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Put your thinking caps on + + + Indigenously : Decolonizing Your Newfeed + + + DECOLONIZING YOUR NEWSFEED "Still Dancing" by Jonathan Labillois “MISSING AND MURDERED” | 5.08.21 The year that First Nations artist Jonathan Labillois was creating the powerful image you see above ab
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DECOLONIZING YOUR NEWSFEED
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“MISSING AND MURDERED” | 5.08.21
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The year that First Nations artist Jonathan Labillois was creating the powerful image you see above about Canada’s “Missing and Murdered” movement - here in the United States, Native nations had just started reclaiming strands of their tribal justice back. It was 2014 and, parallel in North America, the violence inflicted on Indigenous women in both countries was essentially the same crisis. Yet, up north, the ignoring was less chronic. By that time, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had just completed the first state-sponsored overview to look into the disproportionate deaths and disappearances of Native women and girls. But it was a fact-finding exercise mostly prompted by a scathing report from Human Rights Watch the year before. In other words, the RCMP acted upon the interests of Indigenous families only when pressured. But I should pause here, first, for a heartfelt warning: This week’s newsletter is long and tough. It confronts issues that could be triggering for any survivor with any kind of association to traumatic assault. I should know. I was completely caught off guard, Wednesday. That was the day the Biden Administration renewed a proclamation to mark a national day of awareness for the “Missing and Murdered” movement in America. Some of the links and storytelling I’ve presented here to help explain how we got to this point deal with heavy stuff: rape, murder, police brutality, lateral violence, suicide. It’s no Sunday brunch, so please, read with care. 🌷 Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland helped set the stage in a press conference, Tuesday. “For too long this issue has been swept under the rug with a lack of urgency, attention, and funding,” Haaland said before rattling off a series of statistics that have fallen on the ears of Indian Country for years: 4 in 5 Native women experience violence in their lifetime; more than half experience sexual violence. She stopped short, however of quoting the storied “1 in 3” statistic - one of the most commonly quoted to address how many Indigenous women are presumed to be raped. On July 29, 2010, President Barack Obama made “1 in 3” the cornerstone of his speech the day he signed the Tribal Law and Order Act. “When one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetimes, that is an assault on our national conscience; it is an affront to our shared humanity; it is something that we cannot allow to continue.”
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The video from that day will make you cry because it starts off with the testimony of Lisa Marie Iyotte, a Sicangu Lakota daughter and mother whose children were home the night her anonymous rapist came to attack her on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. She had just gotten divorced from a local man who worked on the tribal police force. Living alone at home, she felt targeted. And the day she bravely shared her story at the White House, she was understandably emotional. She talked about how federal authorities declined to get involved in her case because her attacker had not used a weapon. “It wasn’t until he raped a teenage girl that he was finally arrested and convicted,” Lisa said. “He was never prosecuted for raping me.” She wiped tears from her eyes, a kind president standing by her side. Obama was the first sitting chief executive in office to ever address the cycles of violence on Native women - and he acted upon such acknowledgment with legislation. But today, the Tribal Law and Order Act is largely a symbol of how best-laid plans have failed Indigenous families combatting a legacy of violence and the trauma that comes with it. Lisa Iyotte is a case in point. In December 2019, Lisa and I drove from the Puyallip reservation in Washington State to the Yakama Nation for the unveiling of Operation Lady Justice, the Trump Administration’s answer to Indian Country’s violence. As we headed out on the open road, a bald eagle flew over us. Lisa grabbed my hand, closed her eyes, and whispered a tiny prayer in Lakota. Justice has never really come for Lisa, or her grown children and grandchildren. Today she shares a small rental property with her daughter while caring for a grandson whose young life has also been hit hard with violence. The cycle continues.
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Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney leads a presentation about Operation Lady Justice, a DOI initiative to address “Missing and Murdered” Indigenous women on Dec. 16, 2019 at the Yakama Nation Cultural Center in Toppenish, Wa. |
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Most people on the outside looking in, ask why? Why is violence so prevalent in Indian Country compared to other pockets in America? Why haven’t laws been able to fix the problem? Eleven years after the passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act, the multi-million dollar mandate led by the Department of Justice is largely seen as a big letdown. In December 2017, the DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, released a report which criticized the law and mentioned severe budget cuts as high as 40% which the OIG said actually worked against tribal police efforts. “No single department-level entity oversees Indian Country law enforcement activities,” said Horowitz, referring to the DOJ’s failure to deliver justice equity to Indian Country. As a result, crime data involving Natives remained unreliable, the inspector said. Bad data festers at the heart of this so-called “silent crisis.” The very statistics Secretary Haaland laid out in her press conference actually stem from one of the most flawed data sets around - a 2016 National Institute of Justice report that its own author admits carries “large margins of error.” Meanwhile, bottom-up data efforts from Indian Country, while incredibly honorable, have fallen short of transparency. The statistics from the 2018 Urban Indian Health Institute paint a compelling narrative about the “Missing and Murdered” crisis in America, but the authors have refused to release the raw data or the dozens of FOIA documents to support it. That just doesn’t happen with any other count. Also, it’s just ironic given that the violence issue is one hinged on data access. Sorry, but that’s just odd, right?
