MMIWP National Week of Action — The Federal Government Recognizes the Crisis. The Women Are Still Missing.
What actually happened
The 2026 National Week of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People (MMIWP) runs from Monday, May 4, through Friday, May 8 . The week builds on May 5, which the U.S. Senate has recognized since 2017 as the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIWR) . That date honors Hanna Harris, a 21-year-old citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, who went missing in July 2013 and was found murdered days later on the reservation. Her family conducted their own search after an inadequate law enforcement response .
Today, May 5, 2026, communities across the country are holding events: a gathering in Hilo, Hawaii, led by He Ho‘omaka Hou Ana O’ Puna; a day of reflection and visioning at Bismarck State College in North Dakota, with keynote speaker Susan Power; and National Day of Theatre Readings at Colorado College featuring MMIW-focused plays by Indigenous playwrights Marcie Rendon, Jeff Barehand, and Jaisey Bates .
On May 4, U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Steve Daines (R-MT) introduced a bipartisan resolution commemorating May 5, 2026, as the National Day of Awareness . The resolution reaffirms federal recognition of the crisis but does not appropriate new funding or change existing law.
The week is organized by the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center (NIWRC), the National Partners Work Group on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and the MMIWR Family Advisor Workgroup . The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) also supports the week, calling for visibility, community-led solutions, and an end to the crisis .
The numbers that are not abstract
The Centers for Disease Control reports that murder is the third leading cause of death for American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls . The murder rate for Native women on some reservations is more than ten times the national average .
The National Institute of Justice found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women — 84.3 percent — have experienced violence in their lifetime. More than half — 56.1 percent — have experienced sexual violence. More than half — 55.5 percent — have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner. Nearly half — 48.8 percent — have experienced stalking .
In Hawaii, 64 percent of trafficking survivors identified as being part Native Hawaiian . Ninety-five percent of Indigenous women who go missing in the United States do not make national news .
These numbers are not outliers. They are the predictable output of jurisdictional chaos, underfunded tribal law enforcement, and systematic data erasure.
The system at work is jurisdictional fragmentation as a tool of state neglect.
The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women is not primarily a story of individual perpetrators. It is a story of legal infrastructure designed to fail. On many reservations, tribal law enforcement has no jurisdiction over non-Native offenders — a gap created by the 1978 Supreme Court ruling in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, which held that tribes lack criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians unless Congress explicitly authorizes it. Congress has not fully closed that gap. The result is a jurisdictional maze where a crime committed on reservation land may involve tribal police, the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and county or state authorities — none of whom are required to coordinate. Cases fall between agencies. Bodies are found. Cases go cold.
Savanna's Act, signed into law in 2020 after years of advocacy, was supposed to address this by improving data collection and coordination among federal, state, and tribal law enforcement . The law is named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old citizen of the Spirit Lake Tribe who was murdered in 2017 while eight months pregnant. The law passed. The gaps remain. Savanna's Act mandates reporting. It does not mandate prosecution. It requires coordination. It does not fund it sufficiently.
The Parity for Tribal Law Enforcement Act, introduced by Senator Cantwell in 2023 and 2025, would help tribal police departments hire and retain officers by providing access to federal retirement and benefits . It has not passed. The SURVIVE Act, which would increase resources for tribal crime victim assistance programs, has been introduced and stalled .
This is not a failure of individual effort. It is the design of a system where the federal government has a trust responsibility to tribes and simultaneously refuses to fund the enforcement mechanisms that would fulfill it.
The real-world harm is the ongoing disappearance of women the state has decided are less valuable.
The families who search for their missing relatives do so because law enforcement does not. The mothers who organize vigils do so because the FBI does not prioritize cases on tribal land. The grassroots advocates who built the National Week of Action did so because the federal government has held hearings, passed resolutions, and issued proclamations — and the bodies keep accumulating.
The harm of jurisdictional fragmentation is not abstract inefficiency. It is the mother who has to call four different agencies to report her daughter missing, each of whom tells her it is someone else's jurisdiction. It is the family that finds their relative's body themselves because no one else was looking. It is the 95 percent of cases that never make the news, never receive a task force, never get a resolution.
For survivors of domestic violence within Indigenous communities — who make up more than half of Native women — the jurisdictional gap means that calling the police may not lead to an arrest if the abuser is non-Native. That is not speculation. It is the documented consequence of Oliphant and the cases that have reaffirmed it. The Violence Against Women Act's 2013 and 2022 reauthorizations restored some tribal jurisdiction over domestic violence, dating violence, and protection order violations — even when the defendant is non-Native . But those provisions are limited to specific crimes and require specific procedural protections. They do not cover all forms of violence. They do not cover all defendants. The gaps remain.
Two-Spirit relatives face compounded violence at the intersection of anti-Indigenous racism and anti-LGBTQ bias. Including Two-Spirit people in MMIW advocacy is not an add-on. It is a recognition that the systems producing violence against Indigenous women produce violence against Two-Spirit people by the same mechanisms: jurisdictional neglect, data erasure, and state failure to protect .
What the Week of Action does
The National Week of Action is not a request. It is not a plea. It is a coordinated campaign of visibility and demand. Organizers ask communities to download and display an official poster in windows, offices, and public spaces; to share using #MMIWRNationalWeekofAction; and to take specific actions: urging senators to pass the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act reauthorization with tribal provisions; demanding the Department of Justice and FBI improve data collection under Savanna's Act; supporting Indigenous-led organizations including Sovereign Bodies Institute, Families of Sisters in Spirit, and StrongHearts Native Helpline (1-844-7NATIVE) .
The red dresses hung in windows, the red handprints painted over mouths, the marches, the theatre readings, the vigils — these are not symbolic in the way the state likes symbolism. They are evidentiary. They are the visible record of what the state has chosen not to count.
If you are a survivor of sexual violence: StrongHearts Native Helpline: 1-844-7NATIVE (culturally specific, confidential) RAINN: 1-800-656-4673 Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
The structural statement
The federal government recognizes a National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women every May 5. The day is a resolution, not a remedy. The crisis is a structure, not a series of isolated tragedies. The women go missing because the system allows them to.
She doesn't chase trends. She channels truth.
