May 5th is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives. It’s a day of remembrance but also of action and accountability, because colonial gendered violence is not only ongoing but also erased, minimized, or ignored.
Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirit people are murdered at 10x the national average. Homicide is roughly the third leading cause of death among Indigenous girls and women between 10 and 24 years old.
10,248 missing Indigenous persons reports were filed with the FBI in 2024. There were probably many more missing cases and murders that were not accounted for.
It’s hard to know exactly how many lives are lost to murder & systemic violence, because there is no reliable nationwide count. This is due to a number of factors, including racial misclassification of MMIWR cases, and general case underreporting.
In 2016, out of 5,712 reports of missing Indigenous women and girls, only 116 were put into the national information clearinghouse and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases.
95% of cases identified by the Urban Indian Health Institute have not been covered by mainstream media.
Even in the few cases when media covers these murders, they often portray victims in a negative light by mentioning drugs or alcohol use, the victim’s criminal history, if she had one, and sex work, if this was involved. They give false information, misgender the victim when trans, nonbinary, and/or two-spirit, and even make excuses for the perpetrators by using victim-blaming language.
The 10 states with the highest rates of American Indian/Alaska Native missing persons cases in 2025, in the so-called United States, were AK, AZ, OK, WA, NM, CA, MT, NC, SD, and TX. This is a national (and international) crisis but it’s not treated as such, which it’s one of the reasons this day exists.
If this is new information for you, and you want to find out more, the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre can be a good place to start. You can also check out local events in your area for the National Week of Action for MMIWR.
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