On May 5th, red dresses hang from trees and fences across North America each year, a haunting symbol of the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have experienced an all-too-common theme of violence and death. While grief washes over their communities, the National Crime Information Center reported 5,487 cases of missing Native American women and girls in the United States in just 2022. This year 14-year-old Emily Pike of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, whose unfortunate death took place earlier this year, underlines the devastating extent of this crisis.
As communities mourn and demand answers, artists like Nayana LaFond are turning grief into action, using the power of art to ensure that these women and girls remain remembered.
“I am Indigenous and a survivor of domestic abuse,” said LaFond, “We all have intergenerational trauma.”
For LaFond, a Massachusetts-based artist and activist of the Anishinaabe, Abenaki, and Mi’kmaq tribes, the work began not with a vision, but with a moment of boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beginning as a random act of connection and spiraling into a movement, she engaged in a Facebook group called Social Distance Powwows. On May 5th, a day reserved to honor Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), people following the group began posting photos of MMIW to honor their lives.
LaFond came across a selfie posted by a woman named Lauraina Bear and asked if she could paint her portrait. When Bear agreed, it received over two thousand reactions overnight.
“I just said, if anyone wants me to paint them, I’ll do it for free,” Lafond said, “On the first day I got over 25 messages with stories and pictures. I couldn’t say no to any of them, so I said yes to them all. They never stopped coming.”
The portraits, raw and real, became a form of what she calls “micro activism”, a small contribution of raising awareness, creating a not so small impact. What began as a personal, quiet project turned into a visual movement honoring MMIW across North America.
“I didn’t start out thinking, ‘I’m going to do this,‘” she said. “It snowballed. And then I realized I needed to do something with these paintings.”
She entered one into a competition and won “Best in Show” at the 2021 Juried Exhibition. Soon after, invitations and recognition began pouring in. It began her series “Portraits in Red”, red being the only visible color to spirits, a belief shared across Indigenous communities, and the color also being associated with healing and protection.
Today, LaFond serves as Curator and Director of Online Exhibitions and the Online Arts Academy at the Whitney Center for the Arts in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Yet the weight of the work remains.
“It is rewarding, but it can sometimes be very stressful,” she admitted. “It’s just been hard trying to keep up with it.”
For LaFond, each brushstroke is an act of remembrance and resistance. And behind every portrait lies a story she carries with her.
A significant part of her process includes taking great care with every canvas. Painting becomes both emotional labor and sacred responsibility, thinking about their experience and her experience while she is painting, and about the intersectionality between them. She is careful to not overstep any boundaries.
“There are two stories that stay with me,” she shared. “The first is a portrait I made of Kozee Decorah. She was murdered by her fiancé a couple of days after Mother’s Day when she was only 22. She had fled him, but he caught up with her. They found him sleeping in a cabin, naked, with their infant. He said she did it to herself and set their belongings on fire. It’s his reaction that sticks out to me. He just denied it the whole way.”
LaFond views Kozee’s case as a reflection of systemic injustice: “He was not Indigenous, and he was charged with manslaughter on Indian territory,” LaFond explained. “The federal government claimed it was outside their jurisdiction, but most reservations don’t have the resources to convict. I mean, ‘manslaughter on Indian territory’—what even is that?”
The crime occurred on tribal land, the federal government claimed it was outside their jurisdiction. However, many tribal courts lack the authority and resources to prosecute non-Native offenders due to a principle called “plenary power”, giving the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over non-Indigenous people on tribal land.
“This is an excellent example of racism,” LaFond declared. “This happened in 2020. A lot of these are very recent, but many people assume that these things happened a long time ago.”
LaFond’s anger stands deeply rooted in the grounds of her ancestry.
“I come from a line of women who have experienced this violence. Most of them survived, but a few did not. It’s one of the most dangerous things about being an Indigenous woman, and there’s no real recourse for it.”
Another family that left its mark on her is the Hunter family, whom she remains close to. They first reached out to her directly.
“Non-Indigenous men murdered several of their female relatives,” she said, “What struck me is how they’ve kept going. I wish it were unusual, but it’s not. Every Native person knows someone. Everybody does.”
Emily Pike, whose life was cut short and whose brutal death shook her community, continues to present a familiar pattern in these stories. Pike’s killer still remains wanted and unknown. Though LaFond didn’t paint Emily, her voice and her art speak for her and thousands of others.
“The last three years have been kind of retraumatizing,” she admitted, “The family will reach out and usually ask me how much it costs, and I go through the spiel that it’s free. Some send photographs or I will drive to their house to photograph them.”
LaFond mentions that she has had some issues where one family member says one thing to her about how they want the portrait done and the other says ‘Oh that’s not right’. She has had a couple of families come to her and say they could not have a memorial for their loved one and the exhibit felt like they were able to have that.
“The creation of the work itself is always felt,” LaFond explained, “I think about their faces and make sure I got their features correct, because if it doesn’t look like them, what is the point? I think ‘I hope I can paint you in a way that you will be happy with.’”
LaFond had been honored with multiple blanket ceremonies. A tradition, rooted in Native American culture, symbolizing unity and the coming together of two individuals as one. During the ceremony, the couple is wrapped together in a blanket, representing the beginning of their shared journey in marriage. An amazing experience, but also an overwhelming one. To manage the emotional toll of the work, LaFond turned to coping strategies and attempts to mentally detach from the canvas when she was done, but it’s not always so simple.
“To cope,” said LaFond, “I began studying Reiki for myself. It’s incredibly heavy when I meet with these families. But I have new family members all over the place now.”
LaFond believes that art can tell the truth in ways that statistics cannot.
“A statistic can be just a number, and it’s easy to ignore. Especially these days, we’ve become so desensitized because of social media,” she said, “but when you put a face in front of someone, in your mind you start multiplying those faces. You look around the room and there are hundreds of them. It changes perspective.”
As communities come together across North America on May 5th, they demand visibility, justice, and change. Through the eyes of LaFond’s portraits, she ensures the world cannot look away.
