Marita Growing Thunder Montana March

Brut America

There are more than 40 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Montana. This student held her annual walk to honor them. Special thanks to Save Our Sisters, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

Transcript

00:00For this young woman to be missing, that is an entire destruction of a family and

00:09that is what is happening and that's all I could think about.

00:25This young girl I was walking for, she was a mother. She wanted to be a cowgirl.

00:29She had all these hopes and dreams in her life.

00:32And so when I was walking, all I could think about is her kids

00:37and I could think about how much, how they're not going to be raised with a mother.

00:43I was not expecting the amount of people to show up this year.

01:02It was actually the biggest it's ever been.

01:05Her family showed up and there was a lot of family input this year.

01:09Usually I dedicate parts of my walk or my walk, my entire walk to women of the community

01:15or women who have asked me to honor their relatives.

01:40I've been personally affected by it so many times in my lifetime.

01:44I got involved because my mother started talking, or she always talked about her sister.

01:48She talked about her father who talked about his sister who couldn't really talk about the fact that she was murdered

01:53but it was the missing piece in his life.

01:56And my mother's sister who was murdered was the missing piece in her life.

02:10I made ribbon dresses and ribbon skirts and I wore those every day my senior year and freshman year of college.

02:16Sewing has definitely been a healing process for me.

02:20So that's kind of how I have dealt with this issue and dealing with my own problems

02:28and dealing with my own understanding and healing from all of this violence.

02:47There's a lot of positivity and healing.

02:50It's different for a lot of people depending on their perspective of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women

02:56but most of it has been very positive and very uplifting.

02:59It helps people understand what this problem is, especially going on a huge walk and praying

03:04and getting your own feeling and knowing that this is a really painful thing.

03:10Not only the walk but dealing with the sexual violence in Native America.

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