A Walk of Remembrance was held on Saturday, September 14, to honor the memory of late tribal member Crystal Perry, and all other Tribal individuals who have lost their lives due to violence.
The walk was organized by Ciara Hendricks, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's 2024 Powwow Princess, to raise awareness about the ongoing crisis of violence that disproportionately affects Indigenous people, specifically women and girls.
In 2016, the National Crime Information Center recorded 5,712 reports of missing American Indian or Alaska Native women and girls. Only 116 of those cases were logged through the US Department of Justice's federal missing person's database. Nearly four out of five Native women experience violence in their lives, and 67 percent of assaults that are reported involve non-Indigenous perpetrators. Overall, Indigenous women and girls are 10 times more likely to be murdered than any other ethnicity.
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women/People, or MMIW/P crisis, as it is colloquially called, has deeply impacted Tribes across the globe, including right here in Mashpee.
