05/05/2026
Today is May 5. A National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People ❤️
Every statistic about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit People is a human being whose family still sets a place for them in their heart.
Too many conversations reduce this crisis to numbers while communities carry generations of grief, fear, silence, and unanswered questions.
Four in five Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime. One-third will experience sexual violence. Thousands of Indigenous women and girls have been reported missing across Turtle Island while countless cases receive little media attention, delayed investigations, or disappear entirely from public memory.
This did not appear out of nowhere.
Colonial violence taught systems to treat Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people as disposable. Stereotypes still shape headlines, policing, courtroom responses, and public empathy.
Families are left searching while institutions debate jurisdiction, paperwork, and responsibility.
People always ask what they can do. Start here:
- Learn the names and stories of Indigenous women and girls instead of scrolling past them.
- Interrupt jokes, stereotypes, victim-blaming, and racist language when you hear it.
- Support Indigenous-led organizations, shelters, advocates, and community patrols.
- Share missing person alerts with urgency and consistency.
- Push media outlets, governments, and police services toward accountability instead of silence.
- Teach young people that Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people are sacred, valuable, loved, and worthy of protection.
Solidarity is not a hashtag you post once and forget. It is whether Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people feel safer, believed, protected, and remembered because of how you move through this world.
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The red handprint represents the colonial violence that silences us. It’s become a powerful visual in protests, photoshoots, and awareness campaigns to honour MMIWG2S+ and to show that we will no longer be silent about this national crisis.
