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Graduate brings awareness of MMIW to ceremony

Wylee Brown takes advantage of outdoor ceremony to symbolize tragedy of missing and murdered indigenous women

Public awareness of the inordinately high number of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls has come increasingly to the forefront as a serious issue in the United States, as well as Canada, and one 2020 Chinook High School graduate, Wylee Brown, took the opportunity of her graduation ceremony to help spotlight the issue to her community.

Brown, who said it feels really good to be graduating, said she didn't know how she got the idea to make her unique statement that started with being able to ride her horse to the graduation ceremony, held this year at the Blaine County Fairgrounds. Wylee Brown rode her horse Jose alongside her dad, Tom Brown, who rode his horse Neechi, and the horses were decorated in Native symbols, including the red hand print over the mouth, which has come to symbolize the MMIW awareness movement.

"It just kind of came to me," she said. "It was already kind of a special deal because this is the only class that's been able to do something like this (ride horses to graduation). I figured I might as well make it even more special by riding with Dad, for one, and trying to open people's eyes to stuff that's going, to the girls that couldn't have that."

Wylee Brown said she doesn't have anyone in her immediate circle, who has gone missing, been murdered or died under suspicious circumstances, but she she has friends and peers on social media who have sent out pleas for help finding a lost loved one.

Plenty of girls didn't get to go to their graduation or their senior prom, she said.

"So I figured I'd bring them to graduation right along with me," she said, "... to bring awareness to the situation, thinking it's not just my graduation there's other people out there that never got to have one."

The girls and women are victims of abuse and human trafficking, and lost to their families after running away.

Data on the numbers of missing and murdered women varies widely because of the difficulties in reporting. Tribal, city, county, state and federal jurisdictions overlap in most of these cases, making the numbers hard to pin down - and the cases hard to act on in a timely manner and ultimately solve. But Montana, with seven reservations and wide-open rural areas, is considered to be one of the top states for numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.

A little more than a year ago, a group of advocates for missing and murdered indigenous women walked the length of the Flathead Indian Reservation, joining a growing number of similar events and protests in the U.S. and Canada, as well as pleas to lawmakers for help.

Since then, initial steps have been taken to create a system and culture to helps stem the tide of this type of tragedy. Some of the major milestones include passing of Hanna's Act that directed and funded the state Department of Justice to hire a missing persons specialist to coordinate with local, state, federal and tribal law enforcement on cases; development of a state DOJ MMIW task force; Canada's release of a National Inquiry into MMIW that concluded the problem amounted to a "race-based genocide" by the Canadian government; the attorney general hiring two specialists for MMIW; development of a centralized missing persons cases public database; recognition in proposed federal legislation that the problem extends to indigenous boys and men; a missing and murdered indigenous people task force formed by the White House, and the hiring of a missing persons specialist in the Montana Department of Justice.

Brown said it was fun to decorate her horse with the symbols, which also included a circle around one eye to see danger, bands on the nose as war honors, an arrow to add strength, a horse hoofprint on the hop for each year of high school and a squiggly line as a medicine symbol

"Tom and I are thankful Wylee was surrounded by a village of phenomenal teachers and administrators who helped get her to the finish line," Wylee's mom Rene Brown said,. adding with a laugh, "It wasn't always a smooth ride."

This rough ride was partly because most years Wylee, and her sisters, had to board in town during winter months when the roads were questionable to their home in the Bear Paw Mountains.

"Tom and I love that Wylee was able to find a way to incorporate awareness of a cause that is so important to her into graduation," she said. "She hadn't been too excited to participate in the actual ceremony until she decided to make a statement in authentic Wylee fashion."

Wylee Brown said she hopes that her statement during graduation helps people be more aware. They need to pay attention to their loved ones who are in trouble, or who have broken their patterns to catch when they are missing earlier. And people need be aware of their surroundings and suspicious activity, in case they are witnessing an important detail for an investigation - or they are in danger themselves.

The hand print on her horse's hip, applied courtesy of a cousin, Brown added, symbolizes mission accomplished.

 

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