The National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives was first established in 2019 to highlight and, in turn, help prevent the violent crimes that disproportionately affect native communities compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts. In honor of the annual awareness day, Asia Burnett speaks with Choctaw-American Steven Hunter-Oklatubbee about important statistics and how to participate in MMIW Day.
"The statistics about missing and murdered Indigenous women are very daunting," Hunter-Oklatubbee begins. "This whole movement began in 2015 as a grassroots movement out of Canada. Indigenous females are murdered ten times more than all other ethnicities. According to the CDC, murder is the third leading cause for Indigenous women. Think about the causes of death for us. It'd be like cancer, diabetes—theirs is murder."
"More than four out of five Indigenous women have experienced violence," Hunter-Oklatubbee continues. "More than half of Indigenous women experience sexual violence [and] have been abused by their intimate partners. Less than half of Indigenous women have been stalked in their lifetime. When you compare them to Anglo-American women, Indigenous women are 1.7 times more likely to experience violence, two times more likely to be raped, and the murder rate of Indigenous women is three times higher than that of Anglo-American women. It's pretty clear that there's a huge issue involving native women and girls."
Hunter-Oklatubbee says that violent or sexual crimes aren't the only hardships to which Indigenous communities are often subjected. "There's a lot of impoverishment among natives—a lot of it due to generational issues. There's this old stereotype about the 'drunken Indian.' Our people never knew about alcohol until the colonizers came. They would use it during treaty negotiations, and it's been a sickness among our people for a long time."
"But as far as life for the average Choctaw woman, I would say it could be better, but it could be worse," he continues. "One of the things in Choctaw society is our elders are very precious because they are the tradition-bearers. We lost a lot of elders during the COVID pandemic, but many remain, and they pass on the language, customs, and things that our people do. They're very revered—an elder lady especially. The tribe has always tended toward a matrilineal makeup."
"If you ever, in the old days, had any privileges within the tribe, it was because of who your mother was, not your father," Hunter-Oklatubbee explains. "One of my distant relatives was chief when the Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty was signed in 1830, 1831, and that was the beginning treaty of the Trail of Tears. Most people, when they think of the Trial of Tears, they think of the Cherokee because they went the farthest and they were very large. But the Choctaw were the first to go. But that ancestor of mine—who his mother was is what gave him privilege within the tribe."
"The women had such pull that if they wanted a certain man to be chief, that's who was chief. If the chiefs ever wanted to go to war, they had to go around the villages and get the clan mothers' consent. And if they didn't get it, you didn't go to war. That's just how it was. If, say, a couple decided that they were married and had children and they decided to divorce, the husband would pack up what little belongings he had, and he would go back to his family. She kept the home, she kept the children, because, in that matrilineal society, her brothers were responsible for raising her sons, her children, not their dad. He was responsible for raising his sisters' children."
"When Hernando De Soto was around Mobile, Alabama, that Battle of Mabilia was with the Choctaw," Hunter-Oklatubbee says. "The chief, Tuskaloosa, was leading his braves. One of the Spanish chroniclers wrote something to the effect of as the men fell in battle, the women took up their arms and took up their fight, believing it better to die with honor than to ever be enslaved. To this day, in the Choctaw War Dance, a man is standing beside a woman, and they're dancing together side-by-side because the women were as fierce warriors as the men were."
To participate in the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Hunter-Oklatubbee recommends wearing red. "Some women will actually take and paint the palm of their hand red and put it across their face almost as if they're being silenced. If you do that, take a picture of you in red, and post it on social media with the hashtag 'MMIW.' Also, tag the justice department, the Secretary of the Interior, and the FBI. There has been legislation passed to actually focus on this issue, but there's still work to be done."
For more information on how to help the cause for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, visit the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center's website.
