LITTLE BOSTON – As Jennifer Wright-Tom recalls her sister’s life, the memories flow easily.

As a youngster, Tawnya LaVonne Tom would run through the woods at night, lights unneeded. She would grab her sister’s shoes and run off. She loved the color blue, music, basketball. Someday she hoped to be a mother to a boy. She had hoped to go to college. She had hopes and dreams. The sisters shared Port Gamble S’Klallam tribal heritage.

“The way that we grew up, a lot of kids, they don’t say, ‘When I grow up, I want to be….’” Wright-Tom said. “That’s not something that you hear often. When people ask that question, you just laugh and walk away. We stayed strong through that and had hopes. We were always talking about dreams and what we wanted to do.”

Her sister’s life would be cut short at age 19 in a murder on the Hoh Indian Reservation in 2003, her body dumped in a box next to the Hoh River.

“When we lost our sister, the whole world came tumbling down,” Wright-Tom said Thursday, standing on the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe’s reservation. Holding a picture of her late sister, she pauses for a moment as tears well up, mixing with the droplets of rain that settle on her face on a drizzly May day.

Her own experience is just one of many similar stories, and Wright-Tom notes the many others she knows who have been touched by similar heartbreak.

After reflecting for a few minutes, she holds up a bullhorn and helps to muster a crowd and kick off a march with the goal of raising awareness around the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Thursday’s National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls brought a crowd of marchers to the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe’s reservation to reflect and remember those caught up in the crisis.

“We have a strength in unity,” Wright-Tom said. “We come together in love, and this love helps us guide each other into this movement so that people understand that this is our reality. We gotta move on, we have to do something about this.”

Indigenous women are murdered at disproportionately high rates compared with other ethnicities. According to reporting from the USA TODAY Network, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center reported 5,203 missing Indigenous girls and women in 2021, which meant they disappeared at a rate more than two and a half times higher than their estimated share of the U.S. population. The real rate is likely higher, USA TODAY reported; the total was deemed an undercount in an October report to Congress because of a lack of comprehensive federal data.

More:Indigenous woman's murder shows systemic struggles in MMIW cases

Chris Barone, one of the organizers for the march on Thursday and the director of court services for the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, pointed to statistics showing that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, with a little over half of those women experiencing sexual violence. One report found some counties in the U.S. with rates of murder against Native women to be more than 10 times the national average.

“It’s clearly an epidemic that needs to have light shone on it,” Barone said.

There are currently 126 names on the Washington State Patrol’s list of missing Indigenous people.

In March, Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law a bill that establishes a statewide alert system for missing Indigenous people similar to Amber or so-called "silver" alerts. The system will notify law enforcement when there's a report of a missing Indigenous person. It will also place messages on highway reader boards and on the radio and social media and will provide information to the news media.

Back on the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe's reservation on Thursday, following a blessing, the group that had gathered began walking across the tribe’s reservation as rain fell from the sky.

“We have to do something, and this is us making that stand,” Wright-Tom said. “All of our relatives here from everywhere, we’re here to make a stand.”

This story contains reporting from the USA TODAY Network and the Associated Press.

Nathan Pilling is a reporter covering Bainbridge Island, North Kitsap and Washington State Ferries for the Kitsap Sun. He can be reached at 360-792-5242, nathan.pilling@kitsapsun.com or on Twitter at @KSNatePilling.

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