Nearly 100 students gathered in White Plaza outside the Native American Cultural Center on Monday to mark Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) Day, honoring lives lost while demanding justice for violence against and within Indigenous communities.
More than four in five American Indian and Alaskan native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, which is far higher than the national average. Murder is also the third-leading cause of death for indigenous women and girls aged one to forty-five. The National Crime Information Centre recorded 5,712 cases of missing indigenous women and girls in 2016, yet only 116 cases were logged in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Missing Persons database.
“Nobody has been doing anything,” said Julia Perez-Pacheco ’26, who helped organize the event. Perez-Pacheco is Quechua from Peru and Cora and Huichol from Mexico.
Organizers of the rally sought to draw attention to violence against indigenous people, which often goes unreported and unaddressed. “We really don’t know who’s perpetrating all these murders because a lot of the time it’s not investigated; people don’t care,” said Puali’i Zidek ’27, a Native Hawaiian and co-organizer of the event.
The rally represented a collaboration between the Women’s Community Center, the Native American Cultural Center, the SHARE Title IX and Title VI Office and Stanford American Indian Organization.
Native and Indigenous Stanford students, many of whom had lost relatives to murder, spoke at the event, sharing personal stories, reading poetry or playing music from their tribes. Most of the speakers introduced themselves in their native language.
“It’s the collective community coming together to combat this crisis that we are facing right now and we are consistently facing for generations since colonization,” Perez-Pacheco said.
The organizers and attendees wore specially designed red t-shirts to honor the dead, which allows “ancestors to see a way to call back the spirits of missing relatives,” according to Chazlyn Nanabah Curley ’26, a rally co-organizer who started the tradition of MMIP Day at Stanford as a first-year.
“It’s a symbol of blood, like how we all bleed red,” explained Curley, who belongs to the Navajo Nation.
Curley said that since organizing the event in 2022, she has seen heightened awareness about MMIP on campus, with the event reaching more people. She noted that she was happy with the event’s turnout and the diversity of the audience.
Zola Ortiz ’27, a member of the Comanche Nation, Kiowa, Caddo, Acoma and Diné tribes who helped organize the rally, emphasized that an important component of the event’s programming was outreach to different community centers on campus. She stressed “how important and crucial it is for community centers to be in collaboration and support of each other because native liberation is tied to everyone’s liberation.”
“What’s important is definitely the wider Stanford community listening to us, listening to our stories, listening to what we want to achieve for our communities,” Perez-Pacheco said.
Ortiz added that “awareness is the first step, but action and justice need to happen as well.”