Thomasa Rivas
"I am Thomasa Rivas, Tohono O’odham of the Buzzard clan, from the southwest area of the reservation. I am a mom, grandma, and great-grandma, and I am an artist - a weaver, beader, and sewist. I come from a traditional family - being traditional, we still have our annual ceremonies that we go to every year. I am also the founder of the Walk For I’itoi - an annual walk for Creator that is going into its 6th year."
The REDress Project at the Land With No Name
"The way I [Thomasa] started was by being invited to Canada by artist Christi Belcourt (Metis) - she contacted me about my face tattoos and asked if I wanted to come up for a first-ever face painting ceremony. She also created a multi-artist project titled Walking With Our Sisters (pictured, left), that was created in memory of, and to raise awareness of, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. It was a collection of over 1000 handmade moccasin vamps made by people all over the northern continent who have experienced MMIW loss within the family. My cousin Louie was murdered on the rez in the 90’s, and my husband’s cousin Christina has been missing since the 1980’s.
When I went, I was interested in everyone’s stories, all the women who were missing. Besides the moccasin vamps, people started to do the ReDress events, and the red dress became the iconic symbol of MMIW. Red represents medicine in Native ways.
The LWNN was a good place for this installation because many non-natives don’t know about this epidemic. They don’t know about the struggles we face in the 21st century, racism both personal and systemic, and it’s important to create greater awareness of this.
By putting this installation out here on the Land I hope to plant a seed in people’s minds, so that we can be seen.
One year, I was in a grocery store with my husband and this guy in his 40’s came up to us and asked, ‘Excuse me, are you guys Native American?’ When I said yes and he went and got his daughter and said, ‘look, real Native Americans!’ And then he backed away, bowing and holding up praying hands to us. I started to get angry after he left, it hit me later on - it disturbed me for a long while. It felt like we were zoo animals. Incidents like this happen all the time. I just want to make people aware of how serious and ongoing this issue is of MMIW, and to help people understand where we’re coming from.”
May 5th is National Awareness Day for Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in the United States and Canada. In honor of these missing people, and to increase awareness of this multinational epidemic, we have chosen to share the following statistics. We also know that numbers cannot tell the whole story. We create art to bring life, dimension, and materiality to numbers like these - the ReDress project, including Thomasa’s installment of it here at the Land With No Name Sanctuary, helps to bring the frightening reality of these numbers into the realm of stories. Humans learn from stories. Thank you for witnessing Thomasa’s part of this story.
Indigenous women are murdered at a rate more than 10x higher than the national average.
Murder is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women and girls aged 10 to 24 according to Centers for Disease Control.
Most murders of Indigenous women are committed by non-Native people on Native-owned land.
96% of American Indian and Alaska Native female victims of sexual violence experience violence at the hands of non-American Indian perpetrators.
While thousands of Indigenous women disappear each year, their cases are less likely to be investigated by law enforcement than those involving other ethnicities.
The bodies of Native American women are 135% more likely to go unidentified than the remains of women of other ethnicities in the U.S., according to a paper published in the Criminal Justice Policy Review journal in March 2023.
This epidemic isn’t exclusive to women. The average age of an MMIP in America is 19.1 years old, and 69% of those missing were assigned male at birth, while 31% were assigned female.
Factors that contribute to the MMIW crisis include: Government policies of forced removal, Land seizures, Domestic violence, and Human trafficking.
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Jaime Black’s The REDress Project
An aesthetic response to the more than 1000 missing & murdered aboriginal women in Canada
The REDress Project focuses around the issue of missing or murdered Aboriginal women across Canada. It is an installation art project based on an aesthetic response to this critical national issue. The project has been installed in public spaces throughout Canada and the United States as a visual reminder of the staggering number of women who are no longer with us. Through the installation I hope to draw attention to the gendered and racialized nature of violent crimes against Aboriginal women and to evoke a presence through the marking of absence.”
This project was installed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “In her artwork, Black attempts to create a dialogue around social and political issues, especially through an exploration of the body and the land as contested sites of historical and cultural knowledge. The REDress Project positions the indigenous female body as a target of colonial violence while reclaiming space for an indigenous female presence. The dresses, collected through community donation, have been installed at several Canadian galleries, museums, and universities since 2011.”