Exhibition: We Stand With You: Contemporary Artists Honor the Families of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relative Crisis

The exhibition, titled We Stand With You: Contemporary Artists Honor the Families of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relative Crisis, is guest curated by Rachel Allen, exhibition special project manager at the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane, WA. She grew up in Great Falls, MT, and is familiar with artists and the MMIR issue in Montana.
Following a public call for art, Allen selected works by 11 artists, drawing from all of Montana’s reservations the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe, the Blackfeet Reservation, Rocky Boy, Ft. Belknap, Ft. Peck, Northern Cheyenne, and Crow Reservation, as well as the currently unlanded Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians and Tribal people from the state’s urban areas who have a variety of broader Tribal affiliations. Selected artists include Angela Babby, Della BigHair-Stump, Aspen Decker, Monica Gilles-Brings Yellow, Valentina LaPier, Michael Largo, Carrie Moran McCleary, Jennifer Murphy, Linda Pease, Desiree Rowland, and Benjamin West.
The exhibition is highly sensitive but necessary. Tribal people have disproportionately high rates of assault, rape, abduction, and murder. Indigenous women are four times as likely to go missing, murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average, and homicide is one of the leading causes of death for young Indigenous women, with sexual assault occurring at a much higher rate and with more serious consequences than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States. Montana is the epicenter of this national crisis.