Red dresses hanging on birch trees to honor Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Image from Huffington Post.
The missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) epidemic is an issue currently affecting Indigenous people in Canada and the United States, including the First Nations, Inuit, Métis (FNIM), and Native American communities. It has been described as a Canadian national crisis and a Canadian genocide.
Native American women are murdered and sexually assaulted at rates as high as 10 times the average in certain counties in the United States—crimes overwhelmingly committed by individuals outside the Native American community.
These crimes are particularly likely in remote settings where transient workers – oil workers, for example – live in temporary housing units called “man camps” on and near Tribal lands. Their crimes fall between jurisdictional cracks, leaving victims and their families without recourse. As Nick Martin summarized, these are:
“Patterns of violent men and extractive industries breezing through land they do not own to take lives that do not belong to them. Patterns of Tribal sovereignty being undermined and jurisdictional borders being crossed. Patterns of police dismissing concerned mothers and fathers and aunties and grandparents with the excuse that ‘runaways always come back.’ Patterns of coroners dodging paperwork and scrawling ‘other’ next to the line titled ‘Race’ and ‘accidental death’ next to ‘C.O.D.’ Patterns of government officials, top to bottom, ignoring practical, sovereignty-first reforms and instead hoarding the kind of power that keeps the crisis alive.”
It is outrageous that the vast majority of these women never see their abusers or rapists brought to justice. An unworkable, race-based criminal jurisdictional scheme created by the United States has limited the ability of Indian nations to protect Native women from violence and to provide them with meaningful remedies. For more than 35 years, United States law has stripped Indian nations of all criminal authority over non-Indians. As a result, until recent changes in the law, Indian nations were unable to prosecute non-Indians, who reportedly commit the vast majority (96%) of sexual violence against Native women. The Census Bureau reports that non-Indians now comprise 76% of the population on tribal lands and 68% of the population in Alaska Native villages. Many Native women have married non-Indians. However, it is unacceptable that a non-Indian who chooses to marry a Native woman, live on her reservation, and commit acts of domestic violence against her, cannot be criminally prosecuted by an Indian nation and more often than not will never be prosecuted by any government.
On the other side of the story, social scientists coined a term “Missing white woman syndrome” this refers to extensive media coverage, especially in television,[4] of missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls. The term is used to describe the Western media’s undue focus on upper-middle-class white women who disappear, with the degree of coverage they receive being compared to cases of missing women of color, women of lower social classes and missing men or boys.[5][6] Although the term was coined to describe disproportionate coverage of missing person cases, it is sometimes used to describe similar disparities in news coverage of other violent crimes. Instances have been cited in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and South Africa.
Raisa Jones, Brenda Finnicum, and Shelia Price, founder of Shatter the Silence, are leading a Facebook campaign for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Observance Day. To honor victims, survivors, and their families, participants in the campaign have been asked to hang a red dress, shirt, or other article of red clothing in their window or outside of their homes. All three women are members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, and are fierce advocates for justice for Indigenous people. As part of the Facebook campaign, participants are being asked to post a picture of themselves in red using the hashtag #mmiwgday.
Also a number of social movements in the U.S. and Canada works to raise awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) through organized marches, community meetings, the building of databases, local city council meetings, tribal council meetings and domestic violence trainings for police.
read more:
https://indianlaw.org/issue/ending-violence-against-native-women
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