PANDOS—Peaceful Advocates for Native Dialogue and Organizing Support—began by standing in solidarity with the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) movement in 2016. From the start, our work has centered Indigenous rights and environmental justice.

As the community grew, we saw an urgent need to respond to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) crisis. Families needed visibility, support, and a dedicated place to organize information and advocacy.

MMIR Utah continues to face real barriers, including limited resources and the need for wider public awareness. These challenges make community support and sustained advocacy essential.

MMIR Utah became its own entity to strengthen this work and expand our impact—so Indigenous voices in Utah are heard, and our relatives are not forgotten.

Michelle Brown was raised between Alaska and New Mexico, Michelle is a highly accomplished creative professional and community activist from the “Water Flows Together Clan”. She pursued her education in New York, where she developed expertise in fashion and design with a particular focus on supporting and amplifying Indigenous creatives. During her time in Utah, she became deeply engaged with Indigenous activism, focusing on education through the grassroots organization, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives of Utah.

Winter Rex is a future matriarch of community care and cultural leadership. She doesn’t just work in the service sector, but weaves her identity and values, specifically her Blackfoot teachings, into the very fabric of how she supports others. By bridging Family Services with Education, she understands the “whole person” and the “whole family,” refusing to view students, clients, or community members in isolation.

 Winter incorporates her Blackfoot teachings, knowing it isn’t just about representation; it’s about applying indigenous methodologies to modern challenges in community building. 

 As both a mother and a community educator, her commitment to the native community is clearly rooted in a desire to build a sustainable, empowered future for the next generation—a future that is inclusive of her role as a fierce ally to the Two-Spirit community, ensuring that all relatives have a safe place in the circle.

Tammy Dee is an urban auntie who has had to learn, unlearn, and forge new pathways toward belonging. Growing up at a distance from her Navajo family (born for Edge of the Water clan), Dee spent much of her life navigating the spaces between cultures, searching to create a deeper sense of connection with the world around her. She brings her computer science background and technical consulting experience to Indigenous advocacy. Dee works at the intersection of technology, community, and justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives.

Alexandra Ray is a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) and Secretary of Health & Human Relations and MMIW2S+ Advocate for the Gabrieliño-Shoshone Nation. With a background spanning critical care and forensic medicine, she supports survivors of violence while confronting systemic inequities that disproportionately impact the Indigenous community. In addition to her clinical experience, Alexandra is a community educator committed to the prevention of violent crimes through trauma-informed and evidence-based curriculum. Her work emphasizes collaboration between healthcare providers, law enforcement, tribal governments, and community organizations to increase awareness of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives crisis while restoring sovereignty to native nations. 

David is a criminology professor whose teaching and research centers on justice, equity, and care for those most impacted by harm. His classroom work extends into prison education, community-based advocacy with justice-impacted youth, and national research efforts strengthening victims’ rights and survivor-centered policies.

Beyond academia, David is a first responder—serving on a mobile crisis response team during incidents of domestic violence, sexual assault, and homicide, and as a squad leader with a mountain search and rescue team across Utah’s Wasatch Front. His qualitative research listens closely to lived experience, drawing on decolonial methods, to interrogate how systems shape the lives of those they claim to serve.

He is a scholar, a storyteller, an advocate, and, in the ways that matter most, a husband, father, brother, son, and friend.

(Mikee-a-lah Parrish) is a Diné multimedia artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with roots in Rose Park and the Navajo Nation. Working across drawing, painting, muralism, digital art, and film, her work centers Indigenous resilience, kinship, and cultural memory. With a deep grounding in figurative drawing and landscapes, her visual language engages in a critical dialogue with Western art traditions and the lasting impacts of colonization—reclaiming narrative space for Indigenous voices.

In the spring of 2022, Parrish received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Utah, where her mural was selected for permanent installation in the William Browning Building, Spring 2021. Following graduation, she became an artist-in-residence at Lost Eden Gallery, an Indigenous-run space where she collaborated on murals, exhibited work, and performed live drawings during community events. Her practice is closely tied to the Westside of Salt Lake Valley, where she advocates for greater representation of marginalized communities in the regional arts scene.

Rooted in her experiences as a Diné woman raised in Rose Park, Parrish’s work reflects a dual connection—urban and ancestral—to both the city and the land of her people. By creating the Land Recapture Project, she aims to spark intergenerational dialogue, establish community murals, in efforts to create a public art focal point that re-visualizes Utah’s landscape through an Indigenous lens. Her art is both a tribute to where she comes from and a vision for where Indigenous storytelling can go.