Category Archives: #MMIW

#MMIW

A Brief History of Donald Trump’s Attempt to Solve the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

Leave a comment

It is important to remind my students that when we discuss the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls quite often we are talking about people younger than they are. Like  Kaysera Stops Pretty in Places. She was eighteen, played basketball and ran cross-country. She performed in school plays at Hardin High School near the Crow

Reservation in Montana and wanted to act.  She had been at a house party, but disappeared.  She was found several days later, by a passerby, who discovered her body behind a woodpile in the backyard of a different house. I do not know how she got there, and her cause of death is “undetermined.” In March of 2025, Natosi Summers pleaded no contest to felony criminal endangerment. He was sentenced to three years’ probation but no jail time. It is unclear from the media reports what role Summers played specifically in Kaysera’s death. Whatever Summers did, we have a dead child in a reservation border town. The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs says that there are approximately 4200 unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States, with many experts believing that this number is a significant under count. There are thousands more in Canada.

Do you remember a time when your parents did not know where you were? Maybe you were out with friends, partying, having a good time. When you finally came home, your parents let you have it. It may have seemed to you that they were angry but I can tell you from experience that they were scared. There is nothing that frightens us more than the possibility that something bad might happen to you. Nobody can hurt us more than the person who hurts you.

So imagine what your house looks like, sounds like, and feels like, if you do not come home.  Your parents stand and watch and wait and slowly come to the realization that they will never see you again. What would it do to your family to lose you?

This heart-breaking experience happens in thousands of Indigenous homes across the United States and Canada. Only because of the pressure placed by Indigenous women have settler governments begun to act. In the United States, a critical part of the story involved a young Indigenous woman in North Dakota. Brooke Crews, a white woman, butchered Savanna Greywind.  Crews wanted a baby, and her young neighbor was eight months pregnant.  On the night of 17 August of 2017, Crews lured Greywind into her home. She knocked her unconscious. While Savanna was still alive, and passing in and out of consciousness, she cut the child from her womb. When Crews’ boyfriend arrived, she presented him with the baby.  “This is our baby,” she reportedly said. “This is our family.” Together, they cleaned up the blood. Together they disposed of Savanna’s clothing. And, together, they wrapped her body in plastic sheeting and dumped her in the Red River, where kayakers found her body sometime later.

It was a horrifying crime. In response to Greywind’s murder, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp introduced “Savanna’s Law,” to “help address crisis of missing and murdered Native American women.”  Specifically, the act was designed to:

  • Improve tribal access to certain federal crime information databases. The bill would update the data fields to be more relevant to Native Americans, and mandate that the Attorney General consult with Tribes on how to further improve these databases and their access to them. The Attorney General would then submit a report to Congress on how the U.S. Department of Justice plans to implement the suggestions and resolve the outstanding barriers Tribes face in acquiring full access to these databases.
  • Require the Attorney General, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Health and Human Services to solicit recommendations from Tribes on improved access to local, regional, state, and federal crime information databases and criminal justice information systems during the annual consultations mandated under the Violence Against Women Act.
  • Create standardized protocols for responding to cases of missing and murdered Native Americans. These protocols would take place in consultation with Tribes, which would include guidance on inter-jurisdictional cooperation among tribal, federal, state, and local law enforcement.
  • Require an annual report to Congress with data. The report would include statistics on missing and murdered Native women, since there is little data on this problem and there isn’t a central location for keeping that information. The report would also include recommendations on how to improve data collection.

It was an important first step, but Heitkamp was defeated in her reelection campaign in 2018. She was not in the Senate when President Trump signed Savanah’s Law in 2020.

SIX YEARS AGO TODAY, President Trump proclaimed  May 5th “Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.” He appointed a task force, dubbed “Operation Lady Justice,” to investigate the problem of MMIW and MMIWG. Trump was the first American President to place it on the national agenda.

Yet little came of the effort. COVID, of course, limited the work that Operation Lady Justice could undertake. But the pandemic cannot excuse the ideological and political barriers that the Trump Administration would not cross, and its real commitment to the issue was shallow and so limited as to be effectively meaningless. As Native Americans who attended the various listening sessions held by the task force pointed out, the President’s approval of pipe lines and other projects brings large numbers of non-native “man camps” into areas close to Native American communities. Many observers have asserted that a relationship exists between such projects and reports of missing and murdered Native American women and girls. Indeed, Kristin Welch, a community organizer for Menikanaehkem, a Wisconsin group, asserted that cases of violence against Native American women are increased 70% by the presence of these man camps.

