New Mexico’s Deb Haaland, head of the Department of Interior, and the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary announced a few months back that she would spearhead an effort to address the long history of unsolved cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women in this country.
The rate of missing persons and violent acts against Native women is a staggering reality. For Native American women living in Alaska, murder is the 6th leading cause of death in women under the age of 45. And nationally, murder is the fourth leading cause of death in indigenous women under 19 years of age. The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women found that Native women are ten times more likely to be murdered than non-Native women and that more than half of Native women experience sexual violence in some form or another. Also, the National Crime Information Center found that of the 5,712 reports in 2016, only 116 cases were logged in the US Department of Justice’s federal missing persons’ database. Sadly, the rate of violent crimes committed against Native women is tragically high, and gaps in the criminal justice system have allowed cases to grow cold, and perpetrators to walk free.
When Ms. Haaland introduced the Missing and Murdered Unit (MMU) in April, she stated that “violence against Indigenous peoples is a crisis that has been underfunded for decades.” She went on to add that “far too often, murders and missing person cases in Indian country go unsolved and unaddressed, leaving families and communities devastated.”
Violence against Native women has largely been ignored by major news outlets, and invisible to people outside Native communities. Local and federal agencies have done little to address this issue, and the criminal justice system has a long history of failing to protect women as a group. It is about time that lawmakers begin to investigate, track, report, and prosecute cases of violence against indigenous women in this nation.
However, there are legal issues surrounding jurisdiction on Native American lands. Federal laws state that tribes have sole jurisdiction in crimes in which both perpetrator and victim are Native American, but serious crimes are sent to the federal government anyway. Under these laws, non-native perpetrators can’t be prosecuted on tribal lands, causing a huge problem because Indigenous women are commonly attacked by non-native men. Sadly, the federal government has declined to prosecute many tribal cases, no matter how violent. This results in a lack of justice for survivors, families, and communities who are missing loved ones or have experienced violent crimes.
Regarding the high rate of non-Native offenders, a study conducted by the National Congress of American Indians found that 96% of sexual violence cases had a non-Native perpetrator. Nicole Matthews, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition, stated that “of the rates of violent victimization of Native women, primarily over 70% are white offenders [or] non-native offenders.” According to the coalition, indigenous women are vulnerable to violence and sex crimes because they must navigate the obstacles of poverty, homelessness, sexism, and structural racism. Faced with limited options, many of these women are exploited through reluctant prostitution or sex trafficking, in which cases they are vulnerable to abuse and risk, racial discrimination, and violence.
Although a “Safety for Indian Women” provision was added to the Violence Against Women Act in 2005, and the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 gave tribal governments punitive authority in criminal cases, many missing person cases and murders continued to be unsolved. Deb Haaland’s MMU seeks to require that criminal cases are reported correctly, and that information is shared between various law enforcement agencies. Her initiative has $6 million in funding, and these dollars will go towards hiring personnel and expand MMU offices in South Dakota, Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, Arizona, Tennessee, Alaska, and our home state of New Mexico. These offices will concentrate on MMU cases and collaborate with existing law enforcement agencies to resolve them and enact justice.
Deb Haaland also stated that she would implement the “Not Invisible Act,” a 2020 bill that mandates the coordination of law enforcement agencies to investigate the disproportionate rates of violent crime against Native Americans. Secretary Haaland’s initiatives have come none too soon and demonstrate her commitment to addressing the existing crisis in violence against indigenous women in this country. But as Shannon O’Loughlin, a Choctaw member and Chief Executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, addressing violence against Native women goes beyond Haaland’s initiatives. She stated that “There has to be a structure that’s going to really be committed to diminishing the numbers and the occurrences,” she says. “Not just finding the missing women, not just prosecuting the perpetrators, but preventing it in the first place.”