Hundreds of people packed into the nondescript meeting room in southern Washington state to share the stories of Native American women who vanished years or even decades ago.
Many of those who gathered together last October still do not have answers as to what happened to their mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters. Some said they felt failed by authorities; they had been made to wait days by police to report a loved one’s disappearance or had their pleas for help ignored altogether.
At this meeting, and nine others just like it across the state, Captain Monica Alexander, of Washington state patrol, the state’s police agency, sat in the front of the room listening and taking notes. She had been tasked by the state legislature to examine the alarming number of deaths and disappearances of Native American women – for too long brushed aside.
“I go home with such a heavy heart after these meetings because I think about if my sister was missing and no one ever found her, no one ever knew what happened to her and no one seemed to care,” she said. “That’s a horrible feeling.”
This month, Alexander released a report summarizing what was said in these meetings and highlighting some of the especially strong patterns she discovered. Too often, authorities had misidentified the ethnicity of these women and possibly underestimated the potential role sex trafficking could play in these disappearances.
Alexander stressed the need for both more coordination between tribal, state, local and federal law enforcement agencies as well as a centralized database that can accurately track this crisis.
Her report included findings from the National Crime Information Center, an FBI crime data clearinghouse, which reported 56 currently missing American Indian and Alaska Native women in Washington. Despite Native Americans making up only 2% of the state’s population, they account for 7% of all disappearances.
She also included data from the southern Washington Yakama Nation tribe, which reported 24 unsolved or cold cases related to missing or murdered men and women. But since none of the other 28 federally recognized tribes in the state submitted data for the report and the FBI’s numbers probably did not include all tribal cases, some have called these numbers a vast underestimate.
“This is quite disturbing to me as we know there are so many more cases of missing and murdered indigenous women,” said Carol Evans, chairwoman for the Spokane Tribe of Indians, a 3,000-member tribe in north-eastern Washington.
The report is a step towards addressing an extremely complex problem. At a time when Native American women and girls disappear at twice the per-capita rate of white Americans, lawmakers have finally begun to answer the many cries for help in an effort to address the issue and help to put a stop to them.
A bipartisan team of US lawmakers recently reintroduced Savanna’s Act, a bill dedicated to Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a Native American woman who was killed in 2017 in North Dakota. The legislation would require the Department of Justice to develop guidelines for how to respond to cases of missing and murdered Native Americans. It would also call on the attorney general to include statistics on missing Native Americans, including their age, gender and tribal affiliation, in an annual report to Congress.
A handful of states also recently approved proposals similar to the one in Washington. For example, in Oregon the department of state police was asked to examine how they could boost resources for investigating missing and murdered Native American and Alaskan women, and present their findings to the legislative assembly next fall.
Washington has been hit especially hard by these disappearances and deaths. In a report released last year by the Urban Indian Health Institute, the state had the second highest number of cases of missing and murdered women and girls in the country.
Earlier this year, the state’s lawmakers passed new legislation to address this issue. It calls on officials to create two liaison positions within the Washington state patrol, whose job will be to build a relationship between governmental agencies and Native communities. It also requires the state patrol to develop a protocol for law enforcement’s response to missing indigenous persons.
The legislation is meant to build on the work completed by Alexander. But state officials and tribal leaders have been keen to caution that the research, meetings and the report were in no way perfect.
There were questions about whether state officials adequately spread the word about the meetings, and why there were only 10 meetings for the dozens of tribes spread out across the state. Questions were also raised about why Alexander, who is not Native American, was hosting the meetings.
Gina Mosbrucker, a Republican representative in Washington who sponsored last year’s legislation, said it would have helped to increase trust by adding someone to the meeting leadership team who was connected with the tribes and completely separate from the government.
“We’re asking [tribal members] to give the government – that they don’t trust because of intergenerational trauma and the treaty of 1855 and not following through on everything we said we would do – we’re asking them to share information, data, which is their family members and their daughters and sisters,” she said.
But James Rideout, a member of the Puyallup Tribal Council, the elected governing body for the Puyallup Tribe of Indians in western Washington, said he thought the meetings helped to showcase the importance of an issue that has had a noticeable impact on his tribe.
“It empowers our communities and our leaders and our law enforcement and all of our agencies to work together,” said Rideout. “We’re not just going to sit back and accept these things any more, we’re actually going to do something about it.”