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What else is problematic are the politicians and press that gobbled up the numbers without question. These wild standards are emblematic to how Indian Country has historically functioned - without little to lax Indigenous political representation and where outsiders think they know what’s best. Today the unverified urban stats often get used to describe what is largely a reservation-based focus by the federal government - and yet the situation is not at all binary. Here was my take on the UIHI report from Nov. 2018 that didn’t pander to the statistical hype but rather latched onto what the organization aptly pointed out: that violence doesn’t end once Natives leave the reservation. Roughly three-quarters of us live in cities and border towns like Fargo, North Dakota where 22-year-old Spirit Lake mother Savanna Lafontaine-Greywind disappeared and was later found floating in a river - largely without a police investigation. Today, Savanna is the namesake for one of two laws passed by President Trump - Savanna’s Act - hoping to, once more, curb the violence. But so far it’s off to a shaky start. Enacted last October, the law is directly designed to address the data disparities that are like poison to this problem. But already, the lead department, the DOJ, has violated one of its chief mandates: improving tribal access to data. A 180-day deadline was missed as of April 8 to hold formal tribal consultations and conferences to begin setting Savanna’s Act in motion. In public remarks this week, Secretary Haaland made no mention of the roll-out of Savanna’s Act when she promoted the newly established Missing and Murdered Unit within the Interior. Instead, the focus was implementing one of her signature pieces of legislation as a congresswoman, the Not Invisible Act, which establishes a Joint Commission of stakeholders to find solutions to end the violence. “Interior is determined to marshal our resources to implement these laws to finally address this crisis of violence against Indigenous Peoples,” said Haaland. It’s unclear when the stronger law, Savanna’s Act, will start to take effect. There’s more to say and I’m really surprised about my path to writing this weekend’s newsletter. Like I said, I was a little thrown by the visibility of the May 5 day of awareness to Indian Country’s violence. It was unprecedented in many ways. For instance, the Department of Health and Human Services hosted a red shawl ceremony that was live-streamed for all to see. That was a first. They say there isn’t a single Native person who isn’t touched by some kind of assault and that certainly rings true for me and my family. I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about my experience but I shared at least this much on Twitter. That’s good enough for now. I know this newsletter is LONG but I took some time to lay out some links and facts, as well as a hearty Index, as a reference point for you in the future. I predict you’re going to see a lot more about this issue in your newsfeeds - so you’re best to think critically about all the things. So star this one in your inbox. And as always, I so appreciate you being here! Jenni 💃🏽 |
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Exact majority the Supreme Court ruled to strip tribes of prosecuting non-Natives: 6-2 Total days Hanna Harris was missing before found murdered in Lame Deer, MT: 5 Total years after her death that Hanna’s birthday, May 5, is proclaimed MMIW Day: 5 Number of reports alleging #MMIR content removal on Instagram, May 5: 92 Exact SPSS version used to crunch data behind the “1 in 3” violence statistic in 1998: 7.0 Total years after TLOA that mandated data collection was still undelivered by the DOJ: 7 Number of police units and agencies the Urban Indian Health Institute filed FOIAs: 71 Total reported costs to file the FOIAs, according to UIHI: $4,464 Number of FOIAs requested of and released by the UIHI, a federally funded program: 0 Total FOIA requests filed and inadvertently available via MuckRock: 101 Total completed: 19 Exact reward money offered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to find Ashley Loring: $10K Number of other rewards offered by the BIA for other missing Native women: 0 Total governments reports declaring violence in Indian Country a public health issue: 1 Total “calls for justice” in Canada’s Missing and Murdered Nat’l Inquiry report: 231
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In all my hardships as an adult, running has helped heal and strengthen my soul. It’s kinda that way for a lot of Natives. We run for sobriety, to stop pipelines, and this weekend, we’re running for justice. You should consider joining us. Use what’s left of the weekend to pick your own course, upload your times, and honor our “Missing and Murdered” Indigenous relatives and survivors - and for that matter, women everywhere. It’s Mother’s Day weekend, after all. Here’s how this virtual run works:
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“Thank you for Indigenously and the latest issue -- Whale Hunt.” Steve, Port Townsend, WA This is kind to say, Steve, considering that I had the most people ever unsubscribe last week. I asked a friend, “Was it my “Free Willy” remark?” And then I just realized that subsistence whaling must be as hard for the colonial mind to grok as it was 20 years ago. The timing of all this is so ripe for diving into my incubator course where I’m being forced to ask a lot of ideal questions like who this newsletter is for and why? Decolonizing may seem like the obvious gig here but it takes a lot of intention. On that note, I realized I was remiss in updating a link for Robert Sullivan’s Whale Hunt, last week. If you clicked on the button you were directed to that Columbia Indigenous human rights MOOC I recommended a few newsletters ago (which is so good by the way. Did you join?) Anyway, here’s the proper link for Bob’s book who also just got a glorious Guggenheim fellowship! 🐳
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The Indigenously newsletter is produced by Jenni Monet (Laguna Pueblo)
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