Task Force members repeatedly ignored these challenges. When asked about the 1978 Oliphant decision, which held that non-Indians could not be held criminally liable for their actions on Indian land by tribal authorities, Task Force Member Marcia Good said that “Oliphant is currently beyond the scope of [Operation Lady Justice] at this time.” Indeed, the Trump Administration during his first term called for cuts in funding that adversely affected policing on reservations, and limited the ability of tribal governments to combat domestic violence and substance abuse. He did nothing to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which permitted tribes a sliver of protection by allowing them to prosecute non-Indians for misdemeanor intimate partner violence committed on reservations.

Without restoring power to Native nations to allow them to prosecute the crimes non-Indians commit against Native American women on reservation land, the Trump Administration removed from the table what all experts assert was a vital part of any solution to this heart-wrenching problem. President Trump, in other words, supported policies that threatened to exacerbate the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women while permitting no discussion of a critical part of the solution. The Trump Administration seemed interested only in the appearance of action, except when it chose to behave in a destructive manner.

And that destructive behavior has continued during the first sixteen months of Trump’s second presidency. Late in April of 2025, he posted on his Truth Social website that he supported residents of Massapequa, on Long Island, in their efforts to keep the local high school’s “Chiefs” logo. He tagged his Secretary of Education to help out, and she announced that her department “will not stand by as the state of New York attempts to rewrite history and deny the town of Massapequa the right to celebrate its heritage in its schools.” She criticized the state government’s phased prohibition of racist school mascots, by accusing New York of “erasing Native Americans.” It was a cynical and nasty reversal of charges. Massapequa’s logo showed an Indigenous male with a Plains-style headdress. Students wearing “Chiefs” logos appear prominently on the school’s website.  It is an image out of place and out of time. And, as I have pointed out on this blog, when Indigenous peoples are cast as part of the past, as part of a white community’s heritage, it becomes much more difficult for those white people to take seriously the legitimate concerns of Indigenous people today. Every homeowner in Massapequa is the beneficiary of a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession.

It is worth pointing out, of course, that across America Native American mascots are being phased out. A consensus has emerged that holds them to be, at best, in poor taste. Even the Washington football and Cleveland baseball teams, historically two of the worst offenders, have changed their team names. The Trump administration fought on behalf of Massapequa for no principle, other than their mistaken belief that white people have it tough, and that they are being made to sacrifice their very identity because of an onslaught of “DEI.” It is racism and an attempt to stir up white resentments that does nothing to make this country a better place.

Indeed, Trump has taken steps to silence critical discussions of the Native American past. He has proscribed any sort of teaching that denigrates American heroes or makes white students feel guilt. Just last week, the President announced that he would discontinue the practice, begun under his predecessor, of commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Instead, even though it had never gone away, Trump said he will bring Columbus Day “back from the ashes.” He has placed a Columbus statue outside of the Executive Office Building. Democrats, Trump said, “did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much.” Again, the President is stoking white resentment, and raising the specter of DEI fanatics tearing down historic American heroes.

Trump’s rash and widespread budget cuts have endangered efforts to recover the history of Indian Boarding Schools. The Biden Administration lent its support to these efforts, and President Biden apologized, just before the election, for the Nation’s cruelties committed upon Indigenous children. Trump administration officials, apparently, feel no such remorse. As CNN pointed out, “at least $1.6 million in federal funds for projects meant to capture and digitize stories of the systemic abuse of generations of Indigenous children in boarding schools at the hands of the U.S. government have been slashed due to federal funding cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration.” Trump wants us to believe that white people are victims, and any discussion of injustices suffered by peoples of color threatens that tawdry proposition.

Trump’s budget cuts, moreover, has left “Native American Healthcare in Turmoil,” as Native News Online reported. Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services Bobby Kennedy, Jr., had pledged prior to his confirmation hearings to support Indigenous health. Both his father and uncle, he said, had supported healthy Indigenous communities.

While Kennedy did stave off threatened DOGE cuts to the Indian Health Service, cuts to the National Institutes of Health could do massive damage in Indigenous communities, which already have the lowest life expectancy of any demographic group in the United States. The budget proposal Trump released in 2025 cut $617 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, more than $100 million from tribal law enforcement programs (a 20% cut), and $187 million from the Bureau of Indian Education. According to Tribal Business News, “overall, the Trump budget proposal slashes nearly $911 million, or 24%, from core tribal programs that fulfill the federal government’s trust and treaty responsibilities to tribal nations, including road maintenance, housing, and programs for children and families.” This year’s budget promises more cuts to social programs intended to benefit Indigenous people.

One of Trump’s first actions when he came into office in 2017 was to sign an executive order authorizing the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, cutting underneath burial grounds and lands sacred to the Oceti Sakowim at the Standing Rock Reservation . President Trump ignored the legitimate arguments raised in the stunning protest movement mounted by Water Protectors against DAPL, and did nothing to stop corporate thugs and state and local law enforcement officials from targeting them with extraordinary violence. (In all fairness, the Obama Administration did too little, too late, to stop DAPL, and Hillary Clinton was hardly an outspoken opponent).

