Events, marches held across Minnesota to remember missing and murdered Indigenous loved ones
Updated Feb. 15, 9:53 a.m. | Posted Feb. 14 1:05 p.m.
Wednesday marks a day of action and remembrance for missing and murdered Indigenous people. There are marches and events planned in Fargo-Moorhead, Mahnomen, Bemidji, Duluth and Minneapolis, where Minnesotans dressed in red will honor and draw awareness to lost loved ones.
“How many generations we have been trying to mend? Mend ourselves, mend our children, mend our elders, mend our culture? And from that, something good is happening,” said Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, at the march in Minneapolis. “There is a wave of awareness, there's a wave of support.”
The annual event comes as the Minnesota Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office works to make reward money and other resources available to help find missing loved ones.
From 2012 to 2020, as many as 54 Native women and girls were listed as missing in Minnesota each month, according to a Wilder Research analysis of federal crime data.
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While not all of those cases were new, Indigenous women were disproportionately represented in the data. They made up 15 percent of female missing person cases while making up just 1 percent of the state’s female population. They also made up 8 percent of women and girls murdered in Minnesota between 2010 and 2018, according to Wilder.
In 2021, the state MMIR office opened, becoming the first such agency in the nation. Last year, it reached full staffing and began to implement its vision in earnest. That includes providing services for families and coordinating with law enforcement agencies.
In September, the office helped organize a search for Nevaeh Kingbird, who went missing on Oct. 22, 2021 and was last seen in Bemidji. It was reportedly the largest search of its kind in the state.
While it didn’t yield any new clues, it and other searches led the office to create tool kits to help law enforcement agencies and communities conduct searches. They include guidance, as well as supplies such as maps, two-way radios and surveyor flags.
This year, the office is working on assembling an advisory committee and policies to oversee a reward fund. Lawmakers established the Gaagige-Mikwendaagoziwag fund last legislative session to encourage people to come forward with tips about missing and murdered Indigenous community members.
The office is also working on a dashboard so the public can track case data.
At a lunch and learn in Fargo on Wednesday, Sadie Sheppard called for more prevention resources.
Sheppard, an enrolled member of the Sokaogon Chippewa community in Mole Lake, Wis., is a Youthworks anti-trafficking navigator who helps connect sex-trafficking survivors with services. She said many people go missing because they are being trafficked, and they’re more likely to be in that situation if they’re struggling to meet their basic needs.
“It comes down to supporting, like, unhoused efforts, because having access to things like food and shelter is the biggest thing these folks need,” Sheppard said.
Dorene Day is the Cultural Clinical director of White Earth Nation. She was invited to Shooting Star Casino Event Center in Mahnomen to open the day of events with an honor song.
“These kinds of events are very important because we want our family member that has gone missing or been murdered to be remembered in a productive, positive way through our Anishinaabe traditional and spiritual practices, which is what I talked about today,” Day said. “Mainly for me it's, I don’t ever want to forget my father, who was murdered in Virginia, Minnesota when I was 16 years old.”
She described her father: “He was 53 years old. He was a hunter, a trapper. He sang our Indigenous songs. He spoke our Anishinaabemowin language. He and my mother had 17 children that he left behind,” she said.
“That's who he was. He was our father. He was an Indian man. He was a hunter trapper, he was, he cared about the earth, he read Time Magazine, he sold his wild rice at the state Capitol.”
She also described a niece who was in her early 20s when she was murdered in Tower. “I haven’t been there since her funeral. I can’t bring myself to go there. It’s too sad. It’s a tragedy that the way that she was murdered wasn’t investigated properly.”
After shedding tears, Day spoke about the song she had sung earlier in the day in honor of the missing and murdered relatives being remembered.
Before singing it, she had addressed the crowd. “We do have to remember them. We do have to keep fighting for justice. We do have to keep working toward a world where Anishinaabe life is valued.”
Correction (Feb. 14, 2024): An earlier version of this story misspelled Nevaeh Kingbird’s name. The article has been updated.