Native American women are missing and murdered. Will the federal government act?

More than 70 percent of murders of Native Americans in Colorado go unreported to the FBI

Activists march for missing and murdered Native American women at the Women's March California 2019 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Sarah Morris/Getty Images)
Activists march for missing and murdered Indigenous women at the Women's March California 2019 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Sarah Morris/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind was 22, eight months pregnant, and looking forward to her baby shower the following day when she went missing on a sunny August afternoon in 2017.

She had gone to a neighbor’s apartment in Fargo, N.D., where she had been asked to help with a sewing project. 

She never went home. 

Kayakers discovered her body floating in the Red River a week later. Police found her baby alive in the neighbor’s apartment. The neighbor was later convicted of murdering LaFontaine-Greywind and cutting the baby from her body. 

LaFontaine-Greywind was a member of the Spirit Lake Tribe; her mother is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. LaFontaine-Greywind is one of the thousands of Native American women missing or murdered in an epidemic of violence across the country.

Indigenous women and girls face disproportionately high rates of violence in the United States. Experts estimate Native American women face a murder rate 10 times higher than the national average, with 84% experiencing some form of violence in their lifetimes, according to research from the National Institute for Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice.

So what’s the government doing about it? 

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) recounted Savanna’s story at a hearing on the issue last year in the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Gallego paused to clear his throat, shook his head and blinked tears out of his eyes.

“I know these stories are hard to hear, trust me, it’s hard for me to read them, but we must face this problem in order to address them,” Gallego said, his voice breaking. “We must improve the data system related to murdered and missing indigenous women to truly identify the scope of this problem.”

Policymakers “must take action, so this does not keep on going,” Gallego added. 

After decades of grass-roots advocacy from indigenous activists and victims’ families, federal and state governments have recently begun to take action with task forces and legislation.

One of those bills is named after LaFontaine-Greywind. Savanna’s Act, a rare bipartisan effort on Capitol Hill, calls for more federal and tribal coordination in response to cases of missing or murdered Native American women.

Cataloging the crisis

No one knows exactly how many Native American women go missing or are murdered each year. There is no official federal database on the issue. 

But more than 5,600 cases for missing Native women or girls had been logged in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database by the end of 2017. 

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. 

Advocates say the overall numbers are likely higher, since some Native people do not report the data to the federal government.

Last year, only 47 of the 573 federally recognized tribes participated in the database, partly due to some tribes’ lack of access to updated computers or internet. Without data on all potential crimes, some cases go cold. Investigators at a crime scene or on traffic stops can’t pull up information on missing people or potential suspects.

And even when they are reported, victims are sometimes misclassified or overlooked, especially if they live in urban areas instead of on reservations.

On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than 10 times the national average, according to the Indian Law Resource Center. 

More than 70 percent of murders of Native Americans in Colorado go unreported to the FBI, according to a study from the Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit that examines unsolved murders. The study looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and FBI from 1999 to 2017.

There are varied and complicated forces at play behind the disproportionate violence and patchy response. Activists and researchers say the crisis has been building for years, a legacy of generations of injustice, including government policies forcing people from their land and sex trafficking of girls and women. 

Victims can be targeted because they live in remote areas or because of their race. Some are dealing with addiction or other trauma. 

“The crisis we are talking about has deep roots in the historical mistreatment of native women,” Sarah Deer, a professor at the University of Kansas and citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, told lawmakers at a hearing on the issue last spring.

 “Native women and girls have been disappearing literally since 1492, when Europeans kidnapped native women for shipment back to Europe.”

There are 573 federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States and approximately 326 Indian reservations. Over one million Native American residents live on or near reservation lands.

Victims’ families can face a patchwork of tribal, state and federal law-enforcement agencies to respond to a crime, and sometimes victims are dismissed as chronic runaways.

Renee Millard-Chacon, who is both Xicana and Diné (Navajo), grew up in Denver, which is home to one of the nation’s largest urban Indian populations.  She’s a teacher, Aztec dancer and founder of Womxn From the Mountain, a group that seeks to restore respect and equality to women and those who identify as women. When Millard-Chacon was younger, she said, she saw gang violence, substance abuse and domestic violence in the community around her.

“These types of silent epidemics, they end up resigned to family histories,” she said. “So you hear about how an auntie went missing or a sister’s friend or a cousin who was stalked, abused and found in one of the most awful ways possible in a hotel room.”

