May 5 is a day of remembering missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It is also the beginning of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Awareness Month.
In the ELCA, we are called to live out our faith in relationship – with God, with one another and with creation. To be in relationship is to be accountable. It is to see, to hear and to act when injustice is present. The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIWR) is not just an Indigenous issue, it is a human issue, a faith issue and a moral crisis that calls all of us into deeper discipleship and action.
For non-Native women, being an ally in this work means acknowledging the ways that colonialism, racism and gendered violence continue to shape our world today. It means recognizing that the systems meant to protect women often fail Indigenous women and that silence and inaction allow this violence to continue. It means seeing the disparities in whose stories are heard, whose cases are solved and who is given the dignity of justice.
This message is excerpted from “We Stand for Her, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women” by Prairie Rose Seminole, a 2025 resource of the Women of the ELCA. Today is Cinco de Mayo. Today is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).
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