Indigenous women and girls are at a far higher risk of violence and murder. According to Native Women’s Wilderness, Indigenous women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than other ethnicities. This violence is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women. A majority of these murders are committed on Indigenous owned land by non-Indigenous people.

The National Indian Council on Aging, Inc. has illustrated the lack of meaningful data collected on MMIWG making it difficult to understand the full extent. A study by the Urban Indian Health Institute found that only 116 of 5712 cases of MMIWG were on the Department of Justice’s database.

Heather A. Howard Bobiwash

Heather Howard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is also a Research Faculty member at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Indigenous knowledge frameworks both in scholarship and in the community.

Howard is currently working on a project entitled “Waganakising Portal: Indigenous Sovereignty Through Digital Knowledge Sharing,” with grant funding awarded in 2020 from the Whiting Foundation. Additionally, her article, “Concrete Lessons: Policies and Practices Affecting the Impact of COVID-19 for Urban Indigenous Communities in the United States and Canada,”  has just been published with Frontiers Medical Sociology.

Christie Poitra

Christie Poitra is the Interim Director of the Michigan State University Native American Institute (NAI). She is also an affiliate faculty member in the MSU American Indian & Indigenous Studies program and MSU Bio/Computation Evolution in Action Consortium. Her research focuses on how the current state, federal, district, and tribal policy contexts affect Indigenous education experiences in K-12.

In 2020, Poitra helped secure a $140,000 grant from the US Department of Agriculture to support the Growing Native American Student Pathways in Agriculture (see more). She has also authored two reports on the NAI website including Honoring the Whole Student: Developing Space for Native American Students in STEM by Supporting Complex Identities and Reciprocal Research: A Guidebook to Centering Community in Partnerships with Indigenous Communities.

Rocío Quispe-Agnoli

Rocío Quispe-Agnoli is a Professor in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies. Her work focuses on Colonial Latin American Literatures and Cultures.

In 2020, she published “Escribirlo es nunca acabar”: cuatrocientos cinco años de lecturas y silencios una de Opera Aperta colonial andina” in Letras (Lima). She also gave a presentation entitled “Hablando en/desde el archivo: Voces femeninas de los Andes (ss/xvi-xvii)” at the third colloquium of the Colonial Studies Group of the Institute of Hispano-American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center
Native-led nonprofit dedicated to ending violence against Native women and children.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA
Mission of bringing home the missing and helping families grieve those murdered.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Womxn Epidemic
List of educational resources, petitions and calls to action, and places to donate to support MMW