A resolution to mark May 5th, 2025 as National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls passed the Senate on Monday. This was good news among a torrent of bad news regarding Indigenous rights. I want to introduce two voices today, who singularly inform, on an intellectual and an emotional level, respectively, about the issues involving Native Americans.
All images today by Nicole Merton.
Let’s start with the latter, a photographer and activist of Mescalero Apache descent, Nicole Merton. She focuses her photographic work on the MMIWP Movement (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & People) with cultural photography and recordings of untold stories, doing field work across the nation. Her photography depicts women who have payed tribute to memories of their lost loved ones, and their strength to stand for others who can’t. Within these photos there is a red hand print which evokes solidarity and a moment of silence for the ones lost. The symbol that has taken off internationally to point to the growing MMIW movement. It stands for all the missing women and girls whose voices are not heard. It also stands for the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis.
“For the last few decades there has been a massive attack on indigenous women of the United States as well as Canada, and parts of Mexico. These women have been taken and forced into sex trafficking, have been sexually assaulted, and some are murdered. Many have been reported missing with little to nothing being done about it. In the record breaking year of 2016 there were 5,712 missing women reported by tribal officials but only 116 where actually recorded in the United States Department of Justice, the number of missing and murdered women are still rising. A small percentage of those women who have gone missing have been girls as young as the age of 10. Native American women under the age of 35 are at a higher risk of being murdered than many other groups which makes it the third most prevalent cause of death among indigenous women. 95% of these cases never make it to the media, it is my determination to make changes and bring forth awareness, and to change lives.”
The images I am posting today come from Merton’s website, which has an amazing breadth of portraiture, but also from an exhibition where I first encountered her work, 1.5 years ago. Red Earth Gaze was shown at the Angle’s Gate Art Center in San Pedro, CA. Unfortunately I did not note the titles of the photographs, too immersed at the time in their emotional impact.
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The other person of note is Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee), a Native American activist, writer, and public speaker. I summarize below information from her site Welcome to Native America. Her book By the Fire We Carry was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and claimed as the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year, an NPR 2024 “Books We Loved” Pick, an Esquire Best Book of the Year and a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2024.
“The author recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.”
Here is the current situation from Nagle’s reporting: Nationally, there are 4,200 unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Meanwhile, as part of the Trump admin’s purge of “DEI” information on government websites, it has taken down a federal report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. The task force behind the report was created by Congress.
Trump has unveiled a plan to close the EPA Office of Research and Development in Ada, Oklahoma. It is the nation’s only federal groundwater research lab. This will have disproportionate impacts for tribes, where the majority of drinking water systems utilize groundwater.
The Trump-proposed SAVE Act is heading to the Senate. If passed, it will disenfranchise millions of citizens, including Native voters. Under the Act, tribal IDs will be insufficient to prove citizenship and will require additional documentation and rural Native voters will need to travel hours to register to vote in person, or even to update their address or party affiliation. Check out Protect the Sacred, which registered hundreds of Indigenous voters in 2024 through the Ride to the Polls campaign.
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I am always encouraged by the singular reach that people who passionately pursue a cause, can have. Once individual voices add up to a chorus, maybe the message will get loud enough so that it can no longer be ignored. The victims deserve it.
Then again, justice is not easy to come by. For Native women, murder is the third leading cause of death. Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average. 97% of the people who perpetrate these crimes are non-Native. Part of the problem is the legal gray zone of who is responsible for prosecuting these crimes, with diffuse criminal jurisdiction.
I am summarizing Nagle again: Tribes cannot prosecute non-Natives (the most frequent perpetrators) for most crimes. And there are legal limits for the prosecution of tribal members by tribes – even for murder you can only sentence to three years in prison. (Let us for a moment ignore the issue of abolition, ok?) The federal government can prosecute “major” crimes on tribal land, like murder, assault, kidnapping, child abuse, and robbery. The problem here is that historically the federal authorities don’t take up this power – over a third of all Indian Country cases are declined, and for some years the rate is as high as 67%, not pursuing sexual assault cases, for example.
It gets more complicated: as of a 2022 Supreme Court decision, all states have the authority to prosecute crimes where the perpetrator is non-Native, but the victim is Native. Yet only 15 states have prosecutorial power on Native land. And And finally, some tribes can prosecute some crimes (sexual assault, sex trafficking, stalking, and child abuse) committed by non-Natives on their land, but only if they meet certain criteria and seek and receive federal approval. As of 2022, 31 tribes across the U.S. had passed this hurdle – 31 out of 574. Confused yet?
And we wonder why crime rates against tribal women are excessive.
If you are interested in how contemporary poets confront the epidemic of missing indigenous women, I urge you to read this essay that will link to various poems.
Instead of music today here is a poem in audio form. I liked the way the words conjure up a powerful woman, not a victim.
She Is Spitting a Mouthful of Stars (nikâwi’s Song)
She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is laughing more than the men who beat her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to her bones
She is holy in the dust
She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is singing louder than the men who raped her
She is waking beyond the Milky Way
She is new to her breath
She is sacred in this breathing
She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is holding the light more than those who despised her
She is folding clouds in her movement
She is new to this sound
She is unbroken flesh
She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is laughing more than those who shamed her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to these bones
She is holy in their dust
by Gregory Scofield, Métis
