Views and Voices from 2025 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Day

Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan

According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, American Indians accounted for 4.24 percent of all reported homicide victims or non-negligent manslaughter in Minnesota in 2024 — despite representing only 1.4 percent of the state’s population.

Last year, 716 indigenous persons went missing in Minnesota, and 57 percent of those were women.

Minnesota commemorates the lives of missing and murdered indigenous relatives whose cases are both documented and undocumented in the media and the public records, and remains supportive of victims families.

Whereas this day serves to raise continued awareness and encourages all people of Minnesota to support indigenous communities to stop this epidemic and heal together as we all create a collective safer future.

Now therefore Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, hereby proclaims Friday, February 14, 2025, as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Awareness Day in the state of Minnesota. Miigwech for everything that you have done to bring us to this moment, and Miigwech for everything that you will do to ensure that we remain strong, that we are together, that we heal collectively, and that one day, we will no longer face violence in every community of any kind, because that is what our future is. That future is waiting for all of us.

 

Rachel Thunder

I’m co-founder of the Indigenous Protector Movement. I come before you as a community member, as a mother, as an auntie, to stand with you, to pray with you, to march with you. Today we gather again on this national day of mourning to remember and honor the thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, men, boys, and two spirit relatives — our loved ones, our families, our children, those taken from our community,

We remember those of us who have survived.

We lift up these names with love and compassion, and we hold our families in our hearts. We stand with our families, not only today, but every day. We come together in prayer and healing in an unbreakable call for justice for those that we have lost, and justice for those that are still fighting to survive. The violence against our people is a wound that stretches back through centuries of colonial oppression.

But today, we are not here in sadness alone.

We remember our relatives and we say no more. Not one more stolen sister, not one more stolen brother, not one more child taken from us, not one more stolen life.

We fight for the living. We fight for the generations that came before us and the generations that are yet to come.

We say to our stolen relatives that are here with us today that you are not forgotten, that you are loved, and that you are the reason that we rise up together.

We are standing in a moment that our ancestors fought for, prayed for and sacrificed for. A moment that they dreamed of. A moment where our unity becomes unstoppable.

Their prayers are alive in each and every one of us. Their strength is alive in you, and together, we awaken a power that cannot be silenced.

 

 

— credit to Sophia Morrissette for sharing moments from the event