Women and men are murdered and go missing, but indigenous mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties and nieces experience a higher rate of violence than other ethnicities.
Stereotypes that blame victims, the lack of reporting and investigation, and overlapping jurisdiction of tribes, law enforcement and courts stymie action.
To break the silence, indigenous women and allies are organizing to bring awareness to the suffering. They are calling attention to the violence, trafficking and inadequate response.
Indigenous women have been raising visibility by wearing red ribbon skirts to symbolize their sacredness and resilience, and by painting red handprints over their mouths to symbolize the blood shed by lost, stolen and murdered sisters.
They are increasingly visible at the Women's March, Martin Luther King Jr. Day March, Indigenous People's March, and other marches and events.
"Women are reclaiming their role as leaders in tribal communities," said Margo Hill, a leader in the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement. "When Europeans came, they did not understand that women held the land, and women were our leaders, healers, medicine people and food gatherers."
Speaking up as an attorney, educator, researcher, mother and aunty, she understands the intersection of family life, legal processes and urban/rural planning.
As a former attorney for the Spokane Tribe, she is now associate professor in urban and regional planning, public and health administration for Eastern Washington University (EWU) at Riverpoint Campus. She teaches and organizes people on tribal planning, federal Indian law, community development and policies.
"When I give presentations to tribal and community groups, I do not start with numbers and data but with honoring the murdered and missing people," she said.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People recognizes that indigenous people suffer from a history of injustices, colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources. The declaration also recognizes that indigenous people are entitled without discrimination to all human rights and that they possess collective rights indispensable to their existence, wellbeing and development as peoples.
They have rights to life, liberty, security, freedom and peace, and tribes have a unique legal relationship with the U.S.
Aware that statistics also motivate, she shared numbers from different sources. The National Crime Information Center reports 5,712 cases of MMIW in 2016 in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Justice's missing person's database lists only 116 cases. The Center for Disease Control reports that indigenous women face murder rates 10 times the national average. Rates of domestic violence are more than 50 percent.
"Every time I talk, I learn of more women," she said.
Margo said studies often blame victims, saying native women use drugs, are in the sex trade, are trafficked by people they know and suffer high rates of domestic violence.
Beyond statistics, she has observed other dynamics from her experience.
After growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and graduating from Wellpinit High School, she experienced cultural shock when she left a 96-percent Native community to attend the Community College in urban, predominantly white Edmonds.
She chose to expand her horizons on a three-week exchange to Russia and during a semester at the American Institute for Foreign Study in London, before earning an associate degree in 1986.
In 1990, she earned a bachelor's in political science at the University of Washington. Wanting to be a lawyer to fight for tribal sovereignty, she attended a pre-law program at the University of New Mexico for Indian students, gaining connections with Indian lawyers across the nation.
She left studies at the University of California Los Angeles Law School to work with Spokane Urban Indian Health, now the NATIVE Project.
While attending Gonzaga University Law School, Margo worked with the Spokane Tribal Gaming Commission and commuted from Wellpinit. She was pregnant with her first child in 1998, when she earned her juris doctorate. She has two other children, 19 and 16.
"The tribe supported my law studies," said Margo, who helped the tribal attorney while studying.
Prejudice she met spurred her on. One professor said treaties with tribes were scraps of paper, and Indians "are what the government says they are."
She was tribal attorney for more than 10 years before she began studies at EWU to earn a master's in urban and regional planning in 2008. Her work with EWU's Tribal Planning Program includes doing research with and for tribes.
Margo is concerned that jurisdiction slows action on cases of murdered and missing indigenous women.
"If we call the Stevens County sheriff in Colville, he usually does not come. We can't prosecute without a police report," she said.
The FBI can investigate and the U.S. attorney can prosecute a major crime—murder, rape or assault—on a reservation, but they decline most cases. Tribes lack jurisdiction in major crimes by non-Indians on reservations.
Many non-Indians live within reservation areas, because some land was sold. The 1887 Dawes Act opened reservation lands to non-Indians, she said. When police are called to respond to a crime, they first have to know the status of the land
The kind of crime also matters. Minor crimes are tried in tribal, non-tribal or state courts. Tribal courts can give only limited jail time or fines.
