Menominee Nation MMIP Walk set for Keshena on May 5

Keshena’s Menominee Nation MMIP Walk put a hard local question at the center of a national observance: what is being done differently now to prevent Indigenous people from going missing, and to support the families left behind?

The walk was scheduled for May 5, with registration at 4:30 p.m. and the walk beginning at 5 p.m., placing Menominee County squarely inside a coordinated week of MMIP actions that ran May 4-8. May 5 is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people in the United States and Canada, a date also known as Red Dress Day and tied to Métis artist Jaime Black’s REDress Project.

For the Menominee Nation, the event was more than symbolism. The tribe’s present-day reservation is centered in Keshena, and its history begins at the mouth of the Menominee River, about 60 miles east of the current reservation. That local geography matters because MMIP cases are not abstract to families who live, work and travel across Menominee County, where the reach of tribal government, county law enforcement and state systems all intersects.

The broader crisis remains severe. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has estimated there are more than 4,000 unsolved missing and murdered cases, and the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center says disappearances and murders are often tied to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking, sex trafficking and longstanding harms affecting Indigenous communities. In that context, the Keshena walk functioned as both memorial and pressure point, asking whether the public-safety response is keeping pace with the scale of the loss.

Across the country during the 2026 awareness week, communities marked the issue with marches, rallies, talking circles, self-defense classes and candlelight vigils. Many also broadened the observance beyond women and girls to include Native people more broadly, reflecting the way families and advocates have pushed the conversation to match the reality of who is disappearing and who is being killed.

For Menominee Nation participants, the walk was part of that larger movement, but it carried a sharper local edge: a public reminder that every missing person case depends on fast reporting, steady follow-up and institutions willing to coordinate. In Keshena, that meant the burden of accountability rested not only on remembrance, but on whether leaders and law enforcement could deliver a response families have long been asking for.