In the third season of Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award-winning Indigenous podcast Stolen, host Connie Walker, a citizen of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, and her three-person team sought to tell the story of Ella Mae Begay, a 62-year-old Navajo woman who reportedly went missing in the summer of 2021.
“[W]e spent time with the police and realized that Ella Mae’s case is actually an outlier in this community,” Walker told URL Media partner Native News Online. “It’s gotten so much attention and so many resources in terms of police, including the dispatchers who were on shift when it happened.”
While reporting on the Begay case, Walker came across a second case — one with a much more predictable outcome. It was that of 38-year-old Kristina Carrillo, a still missing woman from a different corner of the Navajo Nation, whose September 2022 disappearance was not investigated by tribal police.
Walker said her reporting on these two missing Indigenous women made it clear to her that “part of understanding the crisis of missing people is understanding the crisis in policing that happens [in Indigenous communities].”
According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), there are approximately 4,200 missing and murdered cases that have gone unsolved. The bureau said these cases often remain unsolved “due to a lack of investigative resources available.”
Advocates say confusion over jurisdiction, systemic limitations, and apathy are additional reasons why so many cases go unsolved, as Native News Online reported.
But the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is hoping to solve some of these issues by appointing five assistant U.S. attorneys and five coordinators to address the missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP) epidemic. One of the new attorneys is Bree R. Black Horse, a member of Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, who serves in the Eastern District Washington prosecuting MMIP cases.
“As I step into this role, I look forward to working with our local, state, and tribal partners to identify concrete ways of reducing violence and improving public safety in Indian country and elsewhere,” Black Horse said in a statement. “I also look forward to honing my skills as a federal prosecutor and working with others who are dedicated to DOJ’s mission to seek justice on behalf of victims and their families.”
While the federal government is taking steps to decrease the number of unsolved cases, states like California are going a step further by working to simplify jurisdictional issues.
As Native News Online reported, a pilot program will give three of the state’s tribal nations the ability to investigate MMIP cases in their communities by allowing tribal police officers to become peace officers in the state under certain conditions.
“One contributing factor to this epidemic is the confusion over law enforcement jurisdiction caused by a 1953 federal law,” Assembly member and tribal citizen James Ramos, who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “We can reduce the number of unsolved cases by clarifying jurisdiction and permitting tribal police to pursue alleged perpetrators with the same authority as state peace officers if they meet California requirements.”
And though tribal nations have celebrated these steps forward in investigating MMIP cases, the fact of the matter is that Indigenous people are being killed at a rate 10 times the national average according to the BIA, and more needs to be done to keep Indigenous communities safe from violence. — Alicia Ramirez
Uplift. Respect. Love.
