This was written by one of our members to share as part of the DEI efforts at their workplace. We feel that this is a good introduction to this topic.

When I was 14 my father worked on an oil rig outside of Riverton, Wyoming. He would hear stories from the men he lived with in the man camp, warnings from other white men to not be caught on the reservation after dark. They told him that they had been chased off by Native men and had the bullet holes in their tailgates to prove it. It wasn’t until about fifteen years later when I was working with the Greater Cincinnati Native American Coalition that I came into the knowledge that enabled me to contextualize these stories.

The US Department of Justice estimates that 4 out of 5 Native American Women are affected by violence today, and on some reservations native women are ten times more likely to experience violence than their white counterparts. The legacy of violence against first nations women and children dates back to the early 1600s when Matoaka, a young girl of 11 or 12, was kidnapped from her tribe and taken to England. You may know her as Pocahontas, but she is commonly considered the first MMIW. As of 2018, there is still no database system in the United States that tracks how many Indigenous women have been abducted, sexually assaulted, and/or murdered. Families are frequently left wondering about their missing loved ones for years or decades, often without acknowledgement from law enforcement or national data reporting. To further complicate the issue, the data that is reported commonly labels Indigenous women as Latinx, Caucasian, or unknown. There is no real way to know how widespread this epidemic actually is.

Violence against Native women is perpetrated by individuals – abusers, rapists, and traffickers – yet the federal colonial policies and laws allow it to continue with no recourse. Within the context of the United States government, Native American tribes are considered political groups. They are their own sovereign nations and for the most part they are allowed to police their members/citizens as they see fit. They have degrees of limited authority over non-natives and Native Americans who are not members of their tribe. They do not have the criminal jurisdiction to prosecute non-natives, which then falls to the Federal government under the Major Crimes Act (1885) and the General Crimes Act (1817).

The General Crimes Act allows “federal courts have jurisdiction over crimes by non-Indians against Indians and of non-major crimes by Indians against non-Indians through the application of federal law” and the Major Crimes Act establishes federal jurisdiction in the prosecution of certain serious crimes in Indian Country. These crimes include murder and kidnapping among others. The problem with this is that it forces jurisdiction to be shared between federal, state, and tribal authorities which requires extensive communication amongst law enforcement agencies, prosecutors’ offices, court systems, probation/parole officers, and victim service providers. This causes many of these cases to fall through the cracks and the perpetrators to receive little, if any consequences so the families of these victims to never receive closure or justice for their loved ones.

In light of this information the peppered tailgates my dad had talked about began to make sense. If your grandmothers, aunties, mothers, sisters, and daughters were disappearing daily and your government had repeatedly failed you in protecting them, wouldn’t you defend your community from this genocide? Within many of the 574 federally recognized tribes the belief is held that women are sacred, they bring life in to this world and are the first teachers, political leaders, and carriers of culture and traditions of their communities. In some teachings it is believed that water is the first medicine we receive and we are born out of water. The sacredness of women is tied to this, as they are carriers of this first medicine. In the world we live in today the death and trauma of Indigenous Women comes alongside the trauma experienced by our waterways as well. It is all connected. We are all connected.

I know this is a lot of very heavy information, and I thank you for taking the time to read this. If you feel able, please take a moment to watch Ta’Kaiya Blainey sing the Women’s Warrior Song, an honor song written for MMIW, and reflect on what you’ve learned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeNJnItj5rs