Indigenous women remain missing and murdered at alarming rates

Despite grants and numerous programs to help alleviate the problem, cases of disappearance or murder of indigenous women continue to occur at relatively high rates.

The extent of the problem is almost certainly underestimated.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System showed a dozen indigenous women were missing in Arizona as of mid-2020. They had been missing for an average of 21 years. But the Arizona-based Navajo Nation alone lists 22 missing women. Some cases date back to the 1970s.

Advocates for women and Native American crime victims attribute chronic undercounts and frustrations in solving these cases to confusion over jurisdiction and a lack of cooperation between law enforcement agencies.

“Unfortunately, because a person is Navajo, it is sometimes assumed that the Navajo will take the case; in essence, liability is assumed,” said Eugenia Charles-Newton, chair of the Navajo Nation Council’s law and order committee.

Native women are five times more likely to experience intimate partner violence than white women, according to research from the National Congress of American Indians.

There are two tribal women’s coalitions in Arizona that help victims of domestic and sexual violence. The Hopi-Tewa Women’s Coalition works with Hopi women to End Abuse. The Southwest Native Women’s Coalition is working with others.

“If we could end this violence against ourselves, we would have done it a long time ago,” said Memory Longchase, domestic violence response director for the Southwest Indigenous Women’s Coalition.

Jurisdiction issues arise in or near cities and reservations where tribal members live.

A 2018 report from the Urban Indian Health Institute found 153 cases of missing or murdered indigenous women with no law enforcement records. The report focused on 71 cities in 29 states, including Phoenix, Tucson, Tempe and Flagstaff.

Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute and a member of the Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma, said city police departments often assume that if a tribal member reports a crime, it is the tribe’s responsibility to handle the case. The woman does not live on tribal lands.

This misunderstanding has caused a “nationwide data crisis” that obscures the extent of violence involving Indigenous women and girls, the report says. This also causes investigations to be delayed or cases to be missed entirely.

This has even discouraged people from reporting such cases, according to advocates, because of the common belief that “if someone gets lost…they probably won’t do anything,” Longchase said.

Tucson ranked fourth on the list of cities in Echo-Hawk’s report. Arizona has the third highest number of cases of disappearances or murders of indigenous women and girls.

In Arizona, 10 of the 12 women listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System lived in rural areas, according to research by Arizona State University. Their ages ranged from 20 to 54.

The Department of Justice launched the Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) Regional Outreach Program in mid-2023 to assist with jurisdictional issues.

An assistant U.S. attorney and a program coordinator are assigned to each of the five regional programs. The Southwest program covers Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Nevada.

The purpose of the program is to facilitate communication between tribes and state governments. It’s still in its early stages.

According to the FBI, 10,650 missing persons cases were opened for American Indians and Alaska Natives in 2023. As of the end of the year, 1,631 remained open; Approximately 40% of them are women.

But advocates say many Native American women have learned through difficult experiences that abusers rarely face prosecution, so some do not seek help from authorities.

“If you know five people who were raped and reported it, and nothing happened, how likely are you to report it?” Longchase said.

Judicial issues in Indian Country can be complex. Policing and prosecution are fragmented among tribes, counties, and state and federal governments. In many cases the responsible organization is unclear.

“No one is willing to take up the cause of saying that all law enforcement agencies, regardless of where they reside, are responsible for the public safety of everyone in their communities, and that certainly includes the first people of this land,” Echo-Hawk said.

Charles-Newton said he was a victim of both violence and a lack of follow-up by authorities. When she was 17, her abuser took her to a shack for about a week. Although she knew the abuser, she did not know where he was.

“They were never able to determine jurisdiction because I didn’t know where I was being held (where the barracks was),” he said. “And the man I knew… I mentioned his name, he was never prosecuted.”

According to DOJ data, indigenous women and men experience high rates of victimization; 84% of women and 82% of men report that they have experienced violence at some point.

According to the National Institute of Justice, more than half of indigenous women experience sexual violence; This rate is much higher than the general rate of one in six. Native women are twice as likely to be sexually assaulted than people of other races, according to the National Network on Rape, Abuse and Incest.

The House Appropriations subcommittee held a hearing on Nov. 20 on what it calls the Missing or Murdered Native Women Crisis.

Each of the five witnesses, all advocates for missing and murdered Indigenous women, told the panel they knew at least one missing person. Each of them was also a victim of violence.

“This is obviously a vitally important issue for all of us,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, the subcommittee chairman. “It raises a lot of questions, and only some of them involve financing.”

In recent years, numerous laws and programs have been implemented to alleviate jurisdictional and communication problems. Eyewitnesses said their disappointment continued.

“The judicial issues actually became an excuse, an excuse not to do the job,” Charles-Newton said in her statement.

Congress passed the Not Invisible Act in 2020, establishing a joint commission between the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior to reduce violent crimes against Native Americans. The law established an interregional advisory committee comprised of tribal leaders, federal officials, and relatives of missing and murdered people.

Another 2020 measure, known as Savanna’s Act and named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a member of the Spirit Lake Nation who was killed while eight months pregnant, aimed to streamline communication between state, federal and tribal governments and improve MMIP data collection.

The Violence Against Women Act also provided $86 million for the Department of Justice to assist tribal victims and support programs.

“This is out of proportion to what’s happening in other areas,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, chairman of the Appropriations Committee and a member of the Chickasaw Nation. “Obviously we have a very specific problem. We clearly lack authority in many cases. … Frankly, we have a huge resource problem.”