This time around, Trump announced that his administration would support the transfer of Oak Flat, a site in Arizona sacred to the Western Apache, to a multinational mining conglomerate. Nobody disputes that mining will destroy the site, thus prohibiting the free exercise of an Indigenous religion. An Indigenous group called Apache Stronghold continues to fight against the mining corporations in federal court, but the Trump Administration feels no obligation to wait for the courts to rule.

Wendsler Nosie, Sr., the former chairperson of the San Carlos Apache tribe and leader of Apache Stronghold, said in a statement last year:

The U.S. government is rushing to give away our spiritual home before the courts can even rule–just like it’s rushed to erase Native people for generations…This is the same violent pattern we have seen for centuries. We urge the Supreme Court to protect our spiritual lifeblood and give our sacred site the same protection given to the holiest churches, mosques, and synagogues throughout this country.

No one who has watched either of the Trump Administrations can be surprised by this. Project 2025 called for the exploitation of the mineral wealth that could be found under lands occupied by, and sacred to, Indigenous peoples. The Trump Administration is coming for the American Nation’s public lands. After all, Project 2025 reads, 61% of the mineral wealth in the continental United States occurs on federal land, but less than a quarter of the nation’s oil and 12% of its natural gas come from those lands. The Biden Administration, the authors assert, waged a war against “domestically available fossil fuels.” And by discouraging Indigenous nations from mining, fracking, and drilling, the Project 2025 plotters cynically argued that the Biden administration unconstitutionally breached its trust responsibility to native nations (536).

So Project 2025 called for the federal government to work toward the following two goals:

For Project 2025, it was simple: “A significant percentage of critical minerals need by the United States is on Indian lands, but the Biden Administration has actively discouraged development of critical mineral projects on Indian lands rather than assisting in their advancement”(536-537).

Drill, baby, drill.

 There are Indigenous nations that have aggressively exploited their mineral wealth. The Crows are an example of a Native Nation that has seen in mining its rich coal fields a path out of poverty, and they have placed mining over the health and environmental consequences of mining. Project 2025 would have the Republican Party “end the war on fossil fuels and domestically available minerals and facilitate their development on lands owned by Indians and Indian Nations.” The federal government should no longer require Indigenous Nations to adhere to federal environmental policies. The government should open tribal lands for corporate exploitation, and Project 2025 respected tribal sovereignty so far as it made it easier to extract the mineral wealth in Indian Country.

In February of 2025, the Trump Administration removed from the Department of Justice the “Not One More” Report, which contained recommendations from the Not Invisible Act Commission to the federal government on how best to address the growing numbers of MMIWG. It was removed after federal agencies eliminated public documents that contained words or phrases that the new regime found objectionable, like “Native American” and “Indigenous community.” We must not talk about difficult topics, the Administration implied, and we will no longer consider the suffering of communities of color as a matter of public importance.

I write these words on May 5th. It is Red Dress Day, for awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The President has not revisited his proclamation. Trump has retreated, or forgotten about, his own very limited commitment to this very important issue.

Several years ago the Indigenous journalist Connie Walker, whose reporting has done significant work to bring the crisis of MMIW to audiences across North America, pointed out in an interview on NPR that “this issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls isn’t a new issue.  This is something that has been going on for decades . . .centuries, even.”  What has changed in the recent past, Walker continued, is “there’s a growing awareness of this crisis, and there’s a growing awareness about the impacts of that violence on the lives of Indigenous women and girls.”

 Yet I worry that this crisis will not hold the attention of the American people for long, even more so without national leadership.  Solving this project is one that demands empathy and historical understanding. Both have been in remarkably short supply of late.  There are no easy solutions, and it is difficult to truly discern the true scope of the problem. It has been going on for so long.

It was there at inception.  It was present when Christopher Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, his eyes scanning for those things that he hoped would make him a wealthy man. He found no gold, no silver, but he did see a young girl, swimming in the sea. “They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion.” In 1495, Columbus enslaved over 1600 Indians, and sent home to Spain “the best males and females.”

                                    Columbus saw a girl,

                                    Splashing in the waves.

                                    He couldn’t find gold.

                                    So he started taking slaves.