Along with taking lands and setting up reservations, Margo said, the U.S. and state governments took children to boarding schools to force assimilation.
Forced relocation in the 1950s from reservations to cities ended government recognition of some tribes as a way to take Indian lands and again force assimilation, she said.
About 71 percent of native people live in urban areas, where there has been no research on rates of violence against native women. From 2000 to 2010, Margo was on the board of the American Indian Community Center, which serves urban Indians in Spokane.
Vulnerable in cities, some Indians have migrated back to reservations, staying with their grandmothers, Margo said. Some reservation-to-city mobility is for family and ceremonies.
The government does not respect the Indian extended family system, she said. After the boarding school era, social services removed tens of thousands of children from families and placed many in white foster families from the 1950s to the 1970s. Parents couldn't navigate courts to get children back. When children aged out of foster care, many became homeless. Taken from their tribal communities, most lost family and tribal connections, she said.
Other factors created vulnerabilities.
• Media perpetuate stereotypes and blame victims, said Margo, who grew up seeing John Wayne shoot Indians, Indians as team mascots or a sexy Pocahontas in a one-strap dress.
"In regalia, women are covered from their necks to their ankles," she said.
When a woman goes missing, media do not report it, assuming she's a druggie or a prostitute.
• "Our history of trauma makes women susceptible to human trafficking," she said. "If a woman is on the street 72 hours, traffickers will likely offer her a place to stay, food, drugs, 'love' and a way to earn money.
• Vulnerability also arises from using cash because of having no banks on reservations, and having tribal IDs, not state IDs, said Margo, telling a story:
One day at the bus terminal parking lot, Margo saw a young Sioux woman from South Dakota. She had visited the Kalispel Reservation, and her boyfriend's family had dropped her off there. She was distraught, having only a tribal ID but no state ID required for a ticket, unable to use her mother's credit card by phone and having her phone die.
Margo knew the woman might soon be on the street with no place to go, so she invited her to her home and bought her a ticket back to her reservation.
"It's an example of how easy it is for a woman to be lost," she said. "Women are vulnerable to trafficking here, drugged in a Spokane bar or abducted from a discount store parking lot.
Margo summarized risk factors:
• With loss of land, culture, language and identity, tribal communities face limited opportunities for education, jobs and housing, and struggle with poverty, violence and addiction.
• Structural discrimination comes in legal processes, institutional policies, cultural misrepresentations, lax enforcement and limited resources. For example, with limited funds, tribal law enforcement has few officers, losing many to better-paying county law offices.
• Individual factors include poverty, addiction, unstable housing, unreliable transportation, poor education, and exposure to physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
She said reforms are needed to improve the safety of women and to hold perpetrators accountable.
Solutions include collaborating across jurisdictions, standardizing protocols for MMIW cases, increasing law enforcement resources and prosecutions, developing tribal policies to address sexual harassment and assault, protecting young girls from social media, and overcoming racial bias that slows response to disappearances.
She mentioned some recent bills:
• Savanna's Act, or the #MMIW Act or U.S. Senate Bill #227, sets law enforcement and justice protocols to address MMIW, increasing interagency cooperation, training and funding and requiring the Attorney General to report data on missing and murdered indigenous people annually to Congress. It is named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind of Fargo, N.D., who was murdered in 2017.
• Washington State Patrol Missing and Murdered Native American Women Report addresses missteps in reporting and tracking MMIW.
• The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expired in December 2018. A temporary reauthorization expired Feb. 15, 2019. Its reauthorization is uncertain. It includes jurisdiction enhancement for tribal courts dealing with non-native men. One version, sponsored by Sen. Joni Ernst, restricts jurisdiction of tribal courts.
• On Nov. 26, the President established the interagency Operation Lady Justice Task Force to develop protocols for new and unsolved cases, and a multi-jurisdictional team to review cases.
• A Washington state law signed by the governor in April calls for increased reporting and investigation of missing native women.
• The Washington State Patrol is hiring a liaison in Western Washington and one in Eastern Washington to build trust with tribal communities and improve response when someone goes missing.
"Tribal communities are rising up to be heard and make national and state leaders and law enforcement respond," Margo said.
For information, call 828-1218 or 828-1269, or email mhill86@ewu.edu
