Participants dance during the Red Dress event Sunday on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

MISSION — The Wildhorse Pow Wow ended Sunday, and like last year, the last day helped showcase a Red Dress event to honor missing and murdered Indigenous people.

Mildred Quaempts, a Umatilla language master speaker for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, helped organize the event, along with her family.

“It’s just to honor all those who have been murdered and are missing,” she said. “It’s not just here locally. It’s all over the United States.”

It’s not just women, she said, but children and men who are part of the murdered and are missing.

According to the Urban Indian Health Institute, the National Crime Information Center in 2016 reported 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, although the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database, NamUs, logged just 116 cases.

And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women and rates of violence on reservations can be up to 10 times higher than the national average.

Personal connections

Quaempts said she is involved in the Red Dress event because she was about 4-years-old in 1957 when her mother, Mavis McKay, was slain.

“She was murdered on the Yakama reservation, but she was a member of the Umatilla tribe here,” Quaempts said. “She was only 33-years-old when she died.”

Her older brother was a teenager, she said, and her younger brother was only a few months old. Their grandmother and an uncle raised them.

Quaempts said when she was 9, she asked her grandmother about her mom.

“That’s when she sat me down and told me, ‘Your mom was murdered; your mom died,’” she said.

But her grandmother didn’t know who was responsible for her mom’s death, Quaempts said, and for years, family members didn’t want to talk about it.

“They just told me to be quiet, just be quiet,” she said. “But I still wanted to know what happened to her. That was my mom. She gave me life.”

The case has not been solved.

Violence struck her life again in 2009. Quaempts said one of her five children, Mavis Mayanne Kirk of Warm Springs, was run over after a holiday party on Dec. 16, 2009. She was 31 and a mother of two. And again, no one has answered for this death.

“Nothing was being done,” she said, “not just for my daughter but for other people.”

Since then, she said, she has worked to raise awareness about what happened in her family and in so many more.

“That’s why I took a stand and wanted some kind of remembering,” she said.

She said she began buying red shawls and incorporating names on them for family and friends to remember her mother. Now she makes prayer bundles with tobacco in honor of her mother and others.

“I don’t make like a handful. I make a hundred-plus bundles,” she said.

Rosenda Strong case moves forward Rosenda Strong was a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and a descendant of the Yakama Nation. Her family reported her missing to Yakama Nation Tribal Police on Oct. 2, 2018.

Her remains were found in an abandoned freezer at milepost 64 on U.S. Highway 97 on July 4, 2019.

Authorities released Rosenda’s body to her family members, and she was buried next to their mother at the Umatilla Indian Reservation on Sept. 25, 2021.

The Yakima Herald-Republic reported federal prosecutors on June 13 in the Eastern District of Washington filed an indictment identifying Uriel Balentin Badillo, Joshawa Max Estrada, Wilson Louis Hunt, Michael Lee Moody and Andrew Norris Zack as defendants connected to the homicide of Jedidah Iesha Moreno. Authorities said Moreno shot and killed Strong shortly after she was last seen in 2018, according to the indictment. Moreno was killed the next day, the document said.

Strong was 31 when she disappeared and was a mother of four.

Quaempts said Strong’s name would be called out July 2 during a ceremony for murdered and missing Indigenous people.

But the movement is not just about honoring the dead or missing. Quaempts said this is part of the effort to push tribal and federal authorities, including the FBI, to do more to address the crisis.

The Red Dress Special on July 2 and the larger movement to draw awareness to the missing and murdered also creates space for people to tell their stories and not be silent, Quaempts said, and it gives a voice to those who no longer have one.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The U.S. Department of Justice has announced it will be funneling more resources toward addressing the alarming rate of disappearances and killings among Native Americans.

As part of a new outreach program, the agency will dispatch five attorneys and five coordinators to several regions around the country to help with investigations of unsolved cases and related crimes.

Their reach will span from New Mexico and Arizona to Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan and Minnesota.

Attorney General Merrick Garland acknowledged that the crisis has shattered the lives of victims, their families and entire tribal communities.

“The Justice Department will continue to accelerate our efforts, in partnership with tribes, to keep their communities safe and pursue justice for American Indian and Alaska Native families,” Garland said in a statement.

The announcement came as a special commission gathered in Albuquerque for one of its final field hearings as it works to develop recommendations on improving the response from law enforcement and coordination within local, state, tribal and federal justice systems.