battering, raping, selling, buying, and murdering women.”
Cami Leonard, Dine’ actress, photographer and filmmaker, said she attended the International Women’s Day March to support all of her sisters from around the world.
“I can feel the darkness here in my heart. My heart hurts for all those effected,” she said.
Along the trek that went from the UNM Bookstore to the president’s house in the middle of campus to Lomas Avenue and then south on university, Leonard photographed the event as moms held hands with their daughters and fathers marched in unity.
As they chanted and walked, they raised signs that read – No ICE-No DAPL-No TRUMP, End the War on Women’s Rights, Full Equality or Fight, Safe and Legal Abortions, and Defend Trans Lives.
Looking around, Leonard said, “We can stand strong, together.” Speaker Maya Oliveros-Orozco, who traces her lineage partly to the Muskogee Creek Nation, expressed the same.
“We are here to raise our voices so that others know they are not alone; so, they don’t have to be fearful,” she told the group gathered back near the bookstore after the march.
Bringing attention to the Standing Rock Sioux’s resistance to the Dakota access pipeline, she stated, “It’s heartbreaking. They (pipeline constructors and agents) put elders and children at risk.”
She asked why pipeline developers couldn’t find another route like they did for the residents of Bismarck, North Dakota when they protested the pipeline near their community. “What makes them more valuable, their lives, and their way of life?”
PSL organizer Sylvia Grass (Choctaw/ Cherokee) said that with Trump’s immigration ban, history is repeating itself.
“I am here, today, on behalf of all families being ripped apart by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). As a native woman, I will not stand by and watch an entire generation of children and parents separated by our government. It is wrong. We have the duty to stand up, scream out and say, ‘No, this cannot happen again,’” she stressed.
Grass told of how her Choctaw grandmother was impacted from being taken away from her family at a young age and placed in a boarding school.
“She had nightmares her whole life from what she witnessed there,” she said.
Organizers encouraged attendees to tell their stories, to get to know each other and to participate in the political process.
“There is power in people coming together like this,” said Grass.
In their party material, the organization calls for an end to deportations, universal healthcare, defense for abortion rights, ending mass incarcerations and police brutality, bringing the troops home, and shutting down U.S. overseas military bases, abolishing student debt, equal rights for the LGBTQ community, free child care, and guaranteed access and equality for people with disabilities.
During the event, Rubio announced that women who appeared to follow extreme conservative politics told students participating in the march that they were sinners and that she should act like a lady.