Tuesday was Missing and Murdered Indigenous People’s Day. It’s a day of remembrance, awareness, and calls to action to address the crises of Alaska Native and other Indigenous people facing extreme rates of violence.
Family members of missing and murdered people gathered off Egan Drive in downtown Juneau as the work day was ending to sing, drum, and get the attention of those driving by.
Listen:
Patricia Graham held a sign high above her head with a young woman’s face on it.
“That’s my sister, Jodi,” she said. “She was born on November 4, 1966 and was murdered in 1991 when her daughter was five years old.”
Jodi Erickson was 26 years old. Graham said Erickson took care of her siblings when she was growing up, and her death was a loss for everyone in their family.
“It was from a man who said, if he couldn’t have her, nobody could,” Graham said. “And he was a violent man, so she refused him, and he took her life.”
Erickson’s killer saw jail time, but Graham pointed to the numbers of people lost like her sister that are never found, and their cases are never closed.
Indigenous people are murdered at rates far higher than the national average, according to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. But experts say the numbers are hard to track, because many of these cases are underreported or misclassified.
With her drum in hand, L’xook Jess Kinville led a group of singers in a song she wrote about missing and murdered Indigenous people.
“It’s called Stolen Prayers, because we are the prayers of our ancestors,” she said. “And when one of us is taken, it’s a stolen prayer.”
Kinville wrote the song when she was mourning her own missing relative — her cousin Tracy Day.
“I was just kind of dealing with the grief and the sadness of missing her, and I started thinking about all the people that are hurting right now,” she said. “And I started praying, and I asked Creator. I said, ‘what, what can we do to help people heal? What do we need?’ And the song just came to me.”
Kinville says it’s a prayer that became a song.
Martin Stepetin has been looking for his brother for nearly a year now. Benjamin Stepetin disappeared last summer, and his family called on the U.S. Coast Guard and raised money for divers to search for him.
“It’s been a long time now, a lot of time has passed, and in the beginning, we had a hard time getting any resources and help,” Stepetin said. “But we did eventually, after pushing a lot and after a lot of news stories came out from the press.”
He said seeing everyone gathered to draw attention to these stories is necessary, as families keep losing loved ones the way his family has lost Benjamin.
“It happens way too often in such a small community as Juneau, Southeast Alaska,” Stepetin said. “And so it’s important that we do these and shed light on this tragedy that’s happening.”
Stepetin said the family is bringing in more divers in the coming weeks to keep looking for his brother.
