There road captain leads the way, a frail silhouette at the controls of a 300-kilogram Harley-Davidson. Behind her, about twenty bikers, in leather jackets trimmed in red, on monsters of the same caliber. Like every year, the bikers of the Medicine Wheel Ride group cross the American West in memory of the MMIW or Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, the indigenous women who disappeared without a trace and who the white world rarely cares about. Femicide? Human trafficking? Investigations, when they exist, hardly succeed. “No body, no crime”summarizes the captain Shelly Denny on behalf of those seeking justice.
On this last day of July, the bikers arrive at the stage of Riverton, Wyoming, on the territory of the Indian reservation of Wind River, the “river of the wind”. We are in the northern Rockies, still in the highlands, but the landscape gradually rises towards Grand Teton National Park, which rises to over 4,000 meters. The Wind River Reserve is one of the largest in the United States (8,996 square kilometers). It is home to two tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho, who live together willy-nilly following an agreement ” temporary ” passed with the American army in 1878, but which, no more than the others, was respected.
Lucky Linda and Jacqueline, aka “Jaxx”, set off from San Diego, California. Shelly Denny arrived from Phoenix, Arizona, and Lorie Tsosie joined them from Montana. The convoy headed for Sturgis, South Dakota, the town of 7,000 inhabitants invaded at the beginning of August by some 500,000 Harley madmen from all over the world. With their red bandanas and raised fists, the natives undertook to force the door of this den of masculinity on two wheels. And they succeeded.
It is the third equipped of this group, whose name refers to the medicine wheel, a symbol of the cycle of life. Tossed about as a child between an Ojibwe mother and a white – and biker – father, Shelly Denny is now an acupuncturist at the Indian Health Service in Phoenix. In 2019, she founded the association with Lorna Cuny, from Lakota country, a former US Navy, to fight against the law of silence in the tribes. “The women had accepted their fate”, as if violence were part of the evils of the Indian world, in the same way as ” diabetes “, she says. “Often people think the missing are out partying somewhere, abounds Corinne Tuma, a Navajo employee of the Casino Wind River, of Riverton, biker since 1996. No one joins the families to do research. »
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