For decades, Native American women and girls in the United States and Canada have disproportionately fallen victims to violent crimes like murder and sexual assault, a situation that advocacy groups have repeatedly called “the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women”, or MMIW for short.

Native American women and girls are murdered and sexually assaulted at rates several times higher than the national average, crimes that are generally perpetrated by people outside the indigenous community. Many Tribal lands where these crimes are committed have temporary housing units around them where transient workers tend to reside; these areas frequently fall between jurisdictional cracks, leaving few options for investigation and justice.

In these cases, there has been a notable lack of scrutiny. Earlier this month, a report published by the Sovereign Bodies Institute found that of the California cases classified as murders, law enforcement solved 9%, when the statewide clearance rate is over 60%, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). These numbers came to show that murders of Indigenous women in Northern California were almost seven times less likely to be solved than homicides involving any other victim.

Although California has the highest Native American population in the country, with over 700,000 Indigenous people in the state, there seems to be no reliable source of data on missing Native American women. According to Anita Lucchesi, executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute and Cheyenne descendant, over half the cases in the state couldn’t be found in official missing persons databases.

Once records became available, it became clear that Native women were frequently mis-classified as white, and their deaths were ruled accidental, even when the victims’ family and friends thought differently. The report found a deep sense of mistrust towards law enforcement from Indigenous women.

Several advocacy groups have arisen in social media, sparking the movement called Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, fronted by the hashtag #MMIW. In recent months, during BLM protests all over the United States and other parts of the world, the movement has drawn necessary attention from legislators as well as the general public.

There have been multiple grassroots efforts in Canada, the most popular being First Nations Women and Families in Canada, an effort that even caused the Canadian government to create a national inquiry back in late 2015.

Sheila North Wilson, former Grand Chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakank Inc., started the #MMIW hashtag across social media, achieving goals similar to First Nations Women and Families in Canada. The #MMIW hashtag helped bring local activism to an international level.

According to a Union Metrics Twitter Snapshot Report, tweets containing the #MMIW or #MMIWG hashtag generate hundreds of thousands of impressions every 4 hours, the majority of which are used to call attention to missing relatives, and to spread information regarding authorities’ responses to family’s requests for help. Basically, “the hashtag is mobilizing advocacy across Indian Country.” (Cultural Survival, 2020)

Another group is MMIW-Texas, created by Jodi Voice Yellowfish, which concerns the specific conditions that make native women in the region more vulnerable to these crimes. Jodi and her sister, Snowy Voice, prioritize education as a strategy to eradicate “predatory behavior and lateral violence.”

Although activists around the world are bringing much-needed attention to the problem, U.S. and Canadian federal attention has barely improved in the past few years. The first formal acknowledgment of the situation came in 2016, with the 2016 NIJ Research Report on Violence Against American Indian/Alaska Native Women and Men.

This report reviewed over 1,500 phone surveys that took place in 2010 and came to the conclusion that over 84% of American Indian/Alaska Native women (≈1.5 million people) experience some sort of violence in their lifetime. 67% were worried about their personal safety, and 41% had been injured from physical violence coming from partners, stalkers, and sexual violence.

Another milestone for the movement was the Urban Indian Health Institute’s (UIHI) landmark survey, which (using data from over 70 urban cities) reported 5,712 missing Alaska Native and American Indian women and girls. The Department of Justice had only 116 registered.

These publications made it clear that there was a tremendous problem being actively neglected. Multiple briefs and official reports rely on Department of Justice databases, which, thanks to UIHI’S report, have proven to be faulty. Tribal affiliation data has been consciously excluded from national databases.

Thanks to a number of investigations, the real statistics are now becoming widely known. American Indian and Alaska Native women are 2 times more likely to become victims of rape or sexual assault, and 2.5 times more likely to experience violent crimes.

On the bright side, the DOJ recently partnered with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in order to supervise data management and tracking in both systems, with the purpose to improve budgeting and educational efforts relevant to MMIW.

Another significant reform was that of the re-authorization of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. In 2013, it gave Tribes authority over domestic violence cases that involved Native Americans on Tribal lands, basically meaning that Tribal courts could now prosecute non-Native suspects in domestic-violence cases. However, a proposal made in 2019, nicknamed “the boyfriend loophole” would have further extended their power, allowing Tribal jurisdiction to include perpetrators of sexual violence and stalking. The reauthorization sadly failed last April, largely due to Republican/NRA opposition to reforms that wouldn’t allow stalkers and abusive partners to purchase guns.

Other important bills and acts that could massively improve the situation on a systemic level include Savannah’s Act (named after Savannah LaFontaine-Greywind, a young woman abducted and killed in North Dakota) and the Not Invisible Act, both aiming to improve tracking and reporting of MMIW cases.

There is still a long way to go in order to help these Tribal communities. A good start would include legislative reform that further bridges gaps between Tribal law enforcement and federal databases. “Failure to pass pending legislation in 2020 would represent a failure of the many MMIW task forces to capitalize on this recent momentum.” (Carolyn Smith-Morris, 2020)

“Patterns of violent men and extractive industries breezing through land they do not own to take lives that do not belong to them. Patterns of Tribal sovereignty being undermined and jurisdictional borders being crossed. Patterns of police dismissing concerned mothers and fathers and aunties and grandparents with the excuse that ‘runaways always come back.’ Patterns of coroners dodging paperwork and scrawling ‘other’ next to the line titled ‘Race’ and ‘accidental death’ next to ‘C.O.D.’ Patterns of government officials, top to bottom, ignoring practical, sovereignty-first reforms and instead hoarding the kind of power that keeps the crisis alive.”

Nick Martin

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