By Dan Gunderson

MPR News/90.1 FM

It’s a shared grief in Indian Country, women who are missing or have been murdered.

“Once you start talking about it, it comes up so naturally: ‘Yeah, I had a cousin … or my grandmother … great-grandmother … there’s somebody.’ There’s some story in their family background that involves this issue,” said Angela Two Stars, curator of the art exhibit “Bring Her Home: Stolen Daughters of Turtle Island.”

The show opened earlier this year at All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis. It’s now traveling around the region and is on display at the Fargo Public Library.

Personal experience influenced how Two Stars put the show together. She is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe. And when she was 9 years old, her grandmother was kidnapped and murdered.

“When my grandmother was missing, one the strongest memories I have is [of] my dad pulling the car over and just walking out into the woods,” she said, “and I’m sitting there in the car with my mom and siblings watching him slowly disappear into the woods, and being terrified that he was going to come running out because he’d found my grandmother’s body.”

Two Stars understood from that experience the challenges of asking artists to produce work about something so personal, that might awaken painful memories. She asked several American Indian artists from across North America to create original pieces for the exhibit.

One of those artists is Laura Youngbird, a mixed media artist who also directs Native American art programs at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo. She is an enrolled member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

Four prints Youngbird created are displayed in the busy main entrance to the Fargo Public Library. Each monograph shows images of empty, ghostlike dresses floating on a blue background among bits of sewing patterns. The work is called “More Than a Memory.”

“They were somebody’s mother, sister, aunt, grandmother,” she said. “So often, nobody cares to really investigate. They just get forgotten.”

There’s limited information on the number of missing American Indian women because the federal government has never officially collected the data, and most tribes have not had access to the national crime database.

But studies have found that 4 of every 5 indigenous women experience violence, and more than have half have been victims of sexual assault.

Youngbird has lived those statistics, she said. She was raped as a young woman and survived an abusive marriage.

“He told me he only beat me up in when I deserved it. I did get out of that situation, and I also understand how people get in that trap too, in that cycle,” she said. “It’s touched so many people’s lives and, really, it’s an epidemic. For some reason, Native women seem more disposable.”

Youngbird is hopeful that when the exhibit hangs in very public places, like the downtown Fargo library, it will spark thoughtful conversations.

“Hopefully it brings an awareness, people actually say[ing], ‘Yeah, this is a problem. You know, maybe I should pay more attention to it and look out for my neighbors,’” she said, “and to teach your sons to be respectful of women.”

While “Bring Her Home” memorializes women who have been lost, it is at times defiant and optimistic in the face of the pain.

Hillary Kempenich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, created a piece in memory of Savanna Greywind, a pregnant Fargo woman who was killed and her baby cut from her womb last year.

Another of Kempenich’s pieces — “Prayers Up: Tobacco Down” — depicts Native women in dance regalia. It’s designed to show the unity and strength of indigenous women in the face of violence.

There’s also a bright, happy painting of a Native woman, by Kayeri Akweks, an enrolled member of the Upper Mohawk First Nation on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario.

There’s a label next to the painting: “This is what one healthy, happy, joyful, thoughtful, sweet, and kind, innocent and non sexualized indigenous female looks like, in case you forgot,” it says.

“Bring Her Home” has been so successful that Angela Two Stars is now in the midst of curating a second show on the same topic, which will open in February at All My Relations Gallery.

Two Stars hopes this exhibit and the next will help people think of the thousands of missing indigenous women across the country as more than statistics — “think of them not as a victim, but think of who they were, and their roles,” she said. “And their families, the people that miss them and love them.”