It never stops.  It rings in your ears as you read this history.  The Queen of Paspahegh, captured with her children by the English after they burned her town and wiped out the Algonquian soldiers who defended it. The English officer in charge allowed his men to throw the children into the James River, and to amuse themselves by blowing out their brains in the water.  The Queen of Paspahegh, traumatized land grieving her murdered children like so many Indigenous women, was led away from the English fort and stabbed to death in the woods by an executioner too weary to burn her. Algonquian women who surrendered during King Philip’s War in New England, trafficked and sent to death in West Indian Slavery, or torn limb from limb by English dogs of war.  The mutilation of Indigenous women’s bodies at Sand Creek and at other sites of genocidal violence.  The story has not stopped. Indigenous women go missing, and they die.

It is difficult to criticize a man who believes in nothing for abandoning principles he never clearly held. Trump strikes me as an empty shell, and for him the measure of justice is not how well the weakest and most vulnerable members of a community are treated, but whatever benefits him the most.  And as the Epstein scandal has seemingly made quite clear, cruelty against young women and girls has never slowed Trump down. The Epstein victims. Missing and murdered Indigenous women.  In each instance, Trump walked away.  Nobody who has followed his political career can be surprised by this.

#MMIW

Did Sunny White Murder Mika Westwolf? (Updated)

Leave a comment

A bit more than two months ago, 22-year-old Mika Westwolf was struck by a Cadillac Escalade cruising along Highway 93 near the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana.  Tribal police found Westwolf’s body on the side of the road around 4:00AM.  She was pronounced dead at the scene. The vehicle, driven by a non-Indigenous woman named Sunny White, did not stop after the accident. There is a march scheduled next week to shed awareness about Mika, and the broader scourge of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women. According to a story in the Daily Mail, 239 people have been killed along this stretch of road since 2021. That is an incredible figure.

            Westwolf, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation, was a talented and bright young woman. She was an athlete, an artist, and an advocate for Indigenous peoples, one of four selected from her nation to visit a Sherpa community in Nepal as part of a cultural exchange program. She had been walking along the side of the road, a bit north of the town of Arlee. She had been at a bar called the 4-Star Bar, but had left to retrieve her cell phone, which she believed she had left at home (it actually was in her brother’s car).  Her family wants answers, but they have found little reassurance from the Montana Highway Patrol. The lead investigator, Trooper Wayne Bieber, left Mika’s family convinced that her case was not in good hands. Trooper Bieber seemed not to know the basic facts of the case, and seemed inclined to believe that whatever happened that night, Mika was at fault.  Bieber told the family that walking along the shoulder of a road while intoxicated was illegal in Montana. The state police seemed uninterested in investigating Sunny White at all. She had been arrested shortly after the accident, but released soon after, pending toxicology reports. Bieber assumed that Mika was drunk, and that therefore Sunny White did not commit a crime. That first assumption has not been confirmed, and the second one is absolutely false.

            I stumbled across Mika’s story during a summer when I have been trying to complete a history of the Onondaga Nation, which I have been working on now for several years. I could not help but notice the parallels between Mika’s death and the deaths of so many Onondagas over so many years on the Onondaga Nation Territory. Like the road Mika traveled, the routes through the Onondaga Nation territory were dangerous. Onondagas died with disturbing regularity on the roadways passing through their Nation. George Van Every, for instance, one of the oldest of the Nation’s chiefs, was killed in September 1933 when a bus struck his horse-drawn buggy. He was an important figure on the Nation’s history.  Too many Onondagas were struck and killed by too many inattentive drivers.  Jesse Lyons told the House Indian Affairs Committee that “since we allowed them to build highways across our reservation, 30 Indians have been killed by automobiles and not a white man has been prosecuted.”That was in 1935.  Louis Beckman, a veteran who had just received his honorable discharge after serving in World War II, and his friend Olive Sullivan, were killed walking along South Salina Street in the very early hours of one morning in February 1946. The driver who struck them was not charged.  Anna Mae and Alice Jones, aged seven and eleven, received a total of $5750 in damages after a negligent driver passing through the Nation struck them that same year.  Howard Hill, a Carlisle alum, died after a car driven by his neighbor Andrew Pierce struck and killed him in 1950.  And in November 1950, 68-year-old Jamison Thomas died after a car struck him as he pulled a wood-laden cart along a road in Nedrow, near the reservation.  He had joined the circus at the age of fourteen, was a skilled horseman. He lived alone, a life-long bachelor. He followed the traditional religion and instructed many of his neighbors on its central tenets. The men who bore his coffin to the burying ground read like a who’s who of important Onondaga leaders. Many had attended boarding school. Theodore Thomas, the Tadodaho George Thomas, Ike Lyons, Albert White, and Henry Homer.  They were old men now, and they felt his loss. And it just goes on. Oren Lyons, 47, was killed when hit by an automobile driving on Route 11A on the Nedrow reservation. Martin Moses, a 6 year old, was killed on September 5th, 1957 “when struck by an automobile on a road in the Onondaga Reservation south of Syracuse.”

