Inside the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska office, a few locals are sitting around a long table making posters for Walking With Our Sisters, Unalaska’s annual event for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Awareness Day.
Ariel Gustafson is putting the finishing touches on one of her posters: a red regalia with the words “You Are Not Forgotten.”
“Certain cultures believe that the red is the color that lost spirits can see,” she said. “So we’re trying to help guide them home.”
Gustafson is Unangax̂ and from Unalaska. Another poster she made at last year’s walk features the Woman of Ounalashka, a pencil sketch of an Unangax̂ woman drawn by artist John Webber during one of Captain Cook’s voyages in 1778. Gustafson recreated it with a red handprint across her face and the words “No More Stolen Sisters.”
“I just kind of wanted to incorporate my culture and our culture that’s here with this walk,” she said.
Walking With Our Sisters is a joint effort between the Qawalangin Tribe and Unalaskans Against Sexual Assault and Family Violence. The tribe’s Cultural Resources Director, Anfesia Tutiakoff, was out sick during the poster-making gathering, so USAFV Director M. Lynn Crane explains how the walk started.
“We started doing it a few years ago in order to recognize and draw attention to the ongoing tragedy of Native women and Native people in general,” she said. “Who disappear and are murdered at so much higher rates than the rest of the population.”
There’s data that backs it up. The National Institute of Justice found that 84% of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violent victimization in their lifetime. Alaska ranks fourth in the country for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls cases, with 52 documented, a figure researchers said is likely higher. According to research by local historian Michael Livingston, at least 26 Unangax̂ women and girls have been murdered since 1959.
“I know through my work at USAFV that rates of violence against women in general are very high,” Crane said. “But against Native women in particular, they are astronomical.”
Gustafson notices that disparity too, especially in what stories get told in True Crime media.
“There are so many movies and podcasts and everything about all these women that go missing, and they’re almost always white women,” she said. “There's nothing wrong with attention being drawn to that, but we need that same energy, that same type of awareness.”
Gustafson said she shares posts about missing Indigenous women and girls in Alaska on Facebook almost every week. And on Tuesday, she’ll show up to Walking With Our Sisters for her community and for the Native women and girls who were never found.
“Native women are sacred and should be protected, and so we really have to protect each other,” she said. “If somebody's missing, they’re missing, and there's nothing that anybody has ever done to deserve this.”
The Walking With Our Sisters event is on Tuesday, starting at 5:30 p.m. in front of the Unalaska Public Library. For more information on MMIP Awareness Week events in Unalaska, visit the Qawalangin Tribe’s Facebook page or contact the tribal office.
