A Red Hand on Her Mouth
Approximately 25% of White women will report (operative word) some form of violence at the hands of intimate partners in their lifetime. That number goes up to 29% for Black women, and 37.5% for Native American women. On the ground though, Indigenous resource centers report numbers reflecting that violence is experienced by far more than 37.5% of Indigenous women.
Gabby Petito is a 22-year-old homicide victim who has been featured in countless news-stories, on magazine covers, and cried out for on social media in recent months. Meanwhile, Destini Smothers, a 26-year-old Black woman with an almost identical, dreadful story, is hardly mentioned. This is not a new circumstance.
The prevalence of minority erasure has been proclaimed loud and clear with civil right landmarks like the March on Washington, the first BLM movement, and its revival following the murder of George Floyd protests to name a few. We also saw it in January of last year when Rosalie Fish and Jordan Marie Daniel ran with a red hand painted over their mouths and “MMIW” — the acronym for Missing and murdered Indigenous women — down their legs in the same color. The hashtag #MMIW was coined in 2012 following Jamie Black’s 2010 REDress Project.
Here are some of the startling statistics:
“More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence… On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average”.
These numbers reflect the average lives of countless women, girls, and two-spirits whose 3rd most likely cause of death will be murder.
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