            With the one exception when damages were paid, no one was ever punished in these accidents.  They were deemed natural, part of the normal course of business. Poor people walked. People with more money drove. Sometimes the latter struck the former, and sometimes the former died. Nothing to see here, the authorities seemed to suggest. Best to not be poor. Best to not walk along the roadway.

           And that is what seems to be the case in the Mika Westwolf case. Nothing criminal, in the eyes of the state police, has occurred.  If Westwolf was intoxicated, as the Trooper Bieber seemed to suggest, she may as well have had it coming. It’s infuriating.

I lived in Montana for four years in the middle of the 1990s. I was struck during my time there by how casually racist statements about Indigenous people were made. Native Americans were drunks and reprobates. Their deaths and their disappearance seemed natural, and certainly it was beyond the power of white people to prevent it from happening. The racist attitudes held by many Montanans toward Indigenous peoples could justify their deaths. An Indian woman hit by a car late at night? Of course she was intoxicated, because Indians drink too much. The logic is reductive and violent.

Despite the racism, I had a great fondness for Montana. I learned to teach there. For the first time in my career, I had a significant number of Native American students. I still follow news from the state. And I have read, frequently over the past years, about the number of MMIW cases that have taken place in Montana. The state remains a dangerous place to be Indian. This pains me greatly.

            And it also stinks to high hell, because you do not have to read very much to determine that Sunny White is a monster. Although law enforcement officers have resisted drawing what seems like so real a possibility, this case could easily be a hate crime. Of course accidents happen. Sometimes they truly are tragic, terrible events beyond anyone’s control. But Sunny White was a reputed drug user with a criminal record, and an avowed White Nationalist.  To dispel any doubt about this, she named her two children “Aryan” and “Nation.” That a hateful racist could hit a young Indigenous woman with her car and keep going is sickening, but it should not surprise any of us.

           

The death of Mika Westwolf underscores the urgent need for even more decisive action on the part of federal authorities to address the continuing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous persons. In this case, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the state police are incompetent or, worse, that they are covering up a terrible crime. We need more data, to be sure, but beyond that, we need a commitment to the simple principle that the lives of Indigenous people, whatever the racists and the dingbats and the goons believe, are as valuable as the lives of any one else. In Montana, certainly, that this principle is widely held remains very much in doubt. There is a Go Fund Me Page established by Mika’s family. Help if you can.

#MMIW

I Read Joe Biden’s Proclamation of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day So You Don’t Have To.

Leave a comment

And it was not terrible. As in his two earlier proclamations, Biden pledged to work with Native communities “to find justice, keep families safe, and help them heal.” The scourge of MMIWG was “an epidemic,” he said, that will not be cured until the United States responds “with urgency and the resources needed to stop the violence and reverses the legacy of inequity and neglect that often drives it.”

Biden recalled the work his administration has done, mostly through a 2021 executive order that required federal agencies to investigate “the cause of the crisis, collecting better data on these overwhelmingly underreported crimes, and develop a strategy to combat this epidemic, which most often impacts women, girls, LGBTQI+ people in the communities, and Two-Spirit Native Americans.” Is Biden the first American president to use the phrase “Two-Spirit”?

Biden has done a lot: investing in shelters and rape crisis centers on Tribal lands and “trauma-informed training that helps law enforcement and courts be more responsive” and sympathetic, as well as an expanded recognition of “Tribal courts’ jurisdiction over non-Native perpetrators suspected of committing crimes of stalking, sexual assault, child abuse and sex trafficking on Tribal lands.” Biden justly mentioned his role in writing the original Violence Against Women Act and in strengthening VAWA as Vice President and President. President Biden acknowledged the pain this day brought to many Indigenous peoples, and called “all Americans and all levels of government to support Tribal governments and Tribal communities’ efforts to increase awareness and address the issues of missing and murdered Indigenous persons.” He said that “we are working to address the underlying causes of violence from human trafficking to longstanding economic disparities, systemic racism, historical trauma, and the need for services to address substance use disorders.”

Has Biden done enough?

Of course not. Much remains to be done. His administration, like that of his predecessor, will not consider supporting legislation that would repeal the Supreme Court’s disastrous 1978 Oliphant decision. The Supremes are poised within the next several weeks to gut the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, and have demonstrated little willingness to take seriously Native American nationhood when it threatens at a profound level state sovereignty. Though Biden’s approach to MMIWG is little different in its fundamentals than President Trump’s “Operation Lady Justice,” it is a start.

