A panel of women testifying Nov. 20, 2024, to the House Appropriations Committee oversight hearing on Investigating the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women listen as Maulian Bryant (left) spoke about the challenges her Penobscot Nation faces in accessing resources to find missing people. From left to right: Mary Jane Miles, Cheryl Horn, Abigail Echo-Hawk and Eugenia Charles-Newton. (Screenshot via YouTube/House Appropriations Committee)
Paul Begay, Anne Curley, Ella Mae Begay and Everett Charley are the names of only a handful of Navajo people missing that Navajo Nation Council Delegate Eugenia Charles-Newton shared as she addressed a congressional committee hearing on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People.
“These are a few of the names I wanted to read aloud, so they know they are not forgotten,” Charles-Newton told the House Appropriations Committee oversight hearing on Investigating the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
The victims are both men and women, but it is Native American women who disproportionately go missing and are murdered in cases that are rarely solved, if they’re investigated at all. The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates that there are approximately 4,200 missing and murdered Indigenous peoples cases that have gone unsolved.
She said that the total number of known people missing from the Navajo Nation is 75, and they do not know the number of Navajo people who have been murdered.
“It’s unaccounted for because we lack the manpower to track those cases properly, and we also lack the infrastructure to record all cases,” she said.
Charles-Newton was one of five Indigenous women who testified to the committee on Nov. 20, and each shared their experiences working and advocating for missing and murdered Indigenous people in both rural and urban settings. As part of the testimonies, each woman also provided recommendations on how federal agencies can better support MMIP efforts.
Many of the concerns highlighted in the hearing related to continued jurisdictional issues among federal, state, and tribal entities, the lack of readily available resources for investigations involving MMIP cases, the need for more comprehensive data collection regarding Indigenous peoples and accountability among federal agencies.
“My inner being agonizes over the lack of worth given to Native women and the senseless acts that lead to their harm,” said Mary Jane Miles, vice-chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee and member of the Nez Perce tribe. “In the past, people in power have not cared about Native women, but their families and tribes do care.”
Over and over again, the women who testified spoke about the jurisdictional confusion that, many said, is ultimately used as a way to pass the buck and avoid doing the police work required to seek justice for the victims.
Cheryl Horn, a member of the Assiniboine Tribe of Fort Belknap who sits on the Montana Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force, spoke about the difficulty in getting any help from the tribal, county and federal law enforcement agencies when two of her nieces went missing.
“None of these jurisdictions want this case,” said. “I don’t want jurisdiction used as an excuse not to do it, which is what I’m seeing in Montana.”
Likewise, Urban Indian Health Institute Director Abigail Echo-Hawk told the committee that the “maze of jurisdiction is just an excuse” that allows law enforcement “to not pay attention to those they don’t care about — and those they don’t care about look like me and the other women on this panel today.”
Charles-Newton drove home exactly how jurisdictional confusion has failed Native victims, telling the committee about her own kidnapping and brutal repeated rapes when she was just 17 years old. She said she accepted a Coca-Cola from a man she knew, only to wake up later, tied up in a shack and held for more than a week.
“He raped me repeatedly, he beat me, he broke my ribs, broke my cheekbones. He tried to carve his initials into my pubic area,” she said.
And although Charles-Newton knew who her rapist was, and told police over and over, she said all they kept asking her about was where the shack was located, a question she couldn’t answer. Because of that, jurisdiction was never settled, and her rapist was never prosecuted — and now she represents that man as a Navajo Nation delegate.
No one came to search for her, she said, because tribal police told her family that she’d just gotten tired of living in her tribal community and had left. That was an excuse, Charles-Newton said, but her family believed it because they have been conditioned to believe the police.
“Nobody wants to solve these cases. They just want to say that it’s closed,” she said. “I wish we had law enforcement where everybody took their jobs seriously.”
The tendency to blame Indigenous women who are victimized — conditioned by decades of stereotypes that treat Native people, and especially Native women, as less than human — makes it that much more difficult to get non-tribal law enforcement to respond to the cases the same way they would if the victims were white women, Echo-Hawk said.
“This cannot depend on one person, on one organization. It must be a systematic approach that upholds accountability,” she said. It is something we’ve been calling for, but no one has been willing to take up the cause.”
Maulian Bryant, a member of the Penobscot Nation in Maine and the incoming executive director of the Wabanaki Alliance, said the failure to recognize the crisis taking place on tribal lands and against Native Americans living in urban centers is only the latest trauma visited upon Indigenous people by the U.S. government.
Things like the American government stealing land from Native people and then forcing them into boarding schools, where they literally had their culture beaten out of them, have left Indigenous people “less than human” and “invisible.”
“It’s so much more than laws and jurisdiction, it’s where we’ve been placed in society,” she said. “We love this place and we need it to love us back.”
Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, called the hearing as part of the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees funding for the Department of Interior.
More than 40% of American Indian and Alaska Native women are raped in their lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For Indigenous women between the ages of 10 and 24, homicide is the No. 3 leading cause of death. For Indigenous women ages 25 to 24, it is the fifth leading cause of death.
