Silent powwow gives women voice
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PABLO – Marita Growing Thunder’s graduation ceremony from Polson High School on Saturday, June 3, marked the finish point of her yearlong project to give voice to missing or murdered indigenous women.
“As many times as I wanted to give up, I made it,” she said.
She vowed to wear different dresses she designed, created, and sewed in a style traditional to indigenous women every day for a full school year to bring attention to her cause.
She displayed 80 of those dresses at The People’s Center after her graduation ceremony with a silent powwow. A drum was set up in the center, stick game pieces were in place, and chairs were arranged, but the people were missing. “This is a scene where these women would have been if they weren’t missing or murdered,” she said. “This is their powwow.”
At times, she said she felt too exhausted from studying, testing, and other activities to work on a new dress, but then, she would think about the thousands of indigenous women that have been murdered or gone missing, including women in her own family, and it inspired her to sit down and keep sewing late into the night.
And although it wasn’t often, she did receive a few negative comments about the project, mostly online, which would motivate her to work even harder, and she completed about 100 dresses during the school year. Many people donated material to help with the cost of the project.
She decided to forego the usual cap and gown and wear another indigenous style dress to her graduation ceremony; this one was a long maroon dress starting at her shoulders with four rows of elk teeth around the top, a black belt at her waist, and ribbons around the ends of the sleeves. Her beaded moccasins peeked out from under the dress.
Marita said she accomplished her goals for the year. “I’ve given voice to the voiceless with these dresses,” she said. “And, I think people are a lot more aware of this issue. This opened a safety zone for people to speak about this. It’s not a hidden issue anymore.”
The project has also given her strength. When she started it, her own voice was a bit quieter. “I would hide behind my hair and mumble,” she said. “Now, I feel like I can conquer the world.”
During the year, Marita was given a work of art by artist Alex Wright to symbolize the issue, she received a quilt from a conference in Palm Springs, California, she was named Montana’s Indian Student of the Year, and she walked 80-miles from Dayton to Arlee during a trek that took several days to bring awareness to the issue.
Salish Kootenai College President Sandra Boham attended the silent powwow at The People’s Center. She said many students and faculty at the college started wearing native style dresses on Fridays to support Marita’s project.
“This is leadership at it’s finest,” Boham said of Marita. “She is a young woman showing us what the next generation of leaders looks like.”
Boham looked out at the silent powwow. “You can’t see all these missing people and not feel the power of it,” she said. “Marita has made it okay to talk about a subject matter that is incredibly hard to talk about. She has asked us to look at these dresses and imagine all these silent voices of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, and friends.”
Marita has gained support from students as well as staff members. Joanne Morrow works at the Polson High School. She started wearing a kilt to school on Thursdays to support Marita’s project.
“I have so much respect for Marita,” Morrow said. “She feels this problem intensely and I wanted to show her how much I support her in my own way.”
Now that Marita is finished with her project, she said she is going to have a hard time going back to jeans, so she figured the best solution would be to continue with it while attending the University of Montana. She wants to get a degree in medicine. She also hopes to start the second phase of the project by raising money to hire private investigators to find out what happened to some of the missing women.
