May 5 in the United States, its colonies, and Canada is recognized as the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives and I think the conversation around nomenclature for MMIW is due for a public discussion because I see how menfolk are using it in less than helpful ways.
From my own perspective and understanding, we started by recognizing the vulnerability and reality of human trafficking, assault, and murder of our own women relatives. When I was coming up as a kid in the 1980s and 90s, the victims were generally classified as “runaways,” and characterized that they had “bad families” or they themselves were somehow bad women in and of themselves.
Then the patterns and data showed us what we always knew to be true: that Indigenous women were preyed upon.
The discussion around Two-Spirit and LGBTQ Indigenous relatives was short so we didn’t have time to talk about the unique vulnerabilities of our queer relatives. Frankly, for many of our families, not talking about lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender Indigenous people was the cultural standard for many of us on the reservation or in tribal communities. Colonization had robbed us of the language to be able to have honest and open conversations. When I came out, my family reaction was: 1. Don’t tell dad. 2. Don’t be a queen. 3. I’ll always love you. 4. You broke my heart, I wanted grandchildren.
Adding Two-Spirit folks into the MMIW issues in Indian Country was important because for many of us, not having to make others go through more trauma was more important at the time.
Now when we say Missing, Murdered, Indigenous Women/Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women and Two-Spirits/Missing, Murdered Indigenous Relatives, it’s to encompass women, girls, and LGBTQ+ Natives who experience violence, assault, and murder based on their femme-of-center gender identity and expression. But even so, the data on Two-Spirit folks is astonishingly low in light of the one, clear statistic that 84.3% of women, girls, and Two-Spirit folks report experiencing violence in their lifetime.
While that doesn’t mean that Indigenous men don’t experience violence, in fact Indigenous people are four times more likely to be sentenced into state and federal prisons—where more violence happens—than white people, and of those over 80% sentenced were men. But Indigenous men are more likely to be sentenced for crimes of murder, manslaughter, immigration, fraud, and aggravated assault. They leave a trail of victims in their wake but there’s not readily available data to indicate causality over correlation.
When we talk about the issues of MMIWR, it’s important to stay grounded in the reality that the more vulnerable populations are vulnerable because of the lasting impacts of colonization, patriarchy, white supremacy, Christian Dominionism. When we can create a justice and reconciliation system that grounds us in that reality, and dismantles patriarchy and colonization, we can begin to address injustice at-large from a universal design.
We can do better and we must do better.
SOURCES:
National Congress of American Indians, Violence Against Women Resource Center: https://www.ncai.org/section/vawa/overview/key-statistics
State of Michigan, Division of Victim Services: https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhhs/Division-of-Victim-Services/MDSVPTB/Board-Documents/Archive/MMIWIR-Fact-Sheet50124.pdf
Hoyekiyapi 
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