“Forty percent of all victims of sex trafficking are identified as American Indian and Alaska Native women,” Simpson said. “In 2023, over 5,800 American Indian and Alaska Native females were missing – and 74% were children. This is tragic and unacceptable.”
Simpson said that, as part of the FY2025 House Interior appropriations bill, the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ public safety and justice programs received a $191 million increase, including an additional $141 million for criminal investigation and police services.
Simpson said the bill also provided an additional $13.5 million for a total of $30 million for the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s initiative, which focuses on helping address the MMIP crisis, including resources for criminal investigators, software platforms and evidence recovery equipment.
“These steps are just the beginning,” he said.
The goal of the hearing is not to point fingers, Simpson said, but to solve a problem.
“We want to know what’s working and what’s not working, things that might need to be changed and that is the purpose of this hearing,” he said, because as the appropriations committee, it is their responsibility to fund many of those programs.
Echo-Hawk spoke to the committee on behalf of the Indigenous people living in urban areas who continue to be impacted by the crisis yet still do not have access to resources promised through the Savanna’s Act and Not Invisible Act.
“These people are suffering in the same ways the tribes are suffering,” Echo-Hawk said of Indigenous people living in urban settings.
Echo-Hawk, who is a member of the Pawnee Nation and serves as the executive vice president of the Seattle Indian Health Board, touched on three major topics related to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples: the Department of Justice’s failure to implement the Savanna’s Act and the Not Invisible Act, the need for a national alert code for missing and endangered Indigenous people, and the importance of holding the military accountable for violence against Indigenous people.
“Please ensure that there is accountability for urban Indian populations as we move forward in doing everything we can to achieve justice,” Echo-Hawk said.
Savanna’s Act is an effort to improve the federal response to missing and murdered Indigenous peoples, including increasing coordination among federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement agencies.
The Not Invisible Act was signed into law in 2020, and it requires the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Interior to establish the Not Invisible Act Commission, a cross-jurisdictional advisory committee that will develop recommendations to address the public safety challenges associated with missing and murdered Indigenous peoples.
The commission was formed in May 2022, and it held field meetings in June 2022, which helped it compile a recommendation report for the Departments of Justice, Interior, and Congress in November 2023.
Some of those recommendations included tracking and reporting MMIP and human trafficking cases, coordinating tribal-state-federal resources to combat MMIP and human trafficking, and identifying, reporting, and responding to instances of MMIP cases and human trafficking.
“For those of us serving in the urban setting, the promises of the Savannah’s Act and Not Invisible Act have never come,” Echo-Hawk said. She noted how she has often interacted with law enforcement agencies that acknowledge a crisis happening among Indigenous people, but they do not know how to adequately address it because they do not have the resources to do so.
Echo-Hawk pointed out that the commission for the Not Invisible Act took two years to be appointed, and the process for appointment and data collection was rushed. As a result, many Indigenous people within urban communities were unable to share their experiences with the commission.
“They need to do better,” she said. “Our urban communities must be involved and we have to ensure that all of our people, regardless of where we live, have the opportunity to see justice.”
To address violence against Indigenous women by the military, Echo-Hawk shared her personal experience of being victimized as a young woman by an active-duty military man.
Echo-Hawk called for accountability within the Department of Defense, stating that department leaders need to make current data readily available on human trafficking, sexual assault, domestic violence and homicide of both active-duty military who are affected and those who are perpetrators in the active-duty military.
“We need to know what the impact is of the military on this crisis and of those active-duty service members who deserve safety,” she said, adding that Indigenous people make up over 1% of those in active-duty military service, and this crisis impacts them.
U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, said that it is a complex crisis, and there has been growing awareness and focus on resolving unsolved cases as well as understanding and addressing other contributing factors, such as drug and human trafficking, domestic violence, poverty, housing issues and more.
“They’re all equally important to confront the scale and severity of this issue,” she said. “That is why it’s imperative we pass a full-year interior appropriations bill and not have programs constrained by operating under a continuing resolution.”
Pingree pointed out several initiatives that have been put in place to address the ongoing crisis, including the establishment of Operation Lady Justice in 2019 to pursue these unresolved cases; the creation of a missing and murdered unit within the BIA Office of Justice Services in 2021, which was established to provide leadership and direction for cross-department and interagency work; and the 2023 launch of the DOJ’s missing and murdered Indigenous regional outreach program, which permanently placed 10 attorneys and coordinators in five designated regions across the United States to help respond to cases.
Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, said that Indigenous women and girls continue to be disproportionately targeted by dangerous predators.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data indicates that Native women and girls experience a murder rate 10 times higher than the national average,” Cole said. “Tragically, I have seen these stats first hand in my home state of Oklahoma, which ranks No. 2 on the list of the top 10 states with Native American and Alaska Native missing persons cases.”
Cole said that while the statistics are alarming, data collection on the issue is still lacking, and solving the MMIP crisis will require sufficient awareness and resources.
“Because of the extreme lack of resources, statutory roadblocks, and several other barriers, this crisis won’t be solved without the work and partnership of leaders of the federal, state, tribal, and local law enforcement,” he said.
This article was first published by the Arizona Mirror, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and X.