NO MORE STOLEN SISTERS
While we are still living through a pandemic, Indigenous tribes across North America have been dealing with an epidemic affecting their women and young girls.
words by Alycia Cypress | art by Anastasia Powell
W
ith pipelines and oil drills forcing their way onto reservations across the country, more and more Indigenous women are “mysteriously” disappearing or even worse, being murdered. Native American communities are severely underserved and repeatedly taken advantage of by large corporations determined to use sacred Native land as a way to expand their companies’ reach. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has taken over Indian country in the last few years, with thousands of Natives calling out the U.S. government and big money corporations for their disgusting complacency. In 2017, the movie Wind River, starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen, hit the big screen. It tells the story of a wildlife officer (Renner) and FBI agent (Olsen) who try to solve a murder of a young Indigenous girl, Natalie Hanson (Kelsey Chow), on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.
Spoiler alert: Natalie’s new boyfriend worked at a nearby oil drilling site and his co-workers raped and murdered Natalie. They also killed her boyfriend. None of them were going to be prosecuted if it weren’t for the two protagonists’ continued heroic attempts. Now this film has some issues, specifically the fact that it perpetuates the ever-so-popular white savior complex, caters to a majority white male audience, portrays Natives as living in a constant state of sadness and lacks an Indigenous cast. But the film has an overall important message and ends with a chilling fact: “While missing persons statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American women… No one knows how many are missing.” After the film made waves following its release, another scary statistic presented itself. In 2016, 5,712 Native women were either missing or murdered and only 116 of those cases were entered into the U.S. Department of
