Book Reviewed by:.jpg "MMIWG2S Protest, Montreal 2014")
The emotional crisis faced by the protagonists of Jen Ferguson's Those Pink Mountain Nights stems from the disappearance of a mother and daughter from a First Nations community in Alberta, Canada. Although the book keeps its focus tight, on the intimate stories of a handful of teens, the characters occasionally reference the larger issue of Indigenous women and girls going missing.
This is a problem that impacts communities in the United States as well as in Canada. A 2018 survey of 71 U.S. cities by Annita Lucchesi and Abigail Echo-Hawk reported that murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women. That year, 5,712 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing in the United States, but only 116 were logged into the Department of Justice's database, and almost 60% of police departments contacted could not give complete data about the issue. News coverage of these murders and disappearances is also scanty – the majority of the crimes found by the survey were ...
