Vigil honors missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives
On Valentine’s Day, the Native and Indigenous Student Association at Yale hosted a vigil at the Women’s Table on Cross Campus to remember the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives. The vigil featured speakers and a community dinner hosted by the Native American Cultural Center.
Connor Arakaki, Contributing Photographer
Content warning: This article describes sexual violence and strong language about the violence against Native and Indigenous peoples.
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Student leaders from Native and Indigenous Student Association at Yale hosted a vigil on Feb. 14, in remembrance of the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives and to increase visibility of the historical and contemporary injustices Indigenous communities endure. Native and Indigenous students, faculty and other community members gathered at the Women’s Table on Cross Campus for the vigil, which featured speakers and a community dinner later hosted by the Native American Cultural Center.
Every year, NISAY organizes a vigil on Valentine’s Day to honor the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and raise awareness of the MMIW movement in the greater University community. According to current NISAY President Avery Maples ’26 (Eastern Band Cherokee), Feb. 14 is the designated National Day of Action and Awareness for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, or MMIW, movement.
Since the first Valentine’s Day vigil was hosted in 2020 by the organization — formerly named Association of Native Americans at Yale — the date has been resonant to “uphold promises towards Indian Country and the crisis of MMIW [so that] relatives will not go unheard or without redress,” Maples wrote to the News.
Although a longstanding historical crisis, the MMIW movement first gained political momentum in Canada in 2016, when the Canadian government commissioned an inquiry into its national missing and murdered Indigenous women, naming the violence an “epidemic.” Three years later, former U.S. President Donald Trump established the Presidential Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaskan Natives to pursue unresolved MMIW cases in the United States.
“Indigenous women are vulnerable within these communities due to the lack of accountability towards men and outside communities,” Mara Gutierrez ’25 (Diné/Navajo Nation), former co-president of NISAY, told the News, naming settler colonial ideologies, environmental exploitation, a lack of resources for law enforcement and a lack of tribal jurisdiction as several of the forces that perpetuate the MMIW crisis.
According to a study conducted in 2016 by the National Institute of Justice, more than four in five American Indian and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime. As of that year, at least 5,712 American Indian and Alaskan Native women and girls had been declared missing. The same year, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that the murder rate for Native women living on reservations was ten times greater than the national average — yet even this report falls short in collecting national data on American Indian and Alaskan Native women in urban areas. In an attempt to fill this research gap, the Urban Indian Health Institute identified 506 unique cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls across 71 cities in a 2018 study.
The crisis of MMIW is not limited to the contiguous United States: according to Joshua Ching ’26 (Kanaka Maoli), executive director of the Indigenous Peoples of Oceania student group, the crisis is “especially salient for Pasifika communities” because of the imperial legacies in Hawai‘i and the greater Pacific region.
Indeed, a “Missing & Murdered Native Hawaiian Women and Girls” report released in 2022 highlighted that more than a quarter of missing girls in Hawai‘i are Native Hawaiian. The same report states that in 2021, the Missing Child Center Hawai‘i assisted law enforcement with 376 recoveries of missing children, which are only 19% of the estimated 2,000 cases of missing children in Hawai‘i annually.
In 2021, following the appointment of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland—the first Native American to serve in a presidential cabinet—the Bureau of Indian Affairs formed a new “Missing & Murdered” unit under Haaland’s leadership. The unit leverages federal resources and aims to liaison tribal police, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and FBI investigators on active missing and murdered cases. It has not reported any progress.
Students, faculty and community members gathered on Wednesday afternoon at the Women’s Table on Cross Campus to honor these women. Organizers spoke on the history of the MMIW crisis and offered Native and Indigenous students the chance to speak on their lived experiences with the crisis.
According to Jairus Rhoades ’26 (Samoan), current co-president of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, attending the vigil was a “visceral” and “intimate” experience that “reminded him of the missions of the [Native American Cultural Center] and the responsibilities of stewardship as an Indigenous person.”
Following the vigil speeches and testimonies, NISAY student organizers read the names of current missing and murdered Indigenous Peoples, including women, children and entire families. The vigil ended with a period of silence in remembrance of the lives claimed to the MMIW crisis and an Indigenous travel song, performed by Angie Makomenaw, community wellness specialist at Yale College Community Care and wife of NACC Dean Matthew Makomenaw.
“It was especially powerful to hear [Makomenaw] sing because song and performance crosses Indigenous cultures,” Helen Shanefield ’26, a member of both IPO and NISAY, told the News. “The song universally felt emotional, without having to understand the words—it was clearly personal and intimate.”
As an act of visibility and protest for MMIW, some students painted a red handprint on their face and tied red ribbons around trees near Cross Campus. In light of faculty and administrative backlash to red handprints left on the stone walls surrounding tables in 2022, forms of protests on Wednesday focused on the presence of people, rather than University property. Madeline Gupta ’25 (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), who imprinted a red handprint on her face, wrote to the News that she had been “excited about this as a means of body sovereignty.”
“If we cannot exist on stolen land peacefully, then let us show ownership of our bodies in this space,” Gupta wrote in a statement to the News.
Beyond the vigil’s day of remembrance, Maples wrote to the News that on Mar. 6, NISAY will be hosting a panel with the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association on Native and Indigenous domestic and sexual violence prevention and advocacy.
Furthermore, according to Ching, the three Native American Cultural Center affiliate organizations — NISAY, IPO and American Indian Science and Engineering Society, or AISES — will additionally be planning collaborative events in the spring semester that can be educative of issues that deeply impact Indigenous communities.
“The larger push of what the Native community and affiliate organizations are trying to do is ingrain within the student body and administration that these issues are not just insular to Indigenous communities or tribal nations or Hawai‘i,” said Ching. “Instead, they’re entangled in places like Yale, where there’s so much political and economic capital to influence change.”
The National Day of Action and Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is Feb.14, during which the largest MMIW march takes place annually in Vancouver.