Khadijah Britton, a 23-year-old member of the Round Valley Indian tribes in Covelo, California, was last seen on February 7, 2018, after allegedly being taken from a house party at gunpoint by her former boyfriend, Negie Fallis. A week earlier, Fallis was accused of attacking Britton with a hammer. Fallis has not been formally charged with Britton’s abduction.
In August of this year, 2,000 miles away from Covelo, women marched along US Highway 75 in Brushvale, Minnesota, wearing 134 ribbons, each one signifying an Indigenous woman found dead in the Red River. The ribbons represent only the women whose bodies were discovered. Due to a lack of clear and consistent reporting, there are no reliable estimates of the actual number of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in the United States. As in Britton’s case, the cases are often never closed, leading to years of anguish and frustration for the missing women’s families.
There is no dispute that there is an epidemic of violence towards American Indian and Alaskan natives in the United States. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that murder is the third leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women, and the murder rate is up to ten times higher on reservations than in other communities. In 2010, the National Institute of Justice complied a report that sought to illustrate the true extent of the problem, although even that data is limited. According to the report, 84.3% percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, 56% have been the victim of sexual violence, and 55% of the victims of physical violence by an intimate partner. American Indian and Alaska Native men have suffered similar rates of violence: 81% have been the victims of violence in their lifetime, 27.5% have suffered sexual violence, and 43.2% violence by an intimate partner.
There is a myriad of factors that have simultaneously contributed to the violence and kept the epidemic of violence hidden from the non-native community. However, the 2010 report’s estimates are based on local samples, rather than national statistics, which contributes to the lack of knowledge surrounding the true number of people affected on a massive scale. Often, the race of the perpetrator affects the likelihood the crime being reported and the ultimate chance of prosecution, due to issues with criminal jurisdiction. As the report states, until recently, American Indians had no authority to criminally prosecute non-Indian offenders, even if the crime took place on Indian territories and reservations. According to the report, among the American Indian and Alaska Native victims, 96% of women experienced sexual violence by an interracial perpetrator. This is not surprising, although devastating to the community. There was and continues to be systemic exploitation of the gaps in the criminal justice system, namely the inability of tribes to prosecute crimes committed by other racial groups on their territories.
To this day, there are significant legal challenges facing tribes who attempt to prosecute non-Indians members for crimes committed in Indian country. Some of the most significant obstacles arise from the requirement that the Indian tribe provide legal representation to defendants and meet certain due process standards. Thus, in order for tribes to prosecute crimes which occur on their land, they must have sufficient funding and resources to meet the federal requirements, which is not feasible, for many tribes.
In an attempt to deal with this epidemic, the Senate introduced Senate Bill 227, or Savana’s Act, which “direct[s] the Attorney General to review, revise, and develop law enforcement and justice protocols appropriate to address missing and murdered Indians, and for other purposes.” The bill “is intended to improve data collection, including requiring annual reporting on the number of MMIWG, establishing guidelines for handling the cases of missing Indigenous people, and expanding tribal access to federal crime databases.” It has yet to be enacted into law, and while this is a good step towards combating the problem, but it overlooks a crucial element of issue.
Namely, when media sources, government officials, research groups try to collect data, write stories, or pass legislation, they focus on rates of violence specifically on reservations or in so-called “Indian country.” While this may seem blatantly obvious, 71% of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in urban areas, which are not include in “Indian country,” and the lack of information about this group is another factor that prevents systemic change in preventing violence against Indigenous women. However, the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI), which is a tribal epidemiology center, created a study which assessed number of cases involving MMIWG in cities across the United States, in addition to factors that contribute to the difficulties with data collection and the role of law enforcement and the media.
The study collected data from 71 cities in 29 states, involving cases from 1943 to 2018, although, due to the gaps in data regarding the criminal cases involving Indigenous women, 80% of the cases analyzed took place since 2000. UIHI identified 506 cases of related to missing or murdered Indigenous women, 25% of which were missing persons cases, 56% murder cases, and 19% of the cases were classified as with unknown status, as in the police were unsure about the victim’s cause of death, disappearance, or status. Predictably most of the cases were involved domestic violence and sexual assault, half of the identified perpetrators of non-Native ethnicity and 83% were male. Factoring in the lack of information, the actual number of urban cases involving MMIWG is almost certainly much higher than the numbers produced by the UIHI.
UIHI stated that, in the course of the study, only 56% of the police departments contacted were able to provide data, while 20% did not provide any data, and 25% did not responded to requests for data. Approximately 2/3 of the agencies contacted as part of the study did not provide data or provided data with significant gaps. When the agencies did provide information, the data frequently included racial misclassification, in which agencies would group Indigenous women in with Asian Indian, African Americans, or Hispanic data reports. 30% of the cases identified in UIHI’s study cannot be found in any law enforcement data base.
The final element in the failure to address the disappearance of Native and Alaskan women and the epidemic of violence against them is the way that these cases and this problem are covered or, more accurately, not covered by the news media. American Indian issues are rarely covered by national news outlets. Media bias further affects the reporting of missing women. Generally, the missing women who are discussed in the news are photogenic, middle to upper class white women, a phenomenon known as the “Missing white girl syndrome.” The study found that 129 of the criminal cases in the study were covered by the media, with the top ten cases receiving 62% of the total coverage. Only 21 cases covered by the national or international media and 83% of the cases covered were murder cases. Of the outlets surveyed, 31% used “violent language,” as defined by the study “as language that engages in racism or misogyny or racial stereotyping, including references to drugs, alcohol, sex work, gang violence, victim criminal history, victim- blaming, making excuses for the perpetrator, misgendering transgender victims, racial misclassification, false information on cases, not naming the victim, and publishing images/video of the victim’s death”. When violent language is used, especially when discussing the death of the victim, harmful stereotypes are applied to the victim and their background, which can further exacerbate violence against Native women.
This leads us to a complicated conclusion. The rates of violence against and disappearance of Indigenous women and the lack of data on these issues speaks to a systemic issue. The legacy of Indigenous people in the United States is genocide, enslavement, land seizure and displacement to remote and unusable land, and the refusal of the federal government grant tribes meaningful autonomy or provide resources sufficient to allow tribes to establish well-functioning governmental programs and service. It is not surprising that Indigenous women are subject to some of the highest rates of violence in the country, nor is it surprising outsiders are taking advantage of complex jurisdictional issues to assault Indigenous women. It is actually more surprising, and, perhaps slightly encouraging that Congress has recently enacted laws to combat the problem, and there appears to be slightly more press coverage on the epidemic of violence in the wake of the National Institute of Justice and UIHI reports. Perhaps there is hope that one day the federal governments will take meaningful action needed to direct law enforcement to actually investigate urban crimes committed against Indigenous women and grant tribes the necessary resources to prosecute crimes in Indian country, which would dramatically reshape power dynamics and perhaps deter non-Natives from committing crimes on reservations. Until then, Indigenous women will continue to go missing and there will be many more Khadijah Brittons who remain faceless and unmentioned-- their bodies never found.