State Legislature considers finding resources to solve cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls
Deborah Shipman didn’t sugarcoat her intentions.
“We want to keep you from being one of the statistics,” she said emphatically to the Native American women and girls who’d gathered in a yurt at Tryon Life Community Farm in Southwest Portland on Saturday morning, Jan. 26.
Sitting in a large circle, they convened the second meeting of the Staying Sacred Program. On this day, learning self-defense techniques and how to identify red flags associated with human trafficking were on the agenda. What followed was an intense discussion in which several participants candidly shared stories of sexual harassment, assault and predator grooming they’d already experienced.
Shipman said she hopes these sessions will serve as a preventive measure against the continued disappearances of Indigenous women.
Across Canada and the United States, Indigenous people have been raising awareness of what they describe as a crisis of missing and murdered women and girls in their communities.
Issues with law enforcement jurisdictions on reservations and large gaps in data sharing among tribal and U.S. government agencies have created an environment where Native American women are easily targeted, victimized and, too often, soon forgotten in the public sphere.
“We just don’t know what the real ramifications of the whole issue are,” said Oregon Rep. Tawna Sanchez (D-Portland), who is a Native American of Shoshone-Bannock, Ute and Carrizo descent.
What her community does know, she said, “is that people go missing and nothing happens.”
In an effort to begin addressing this issue in Oregon, Sanchez has introduced House Bill 2625, which would direct Oregon State Police to study how to increase criminal justice resources focused on missing and murdered Indigenous women across the state by bringing together the Commission on Indian Services, local law enforcement agencies, Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes, and urban Native American organizations to identify barriers and create partnerships.
Sanchez said she wants more information and better communication among systems that often maintain separate databases of missing persons. Until that happens, the breadth of the problem in Oregon will remain unclear.
“We don’t know how many people we are really talking about,” Sanchez said.
FURTHER READING: Tawna Sanchez: A new perspective in Salem
The relationship between under-resourced tribal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaus can complicate investigations into homicides and missing persons on tribal lands. And depending on the set-up of local law enforcement and tribal sovereignty, those relationships and jurisdictions can vary.
When a crime against a Native American on a reservation with a sovereign government is committed by a non-Native, for example, it falls into federal jurisdiction. And that often comes with limitations.
Federal agencies are often backlogged and forced to prioritize cases on already-squeezed budgets, said Laura John, tribal liaison to the city of Portland and descendant of the Blackfeet and Seneca Nations. “So it creates a situation where the chances of federal jurisdiction taking cases are compromised. There’s a lower chance, if it’s a rape, for example.”
This reality, she said, “has created an environment where predators are targeting reservation communities because they know the chances of them being charged with a crime are low.”
Sanchez’s bill would set up the ability for the state of Oregon to assess where there are gaps in the system, she said.
“Right now,” she said, “we don’t have a clear view of where our gaps are, so I’m hoping that helps trigger that conversation.”
Kimberly Loring and her cousin, Lissa Loring, both traveled from their homes in the Portland metro area in December to Washington D.C., to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs about murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
Kimberly’s sister, Ashley Heavy Runner-Loring, went missing from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in June 2017, when she was 20 years old.
It took more than a month before federal investigators initiated a search, Lissa told Street Roots. Despite her sending a text message before her disappearance that indicated she was in a bad situation and needed help, tribal law enforcement told the Loring family that Ashley was probably “out partying.”
Ashley was a college student who took care of her grandmother, and to disappear without a word would be uncharacteristic, Lissa said.
Ashley’s family conducted their own search and investigation, ultimately finding Ashley’s sweater, covered in red spots they believed to be blood. But, as Kimberly testified in Washington, D.C., law enforcement failed to test and properly process that evidence or search the area where it was found. Only when she testified did an agent in the room make a call to get the ball rolling. Lissa said the family is still waiting for results.
Before Ashley disappeared, she expressed a desire to get involved with the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s movement, said Lissa, “and here she ended up becoming one of them.”
Lissa said the family believes Ashley’s body is somewhere on the 1.5 million-acre reservation and plans to continue looking when the snow melts.
“There’s 15 cops to the whole reservation,” she said.
She and Kimberly have created their own database of missing and murdered cold cases on the Blackfeet Reservation. It includes missing women and men, and so far they’ve counted 33 people, she said.
Unlike most cases, Ashley’s made headlines. But that’s thanks to her sister and cousin’s unwavering determination.
“Those girls are trying so hard,” Shipman said. “Ashley’s name is out there because of those women.”
She said in some instances of missing Indigenous women, no one pushes for an investigation.
“A lot of this stuff is domestic violence to be quite frank,” she said. “The two families that are usually involved in this stuff, they don’t want any more trouble, and they just leave it be.”