Presidential proclamations may not mean much. I am sure that only a tiny, tiny percentage of Americans read them. If the news media does not bring them to the attention of the American people, they fall on deaf ears. There is little this government can do to help Indigenous communities heal, not with Red State governments banning any sort of history teaching that suggests that children reflect on the uglier parts of this nation’s history. The Republican racists will work to silence America’s violent treatment of Native Americans. But it is a start. And the important thing to remember is that Biden, like Trump before him, has only come to see MMIWG as a national crisis because of the pressure placed upon him by thousands of Native American people and their allies committed to preventing the loss of any more stolen sisters.

#MMIW

Original Sins

Leave a comment

            Sometimes I feel like a am teaching America’s original sin.  I have felt that way a lot recently. Over the past week I have listened to the first six episodes of Connie Walker’s excellent new podcast, “Stolen: The Search for Jermain.”  She focuses on the disappearance, and also the life, of Jermain Charlo, a 23-year-old woman from the Flathead Reservation in northwestern Montana who disappeared from Missoula in the summer of 2018. 

Family Hopes Increase In Reward May Help Locate Missing Montana Woman | MTPR

            During the final year of the Trump Administration, the President designated May 5th as “Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day,” and he established by executive order “Operation Lady Justice,” a task force given the charge to work toward solutions to this incredibly difficult problem.  Crimes against humanity are taking place, and even the buffoons in the Trump Administration had to act, even if it was nothing more than an attempt to lure Native American votes in advance of the election. It did not work. Just this week, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the formation of a special unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. to investigate crimes against Indigenous women. Native American women are murdered at a rate more than ten times the national average.

            The national media widely reported on Haaland’s announcement, a refreshing change.  More Americans are becoming aware of the pain and grief the #MMIW crisis is provoking in Native American communities, on reservations and off.  As Connie Walker pointed out in an interview on NPR, “this issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls isn’t a new issue.  This is something that has been going on for decades . . .centuries, even.”  What has changed in recent past, Walker continued, is “there’s a growing awareness of this crisis, and there’s a growing awareness about the impacts of that violence on the lives of Indigenous women and girls.”

            I worry that this crisis will not hold the attention of the American people for long.  Solving this project is one that demands empathy and historical understanding. Both have been in remarkably short supply of late.  There are no easy solutions, and it is difficult to truly discern the true scope of the problem. It has been going on for so long.

            It was there at the inception.  It was present when Christopher Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, his eyes scanning for those things that he hoped would make him a wealthy man. He found no gold, no silver, but he did see a young girl, swimming in the sea. “They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion.” In 1495, Columbus enslaved over 1600 Indians, and sent home to Spain “the best males and females.” 

                                    Columbus saw a girl,

                                    Splashing in the waves.

                                    He couldn’t find gold.

                                    So he started taking slaves.

            It never stops.  It rings in your ears as you read this history.  The Queen of Paspahegh, captured with her children by the English after they burned her town and wiped out the Algonquian soldiers who defended it. The English officer in charge allowed his men to throw the children into the James River, and to amuse themselves by blowing out their brains in the water.  The Queen of Paspahegh, traumatized land grieving her murdered children like so many Indigenous women, was led away from the English fort and stabbed to death in the woods by an executioner too weary to burn her. Algonquian women who surrendered during King Philip’s War in New England, trafficked and sent to death in West Indian Slavery, or torn limb from limb by English dogs of war.  The mutilation of Indigenous women’s bodies at Sand Creek and at other sites of genocidal violence.  The story has not stopped. Indigenous women go missing, and they die.

            Montana, where Jermain Charlo went missing, must be among the worst places for this. 
            I lived for four years in Montana. I taught at Montana State University at Billings, in a hellhole of a history department.  Students from the Crow Reservation were the largest minority on campus, and occasionally a faculty member let them know that they were an unwelcome minority as well.  I think about some of the Indigenous women who took my classes there, and the struggles they confronted. I think of the casual racism I heard in Billings, on campus and off.

            I think about my students in Geneseo as well. I imagine that many of them, when they lived at home, went out at night with their friends.  Your parents are not idiots, I told them.  They know you may be out having a good time. They know that sex and alcohol and drugs might be involved. They have to trust that you will make the right decisions.  Even when we parents do not trust you to make the right decision, we have to, I said.  You go out and you come home later than you said you would, and your parent might be angry, they might ask you lots of questions, they will pester you. You might see this as the ultimate buzzkill, or as disrespectful.  It might bother you that your parents do not seem to trust you, or that they worry so much.  I have children, so I share with my students one thing I know for certain: that when you get out of your parents’ sight, they worry.  When you are not where you said you would be when you said you would be there, no matter how old you are, they will worry because they are afraid.  We are afraid.  Really. Because there is nothing worse than thinking that something bad happened to your child, or that somebody hurt your child.  So, imagine, I tell them, the scene in your house if you did not come home.  Imagine the scene without you in it.  Imagine your parents planning your funeral or, perhaps, for years wondering what happened to you.  I think if you asked your parents, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?” they would say that something terrible happened to my child, or that someone hurt my child.  I know I would say that.  I ask my students to imagine what it would do to your parents to lose you.

