Eureka High students march for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples awareness

Eureka High School students will walk from campus to the Humboldt County Courthouse on May 5, then pour red sand into the cracks of the sidewalk to draw attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples in Humboldt County.

Student organizer Autumn Morales said the red sand will symbolize Indigenous people “falling through the cracks” of society and being forgotten. The walk is intended to do more than mark an awareness day. Morales said the students want to raise local awareness of how MMIP affects the community and create pressure for change.

The planned march lands in a county where the issue carries a painful public-safety dimension. Humboldt County has one of the highest MMIP rates compared with other California counties despite having a smaller Native population than many parts of the state. Tribal leaders and advocates have long tied the crisis to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking, sex trafficking, substance use, drug trafficking and labor and sex trafficking, along with jurisdictional confusion and data gaps that make cases harder to track and solve.

May 5 is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives, honoring Hanna Harris, a 21-year-old Northern Cheyenne woman whose disappearance and murder in 2013 helped spur the observance. The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center says that on some reservations Native women face murder rates more than ten times the national average.

The Humboldt Area Foundation says California ranks fifth in the nation for MMIP incidents, and that the far north of the state accounts for most of the cases. The Yurok Tribe says California has the fifth-highest number of MMIP cases, with the vast majority involving young women and girls.

The issue has also reached the state Capitol. The California Native American Legislative Caucus has made MMIP Week an annual event around May 5, underscoring that lawmakers see the crisis as a continuing failure of safety systems, not a symbolic one-day observance.

In the Pacific Redwoods region, the Humboldt Area Foundation has launched the Pacific Redwoods MMIP Crisis Action Fund to support regional research, policy advocacy, crisis response and recovery, and technical assistance gaps. That broader network of response frames the Eureka High walk as part of a growing local push for accountability, resources and a stronger public response in communities that have spent years demanding action.