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Shipman, of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, is the backbone of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA, which tracks and spreads awareness of missing Native American women across the United States. She said she became involved with the MMIW movement after two of her friends were murdered in New Mexico.
Her Portland-based organization has volunteers in several states, and Shipman said she spends many hours each day on the phone with families who are desperate to know what’s happened to their loved ones and with law enforcement agencies, advocating on the families’ behalf. Her organization uses donations to help pay for tombstones and memorial services.
“We’ve helped over 1,000 families and we’ve only been in operation for three years,” she said.
While Shipman estimates the number of missing Indigenous women to be in the thousands nationwide, pinning down an exact number has proved virtually impossible.
For one, missing Native American women aren’t always reported as such, she said, with law enforcement often making assumptions about a person’s race and ethnicity. This is further complicated when the person is multiracial.
Sanchez echoed this concern, saying that if she were stopped by police, she would likely be identified as Hispanic due to her last name.
Additionally, data sharing and consistency among reservations and U.S. government agencies are often non-existent. While the FBI’s National Crime Information Center reported nearly 6,000 missing Native American women and girls in 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice’s database listed just 116 cases.
This was according to a recent report from Urban Indian Health Institute, which highlighted that while 71 percent of Native Americans live in urban areas, the rate of violence against Native American women in U.S. cities hasn’t been researched or tracked in the way it has for other races and ethnicities.
The authors of the report attempted to gather data from 71 urban areas through public records requests, and they identified 506 cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaskan Native women and girls. Seattle had the most cases with 45. But the institute wasn’t able to paint a complete picture because “nearly two-thirds of all agencies surveyed either did not provide data or provided data with significant compromises.”
Portland Police Bureau, according to the report, never supplied any data despite receiving payment for it.
Shipman said she suspects Portland has numbers on par with Seattle, considering it has the ninth-largest urban Native American population in the U.S.
Portland Police Bureau, however, told Street Roots it has zero cases of missing Native American women and, in the past 10 years, zero cases of murdered Native American women.
There are two Native American women listed as missing in Multnomah County in the Oregon State Police Missing Persons database: Laticia Becerra, who went missing within the past year at age 35, and Lisa Pearl Briseno, who was listed as missing at age 28 more than two decades ago after last being seen with her boyfriend. There are a total of nine missing Native American women statewide in the database. This number, while considered an undercount because it likely omits any tribal data, is proportionate to the size of the Native American population in Oregon.
Women might not be showing up in the data due to misidentification or because they were never reported as missing in the first place. But whether they appear in the data or not, Sanchez believes it’s a problem locally.
“We know that we have sex trafficking as an issue here in the state of Oregon. We know that the I-5 corridor is an issue, but we just don’t know the enormity of the situation in my opinion. We also know that foster kiddos are more vulnerable and end up in those situations sometimes,” she said, adding that Oregon does little to track the whereabouts of foster children who exit the system.
Nationally, a bill introduced Jan. 28 in the U.S. Senate also seeks to boost communication and data sharing among tribal and U.S. law enforcement agencies, including local law enforcement, in cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) reintroduced Savanna’s Act, which passed the Senate last year but never came up for a vote in the House. The bill is named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman whose unborn baby was cut from her womb when she was killed in Fargo, N.D., in 2017.
Street Roots reached out to members of all nine of Oregon’s federally recognized tribes but was only able to interview members of two by press time.
Coquille Indian Tribe spokesperson Clark Walworth said that in Oregon, because the percentage of the population living on reservations is small, missing and murdered women is more likely an urban issue.
Leona Ike, who formerly supervised parole and probation for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, said that while she believes murdered and missing Indigenous women is an issue in Oregon, most cases on her reservation get solved. That’s in part, she said, because her tribe has one of the most established criminal justice systems in Indian Country, dating back to the late 1800s.
When there is a homicide, she said, tribal law enforcement will preserve evidence and the crime scene until the FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs are available to come out and investigate.
“This is a really sensitive matter for Native American people,” Ike said, “because of the value we see in life and dignity and taking care of a person’s body. We have a covenant with the Creator to make sure those who have lost their lives are taken care of properly so they can start their journey to eternal life.”
When the body is missing, she said, that journey is interrupted.
UPDATE: Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed House Bill 2625 into law on May 14, 2019.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
Staying Sacred Program for Women and Girls
WHAT: Program for empowering youths centered on Native American traditions
WHEN: Meets from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. the last Saturday of each month
WHERE: Tryon Life Community Farm, 11640 SW Boones Ferry Road, Portland
INFORMATION: Visit Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA on Facebook
On Twitter
Follow #MMIW and #MMIWG
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