            Because all the evidence suggests that thousands of Indigenous families in Canada and the United States experience this “worst thing.”  Savannah Grey Wind’s family, for instance. Savanna was eight months pregnant. Her neighbor in a Fargo apartment complex lured her inside, hit her on the head, and while she was still alive, ebbing in and out of consciousness, cut the baby out of her womb.  Together, Brooke Crews, that neighbor, and her boyfriend, cleaned up the blood, disposed of the clothing, and wrapped up Savannah’s body in plastic sheeting before dumping her body in the river, where kayakers found her some time later. They attempted to raise the baby as their own, before the authorities arrested them. The baby is how with her father.

            Or Mildred Old Crow, who disappeared in November of 2020.  She was eight years old.  Her body was found in February of 2021. Her guardians had been charged in tribal court for endangering the welfare of a minor.  Eight years old. Native Americans make up 7% of Montana’s population, according to one set of figures, but they comprise a full 25% of the missing persons in the state. In February of this year, accordig to another source, there were 167 active missing persons cases in Montana.  53 of them, or 31%, were indigenous.

Just a month before the discovery of Mildred’s body, authorities found the body of Selena Faye Not Afraid on the Crow Reservation. She was

Body found near Montana rest area confirmed to be Selena Not Afraid, missing since New Year's Day
Selena Fay Not Afraid

sixteen.  She died of hypothermia, exposure, after walking away from a broken down car. It was January in Montana. It was viciously cold.  Why did she leave? What caused her to leave?

            And Kaysera Stops Pretty in Places. She was eighteen, played basketball and ran cross-country. She performed in school plays at Hardin High School and wanted to act.  She had been at a house party, but disappeared.  She was found several days later, by a passerby, who discovered her body behind a woodpile in the backyard of a different house. Nobody knows how she got there, and her cause of death is “undetermined.”

No cause of death found for Kaysera Stops Pretty Places; investigation still active | Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women | billingsgazette.com
Kaysera Stops Pretty in Places

            It is difficult teaching this subject.  Sometimes it can grind you down.  It is difficult, I found, to listen to parts of Connie Walker’s podcast.  This is an enormous problem, but I am a historian.  Nothing is inevitable, I tell my students.  Every things has causes. This is not a force of nature or an act of God.  These are criminal acts by individuals committed against Indigenous women and girls. It does not have to be this way.  At least, that is what I believe. Why are so many Native American women and girls missing? Though there is still by all accounts a shortage of evidence as to the scope of problem, everyone acknowledges that the problem is substantial.  It is causing devastation and grief. You can read the tributes on Selena’s page at the Dahl Funeral Chapel. You can listen to the voices of Jermain Charlo’s friends and family members in “Stolen.”  It is right before your eyes. The government has slowly started to respond.

            Were these young women white, and had they disappeared from the suburbs, this problem would already have been solved. It only gets us so far to point out that truth.  These are often crimes committed on the margins, on remote reservations or in American cities where, if you want, you can feel as isolated and alone as if you were walking in the woods. None of them disappear without a trace.  There are clues, incomplete, but enough of the picture is complete to suggest that a solution to the puzzle is near.  And there are the people left behind: Jermain had two children, but also the sisters, friends, parents and relatives, concentric circles of grief, radiating outward like ripples on the surface of a pond.

#MMIW

The Donald and the Missing Girls

Leave a comment

Well, that did not take long. Last week I published a piece in the Syracuse newspaper giving the Trump Administration qualified credit for appointing a task force, dubbed “Operation Lady Justice,” directed at addressing the problem of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and for issuing a proclamation making May 5th “Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.“

At a listening session yesterday, the Trump Administration unsurprisingly demonstrated that its real commitment to the issue is shallow and so limited as to be effectively meaningless. As Native Americans who attended the session yesterday pointed out, the President’s approval of pipe lines and other projects brings large numbers of non-native “man camps” into areas close to many Native American communities. Many observers have asserted that a relationship exists between such projects and reports of missing and murdered Native American women and girls. Indeed, Kristin Welch, a community organizer for Menikanaehkem, a Wisconsin group, asserted that cases of violence against Native American women are increased 70% by the presence of these man camps.

Task Force members repeatedly ignored these questions. When asked about the 1978 Oliphant decision, which held that non-Indians can not be held criminally liable for their actions on Indian land by tribal authorities, Task Force Member Marcia Good said that “Oliphant is currently beyond the scope of [Operation Lady Justice] at this time.”

