Friday is Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day.
The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska is hosting a rally to demand that Alaska’s cases of missing and murdered people be taken seriously and investigated further.
Jeni Brown, who works with Tlingit and Haida’s Violence Against Women Task Force, said that like many Alaska Native people, it’s personal for her.
“I take this MMIP advocacy very seriously, not only because I have missing and or murdered people in my family, like this has been affecting me since I was 10,” she said. “And I’m 45.”
Brown said events like this are important because many people are still in denial about the problem. In 2016, the National Institute for Justice released a study that found that four in five Indigenous American women experienced violence in their lifetime.
“There’s a lot of people in Juneau, in our community, that think this doesn’t happen to us. This isn’t happening in our community. It is,” Brown said. “There’s racism alive and well in our community. There’s sexual assaults that happen in our community.”
And Brown said that while authorities don’t always take these cases seriously, it’s time that Juneau — as a community — does.
“Our people are disappearing, and nobody’s able to say anything about it. And I feel like now’s the time,” she said. “This is our time, this is our time to speak up. This is our time to make everybody aware that this stuff is happening.”
The rally starts at 5 p.m. on the Capitol steps with a lineup of guest speakers. Participants will then march to the Marine Park Pavilion.
