Wearing red, dozens rally in Fresno on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Day
A handful of red dresses hung from the trees around Fresno State’s Peace Garden on Friday, swaying in the gentle Friday night breeze as silent symbols of the disproportionate violence suffered by Indigenous people.
Many of the dresses carried somber messages.
“More than half of Indigenous women have been physically abused by their intimate partners,” one read.
Inside the Fresno State Peace Garden, more than 100 people — many of them also wearing red — gathered in recognition of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day. The color and garment has come to signal solidarity among the many tribes affected by this pattern of violence against women in particular.
Since 2021, May 5 has been nationally recognized as a day of awareness for the disproportionate rate of crimes committed against Native American women and girls.
A 2016 National Institute of Justice report found that more than half of American Indian and Alaska Native women experience sexual violence in their lifetime – and more than four in five experience violence in general. The vast majority – or 96% – of sexual violence these women experience is at the hands of non-Native people.
Fresno County is no stranger to this issue, where the 2021 death of a Native American woman from Auberry, who had gone missing days before her body was found, remains unsolved.
Members of indigenous tribes in the Fresno area and across California who gathered Friday mourned the loss of their own relatives over generations.
“We need our neighbors and our friends to care that this has happened,” said Leece Lee-Oliver, director of American Indian Studies at Fresno State, in an interview with The Bee. “We need it to be intolerable to others, not just us.”
During her remarks to the crowd Friday, she called on everyone in attendance to be part of a “new coalition” in the Central Valley to face down an issue “as old as colonialism.”
“We need it here,” she said. “How are we where we are in the Central Valley, and nobody’s paying attention?”
‘It’s hardly ever publicized’
Members of the Fresno American Indian Health Project, an organization that works with Native families that are victims of this type of violence, also helped organize Friday’s gathering.
Ruben Garcia, director of Native Wellness at the organization, told The Bee in an interview that the issue calls for greater support from Fresno leaders. He pointed to the creation of a “Feather Alert” system – much like Amber Alerts that notify the public of a missing or abducted child – in California that allows law enforcement to quickly alert people en masse of missing indigenous persons.
“Because one thing that we know is when things happen, whether it’s on a rancheria or reservation, that it doesn’t always make it into the mainstream media,” he said, “and it’s hardly ever publicized.”
Improving response time from law enforcement “is essential,” he added.
“It’d be essential to either finding a person,” he said, “or stopping the crime from actually happening.”
Historically, a small percentage of these cases are investigated, let alone solved, researchers have said.
A 2018 study from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that while the National Crime Information Center indicated 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women in girls in 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database only logged 116.
Fresno County’s ongoing case
A Fresno County case that remains unsolved to this day is that of Bessie Walker.
The 27-year-old woman, who lived in Auberry and was of the Mono indigenous people, was reported missing on Aug. 8, 2021. Just under two weeks later, on Aug. 21, she was found dead by a search party of her family and friends.
An autopsy reported her cause of death “undetermined.”
The Fresno County Sheriff’s Office called the death “suspicious” in an April 2022 news release announcing a $10,000 cash reward for anyone who came forward with information.
Over a year has passed since that announcement – but still “there are no new developments” in the case, Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Tony Botti told the Ed Lab in an email Friday.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Detective Oscar Iniguez at 559-600-8201.
This story was originally published May 6, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