Renee Millard-Chacon of Womxn from the Mountain is among local Coloradans working to bring the issue of missing and murdered Native American women to light. Millard-Chacon, who is Xicana and Diné (Navajo), wears the red hand in this portrait "because red is the color that spirits see and in honor of the womxn lost to call them home and bring them and their families peace."
Renee Millard-Chacon of Womxn from the Mountain is among local Coloradans working to bring the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women to light. Millard-Chacon, who is Xicana and Diné (Navajo), wears the red hand in this portrait “because red is the color that spirits see and in honor of the womxn lost to call them home and bring them and their families peace.”

Over time, Millard-Chacon said she began to see how larger society stripped humanity and dignity from women caught in a cycle of violence and abuse, and the way in which their lives were erased by lack of attention from law enforcement and the media.

“Each one of us has these sad stories and each of us wants to do something to create a narrative around this specific injustice,” she said.

That combined effort among various groups in Denver takes the shape of self-defense classes, prayer circles, art installations and blessings before dances. It embraces migrant women, trans women, children, the vulnerable, whom Millard-Chacon says, have been denied justice in life and in death. The goal is to connect to other women, activists and organizations nationally.

“We all have the same pure intention of trying to change the narrative of missing and murdered indigenous women from just victims to people who still deserve justice. Their cases don’t get followed up on, their families don’t know what happened, and their families deserve justice, too.”

Legislation and task forces

As the issue has gained national attention, Congress and the White House have raced to show some response.

President Donald Trump authorized a new federal task force on the issue last November. It met for the first time at the end of January.

The group’s aim is to develop protocols and procedures to address new and unsolved cases. The task force includes representatives from the Department of Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. 

“The task force is eager to get to work to address the issues that underlie this terrible problem, and work with our tribal partners to find solutions, raise awareness, and bring answers and justice to the grieving,” Attorney General William Barr said in a statement. 

But notably missing from the task force itself are tribal leaders or Native American survivors — a point of contention for indigenous advocates who have been tracking the issue for years. Annita Lucchesi, executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, said the task force seems like a hollow attempt to make it appear the administration is addressing the issue in an election year. 

“It has glaring holes in terms of who should be there,” Lucchesi said. 

“Frankly, I don’t trust federal agencies to self-investigate and identify their own gaps and breakdowns in justice, and self-correct with no outside accountability.”

In the Capitol, lawmakers have introduced two significant stand-alone bills on the issue in recent years: Savanna’s Act and the “Not Invisible Act,” as well as provisions for Native American women in the Violence Against Women Act. 

Lucchesi is more hopeful about the potential for those bills — which focus on better data collection.

“You can’t end violence that you don’t understand,” Lucchesi said. 

Savanna’s Act would boost coordination between federal and tribal agencies and improve tribal access to law enforcement databases. 

Former Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) first introduced Savanna’s Act in 2017. It passed the Senate unanimously, but faced a roadblock from Republicans who controlled the House of Representatives at the time. Former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, blocked it in the House. He objected to how it dispersed federal funds. 

Since then, Goodlatte retired and Democrats took control of the House, opening the door for action on the bill this year. The senators also changed some language in the bill to try to overcome any opposition from the House. Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez- Masto (D), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said she is hopeful it will become law this year.

The “Not Invisible Act” would create a new federal post within the the Bureau of Indian Affairs to coordinate violent crime prevention. It also requires the Interior Department and Attorney General to form an advisory committee on violent crime.

No Colorado lawmakers are current cosponsors of either bill, but Rep. Jason Crow’s office said earlier this month that the freshman Congressman supports the effort and “intends to co-sponsor them.”

The issue has also made its way into other legislation. Debate in the House this year over a massive infrastructure bill included discussion of the need for expanded broadband and 911 access, in part to help Native women. 

Researchers and advocates say these efforts are hopeful, but it will take years of work to reverse the problems.

“There will be no quick fix to this problem. The crisis has been several hundred years in the making and will require sustained multi-year, multifaceted efforts to understand and address the problem,” said Deer of the University of Kansas.

Tina Griego contributed to this report. 

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Native americans have a cultural background very different than the materialistic american people. White people should first learn and accept native cultural ways, customs and traditions. Then, after this, maybe there will be a bridge between these two opposite cultures where both meet and build a better understanding between them.

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