On this Day of Awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Relatives, during the global #Week4Palestine, we in AF³IRM Los Angeles grieve.

We grieve for Hanna Harris (Northern Cheyenne), for whom this day was proclaimed. She would have been 32 years old today. We grieve for Juana María, the last living member of the original peoples of San Nicolas Island, who died in 1853 at the Santa Barbara Mission just weeks after being stolen from her home.

We mourn all missing and murdered Native sisters, daughters, mothers, and relatives, here in California, the “state” with the fifth highest rate of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples in the so-called U.S.

We mourn, we grieve, and we rage, because we know the U.S. politicians, capitalists and colonizers who ignore this epidemic are the same ones who sanction the slaughter and torture of Indigenous Palestinians today.

We condemn the U.S.’s backing of “israel” even as we acknowledge that the U.S. itself was founded on genocide. We denounce their sick relationship. We see their shared tactics and corrupt morals: how the misogynist, colonial police states both weaponize sexual assault, humiliation, and starvation; how they are both deliberately complicit in the disappearance and killing of Indigenous women, girls, and relatives.

We see “israel”’s strategy for what it actually is. It is not a war against an armed minority as they claim. It is a plan to decimate an entire people, which is why over 70 percent of those killed in Palestine in the last 211 days have been women and children. 

This May 5th, we demand an end to the system that profits at the expense of our communities and colonized peoples everywhere. The dehumanization, objectification and exploitation of Indigenous women, girls, and relatives must end. Imperialist racist patriarchy must end.

From here on Chumash, Tongva, Acjachemen, and Tataviam ancestral lands, we demand: NO MORE STOLEN SISTERS. NO MORE STOLEN RELATIVES. NO MORE GENOCIDE.