BOISE, Idaho — A cascading tower of 75 red dresses suspends from the ceiling of a gallery in the Boise State Student Union Building.
The exhibit, featuring dresses students collected from women at the university and in the community, “aims to bring to social consciousness those women who have been hidden and unseen before.”
Those hidden and unseen women? Missing and murdered indigenous women, or MMIW.
The numbers are staggering, the Idaho Statesman reports: Nationwide, homicide is the third-leading cause of death for American Indian and Alaska Native women under the age of 20 and the sixth leading cause of death for those between 20 and 44 years of age, according to a 2016 Centers for Disease Control study.
Eighty-four percent of Native American and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, according to a 2016 Department of Justice study.