Missing or Murdered in Indian Country, Gone Without Justice

Resplendent in her Southern Ute of Colorado garb, Diane Millich told a harrowing story. In the late 1990s, at 26, she had married a White man who she said slapped, kicked, punched and abused her emotionally, beginning on the third day of their marriage.

She reported him to tribal police, but they could not arrest a White man, and could not keep reports of his abuse. The county sheriff had no power because her White husband was living in her house on Ute land. After more than 100 incidents of abuse, she left for a shelter.

Her estranged husband showed up at her workplace with a gun. He had done so before, threatening to shoot her. This time, he pointed the gun at her and fired. A colleague pushed her aside and took the shot in his shoulder.

Because Millich and her savior were Native American, county or Colorado state criminal justice agencies had no authority in their case. Moreover, Millich worked for a federal agency, the Bureau of Land Management, so the crime took place on federal land. She had told federal authorities about her husband, but they had ignored her.

“It was just crazy, now when I think back on how it was,” Millich told The New York Times. In her office where she was nearly killed, tribal police were on the floor with tape measures, trying to measure the distance between the gun barrel and where the bullet struck, to persuade local authorities to act. Finally her husband was arrested, but as a first offender. At the time of the attempt on her life, homicide was the third leading cause of death of Native American women her age.

Millich told her story during President Obama’s 2013 signing of the reauthorized Violence Against Women Act. Thanks to a Supreme Court decision that had denied Native American law enforcement jurisdiction over non-Natives on Indian land, men who are not Indian had been able to kidnap, assault, rape and kill Native women with impunity, so long as they did so on tribal land. The new version of VAWA restored to tribal authorities criminal jurisdiction over non-Native Americans.

Diane Millich, a member of the Southern Ute of Colorado tribe endured physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband. Because her husband was White, her legal remedies for getting him arrested were stymied, even when he tried to kill her. National Congress of American Indians

Nevertheless, statistics remain shocking. According to the Indian Law Resource Center in Helena, Montana, more than four in five American Indian and Alaskan indigenous women have  suffered some form of violence. For more than 51 percent, the violence has been sexual, and in more than 90 percent of these cases, the perpetrator was not Native or indigenous.

Urban Indian women are not immune. In Seattle, the Urban Indian Health Institute heard about 5,700 cases of missing and murdered indigenous women in 2016 alone, and believes many more cases are going unreported. As for Native children exposed to violence against their mothers or other women, the Department of Justice says they are three times more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder than the rest of the U.S. population -- the same rates as combat veterans.

The situation is so appalling that the National Congress of American Indians, along with tribes and Native women’s organizations, have declared the situation a human rights issue, not just an issue of violent crime.

Since the turn of the last century, natural gas and oil development on reservations and federal lands has meant an influx of non-Indian workers and a heightened risk of violence against and trafficking of Native American women. According to Christopher T. Foley, lawyer at the Indian Law Resource Center, no study has determined exactly how much more risk that energy development poses to Native women.

The 2017 film Wind River illustrates the new threats to Indian women from energy development. An Indian woman’s body is found and reported to tribal police, and the FBI arrives to help. But according to Foley, before VAWA’s 2013 reauthorization, real-life investigations were rare.

If anyone reported finding a Native woman’s body to state or local police or even federal authorities, Foley says, they usually were ignored. The body was ruled the result of “accidental homicide” or “cause of death unknown.” Today, Millich’s domestic abuse and attempted murder would not go unpunished.

This year, VAWA is up for reauthorization once again, and its new version would extend that lost protection against violence to Alaskan indigenous women -- Eskimos, Aleuts, Inuits and other groups. Of all 50 states, Alaska has the highest incidence of domestic violence -- 10 times higher than the rest of the United States. Many indigenous women endure violence at the hands of non-indigenous intimate partners.

President Biden, who co-sponsored the original bill that became VAWA when he was a senator from Delaware in 1994, made its 2021 reauthorization a key goal of his first 100 days in office. The House reauthorized VAWA, but the bill remains mired in the Senate. Members who oppose gun control don’t like the new version of VAWA because it closes “the boyfriend loophole” by permitting law enforcement to confiscate guns from abusive intimate partners, not just husbands.

A halt to trafficking of Native American and Alaskan indigenous women requires international efforts. Taking these women out of the country is all too easy: In the U.S., many tribes’ lands are close to borders with Canada or Mexico, or to waterways, coasts and ports. Alaska is not far from Canada, Russia and East Asia. Native women reported missing may have disappeared because they have been trafficked over those borders or via those ports. In Mississippi, they can be trafficked south to the Gulf Coast or north via rivers and east to the Great Lakes. From there, they are boarded onto ships bound for other countries.

But international efforts mean diplomacy, and diplomacy can move at the pace of geological eons. Foley pointed out that a grassroots international movement began in 1977, when more than 100 delegates -- North American Indians and indigenous Alaskans, Central and South American Indians -- went to Geneva, Switzerland, to ask the United Nations Council on Human Rights for a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, including freedom from trafficking and violence against women and children.

After 30 years of work, the UN finally adopted the declaration in 2007. Four countries had voted against it, but changed their minds. Foley says he was not surprised that the United States was the last to do so, in 2010.

This declaration is not a treaty, so it is non-binding. But in 2017, a decade after it was ratified, the UN set up an Expert Mechanism to encourage member states to adopt laws and policies that advance these rights, primarily by political pressure. The international movement continues to grow, and meets for two weeks every spring at the UN in New York, under the auspices of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Open to all, the 2021 session ended last week.

The National Congress of American Indians offers a toolkit, including sample letters to senators, to those interested in pushing passage of the new version of VAWA with its added protections.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.