March in Wenatchee honors Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

WENATCHEE — Organizers Amanda Keewatinawin and Shelly Nelson led a group of mostly women on Monday afternoon from Pybus Public Market up Orondo Avenue and onto Wenatchee Avenue, then to Centennial Park, in the first-ever (in Wenatchee) March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

Although the subject matter is somber, the kinship among those involved was palpable. That’s because the kind of statistics on crime and violence against American Indian and Indigenous women in both the United States — especially here in Washington — and Canada can lead many of them to feel that all they have is each other.

While many are already horrified by the fact that 1 in 8 women in the U.S. are sexually assaulted every year, among Native women, that number expands to a terrifying 1 in 3 who become victims.

Even if May 5 isn’t actually Mexican Independence Day like so many Americans believe, there is a national observance that this march coincided with: Missing and Murdered Indigenous People’s (MMIP) Day. That observance, in turn, coincides with Red Dress Day in Canada, which is held for the same reason.

When we spoke to Keewatinawin, whose non-colonized name means “Wind that blows north,” she told us that she didn’t know much about this until she got older. But she has felt the generational trauma of boarding or “residential” schools that Natives were once whisked away to, to strip them of their Native identity and isolate them from their culture. Her own grandmother had herself run away from residential schools many times, which gives you some idea of just how long the practice of hollowing out Native culture has been happening, and how recently it was ended on a federal level.

Beginning the 17th century, colonial Americans and Canadians alike decided to tamp down the “savagery” of the Natives whose land they had claimed by attenuating the effects of passed-down oral histories and assimilating them into Euro-American or Euro-Canadian culture.

But Keewatinawin’s own path is ambitious. She is the co-chair of the Indigenous Roots and Reparation Foundation, which seeks, among other things, to have some land ceded back to the Native people of the Wenatchi and surrounding tribes, that they might build a cultural center, like you see in some larger areas like Yakima, Spokane or the many on the other side of the mountains. They want to teach language and basket-making and the real history, not a whitewashed one, of their people who lived here for thousands of years.

“We have never been the ones to be able to write our own history or even share our own history, and people have never really listened to it,” Keewatinawin says. “But no matter where you go in this valley, you are on Native land.”

The march today was for the missing and murdered, of course. But it was also for the indigenous spirit that has been all but killed off — or at least crowded out. The fact that such awful statistics exist, with a full 80% of American Indian and Alaska Native women who have experienced violence, primarily at the hands of non-Natives, is appalling. The fact that so few know about it is even more so.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media