 5th is MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) Day, which sheds light on the ongoing endangerment of and femicide against Indigenous/First Nations individuals in the United States and Canada*. This violence is a continuation of the colonial, racial, and gendered violence that was woven into these imperial states at their inception. Please do research into how you can support Indigenous women and their communities. See more info below.
Urban Indian Health Institute - Data & Resources
Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women
Jamie Black, The REDress Project
*Similar observances are held by and for Indigenous/Aboriginal groups in Australia, New Zealand and beyond.
Note: The Native woman in regalia is drawn from traditional Lakota (Teton Sioux) clothing. Women and girls from hundreds of individual tribes and clans are subject to this violence, and Indigenous peoples are not a monolith.
Family members of Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered along the Highway of Tears gathered in Prince George, B.
The family members of Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered along the Highway of Tears in northern B.C. cried and held hands as a monument created in their honour was unveiled at Cottonwood Island Park in Prince George Friday morning.
Called the Pillar of Hope, the monument commemorates the string of disappearances and murders of Indigenous women and girls along the 720-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert dating back to the 1960s.
"It's a bittersweet moment," said Mary Teegee, executive director of Carrier Sekani Family Services, which led the project.