Without restoring power to Native nations to allow them to prosecute the crimes non-Indians commit against Native American women, the Trump Administration has removed from the table what all experts assert is a vital part of any solution to this heart-wrenching problem. President Trump, in other words, supports policies that threaten to exacerbate the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women while permitting no discussion of a critical part of the solution. The Trump Administration is interested only in the appearance of action, except when it chooses to behave in a destructive manner.

#MMIW, Current Events, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Donald and the Missing Women and Girls

Leave a comment

During his visit to Arizona at the beginning of May, President Donald Trump took some time out to comment on his administration’s efforts to help the state’s large Native American population combat the Coronavirus pandemic and, as he put it, to bring attention to “the unprecedented actions my administration has taken to support our treasured Native American communities.” The President said that his administration has improved “the lives of Native American families and tribes more than any administration has done by far.”

            That is quite a claim, and it’s not supported by the evidence.

            Trump touted the eight billion dollars Congress appropriated to assist American Indian nations, which he claimed, “is the largest single investment in Indian Country in our history.” The President announced as well that the Navajo Nation will receive an additional $600 million in assistance. “That’s a lot,” he said. Trump then asked, according to the White House transcript of the meeting, “Should I renegotiate that? Can we renegotiate that? (Laughter).” “Only if you go up,” said Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer.

Lizer can be forgiven for not laughing. As of May 28th, the Navajo Nation had suffered more than 5000 active cases of COVID-19, and 167 deaths, and the third-highest per capita rate of infection in the Country.

             “Since I took office,” Trump continued, “my administration has also worked to repatriate precious Native American artifacts, to protect children in the care of the Indian Health Service, and to make eagle remains more easily accessible for cultural and religious purposes, and to highlight the contributions of Native American veterans throughout the history of our nation.” None of the items on this list are unprecedented, and all are required by laws that predated Trump’s election in 2016.

            Make no mistake, Trump’s presidency has been mostly bad for Native Americans. His racist name-calling directed at Elizabeth Warren reinforced damaging stereotypes about Native American identity. Within days of taking office, he authorized completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and ignored the protestors at Standing Rock, and rolled back protections on sacred sites like the Bears Ears National Monument. His fetish for Andrew Jackson has bothered those who know anything at all about that president’s record concerning Native America, and Trump’s budgets have imposed cuts on the Indian Health Service at a time when additional funding was badly needed. In fact, the $800 billion in funding has been tied up in court as tribes have clashed with the nation on who should receive the payments. He has ignored the problem of police violence towards Native Americans. The President has been more talk than action, and those actions are usually bad.

            With one exception.

            In November of 2019, the President signed an Executive Order establishing a task force “on Missing and Murdered American Indian and Alaska Natives,” charged with consulting tribal governments “on the scope and nature of the issues” related to missing and murdered women and girls, developing “model protocols and procedures to apply to new and unsolved cases of missing or murdered persons in American Indian and Alaska Native communities,” as well as the “establishment of a multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional team” including representatives from tribal law enforcement agencies and the federal Departments of Justice and Interior.

            Dubbed “Operation Lady Justice,” the task force held consultation/listening sessions in January and February of this year but had to shelve the rest of its schedule, which was to have run through the end of July, because of the coronavirus pandemic.

            This is a serious problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control found that 49 percent of Native American women have experienced sexual violence. The Department of Justice reported that 34.1 percent of Native American women will be raped during their lifetime, more than for any other ethnic or racial grouping. As President Trump indicated when he signed the Executive order, “the statistics are sobering and heartbreaking.” He said that “more than 5,000 Native American women and girls were reported missing,” and though the majority return home or are found, “too many are still missing and their whereabouts are unknown—and they usually don’t find them.”

            It was this task force about which he spoke during his visit to Arizona. He issued a proclamation making May 5th “Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.”

            Many of these missing women have been caught in a web of human trafficking, the exact breadth of the problem unknown. It is a problem of great magnitude but hazy borders. In this sense, the President’s effort to bring additional attention to this issue is welcome. More resources are needed. Nearly half of tribal law enforcement agencies who responded to a Government Accountability Office called for the information reported that they believe human trafficking is occurring on tribal lands within their jurisdictions. The President can educate Americans about the problem of missing and murdered women and girls.

            These are crimes on the margins. Native communities are poor. They are isolated. The Supreme Court has made the prosecution of non-Indians by tribal law enforcement officers difficult where it is not impossible. Native American history is a story of tragedy, violence, crime, theft, and plunder. It is, at other times, a story of blundering goodwill. Even those who want to do right often do damage. But the harm is not inevitable, and nations, like individuals, have choices. In this one instance, the President and his handlers have made the right one. The Task Force is still on schedule to report to the President sometime after the election. Let’s hope, whatever the outcome in November, that this important first step is not one wasted.