MINNEAPOLIS (MN)
Broadly.
February 1, 2018
By Sheila Regan
[Note: All My Relations Arts and the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center present a group exhibition highlighting the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous Women. On View: Feb 2nd – Apr 10th]
Indigenous women are murdered, kidnapped, and trafficked at alarmingly high rates. In a new exhibit, 18 Native artists address the crisis and celebrate resilience.
In 1991, a Dakota woman named Delvina Bernard was kidnapped and murdered by her neighbor for no apparent reason.
“She was my grandma’s sister, but in our Indian ways, she was my grandma,” says Minneapolis artist Angela Two Stars, who was nine years old at the time.
For a long time, Two Stars’ family searched for Bernard, but could never find her. Two Stars’ uncle even visited the murderer in prison to beg for the location of the body. “He told the guy: ‘You are going to be in jail for the rest of your life, so it doesn’t matter. Would you tell us where she is?’” Two Stars recalls. All the family wanted was to bring her home.
Two Stars’ grandmother is just one of so many missing and murdered Indigenous women (referred to as MMIW) making up an epidemic that has been facing the United States and Canada for decades. According to advocates, crimes against Native women aren’t taken seriously by law enforcement and don’t get the media attention they would if the victims were white. In addition, there’s insufficient data on the crisis, in part because most law enforcement agencies keep track of race and ethnicity for murder victims but not missing people. In 2016, Canada launched a long-awaited national inquiry into the issue, which is ongoing.
The scant statistics that are available indicate a dire problem. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 16 percent of all female homicide victims in Canada between 1980 and 2012 were aboriginal, though aboriginal women make up only 4.3 percent of the population. More than 1200 Indigenous women and girls have been murdered or gone missing across the country since 1980—although advocates have pointed out that number could be as high as 4000. Meanwhile, Native women in the US are murdered at 10 times the national average and raped at 2.5 times the average.
In response to the epidemic, Two Stars—who is Dakota herself—is curating an exhibition entitled Bring Her Home. The show opens on February 2nd at All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis and will feature art by 18 Native women, including several with personal connections to the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women, as well as sexual exploitation. Two Stars’ intention is both to call attention to the problem and honor the painful story of her grandmother.
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