"A Nest of Snakes..."
This headline happens here; it’s neither a foreign concept nor limited to a foreign country.
The only difference here, especially in Indian Country across North America, is scale.
Mothers in some communities south of the border dig holes in the ground for daughters to hide in when men in trucks come through the region, a burial alive to keep them from being buried dead. Some mothers and aunties and cousins and grandmothers pray, some join in the predation.
For a nation that loves ‘true crime’ like the US, this is something that no one will look at. No one talks about it outside of whispers yet everyone knows: old-school medicine men and middle school students, the nuns that harbor, the neighbors who see, the parents who plead. Everyone knows.
The aspects of MMIW that I focus on, those fueled by the Sinaloa Cartel, are entrenched in Indian gaming, drug dealing, money laundering, grave digging, gun buying, and border-hopping; all with ease. I’m a perpetual antagonist, poking at the relationships with Indian Gaming, leadership and how those web-like relationships impact community health and the broader impact on Native American communities that cannot afford to have more of their women disappear (and the links to multinational terrorist organizations).
One of the reasons that the Sinaloa Cartel activity here is such a threat to women and girls is that, unlike in Mexico, there’s no threat to them. There’s no rival faction, really. There’s no real challenge at all. Tribal law enforcement has it’s hands tied by treaty, legislation and internal collusion. Federal law enforcement meets lack of cooperation fueled by distrust, reassignment, internal & institutional racism. When enforcement and interdiction operations are met with communal fear of retaliation and the weight of history, hope loses out and the cycle continues.
In an age when anti-cartel bluster that comes from a federal administration threatening Mexican authorities and sovereignty is countermanded by cartel-led sex trafficking through the Trump International Beach Resort, the whiplash of hypocrisy can become nothing more than a shrug.
That the inception of these relationships is over 400 years old, enmeshed in legitimate businesses, family ties, and ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitudes of the majority population is a quagmire that mutes civilian tribal cries for ‘more awareness’ and the official mantras of ‘See something, Say something’. Seeing and saying can’t meet safety for many people, including myself. However, once seen, it cannot be unseen.
This is not a security crisis contained in a foreign country. It is here, entrenched, for communities across North America.
To quote from the NYT article in the comments: “It is a perfect storm that turns women into easy prey,” said Ms. Ojeda. “Whether the aggressor is a cartel member or an ex-husband [or a ‘boyfriend’ or FB ‘friend’], the conditions are always the same: impunity, institutional neglect and a society consumed by violence.”
It is insidious enough that an elected representative of the Blackfeet Nation told me in 2018 that I should write a novel and added that “even if you change everyone’s name, they’ll know that you are talking about them” because she knew who I was talking about. A politician in the Montana legislature was aware of informal and formal leadership in relationship with the cartel and the disappearance of women and her response to problem solving was for a stranger to write a novel.
A shrug.
Still seeking assistance, or at least to be heard officially, I sent letters to six sitting Senators and Congress people in Washington, DC, who had publicly shared their support for Indian Country in a number of ways. The only response, ignoring anything I’d shared, was from then-Senator Jon Tester who regaled me with a list of his ‘good works for the Indian.’ Nary a question asked.
A shrug from power cloaked as self-aggrandizing indifference.
In 2021, there were two responses to a letter sent to over 450 elected Native American and First Nations leaders. First, I had a conversation with a council member from a nation I’d not had previous contact with. Turns out, I was not the only one who had difficulty getting assistance in the retrieval of remains. Different contexts, same outcomes.
The second response was getting swatted from the Gila River community in AZ while I was in a hotel in Montrose, CO. Two phones calls: one to 911 and the other to the hotel reporting that the person in my room (that’d be me) was either murdered or had witnessed a murder. Subsequently, I was rousted from a sound sleep by tactical teams from Montrose Police and Sheriff’s Office.
From Arizona to rural Colorado, with a three year gap between my initial encounters with The Fuckery, my car and I were recognized by hotel staff or construction workers from Texas and reported to cartel operatives on the Gila River rez. How do we know? Because that’s where the calls originated from. Subsequent calls to me included pronouncements from perhaps another caller, voice distorted for effect, “I have a machine gun.”
Despite my desire to retort with a “Don’t shoot your dick off with that,” I merely noted that Indian Country wasn’t interested in changing the status quo and wasn’t going to help me retrieve remains that want to come home. And that they are afraid of me and afraid of the consequences of using that machine gun.
A shrug with weapons.
While in the desert in 2017-2018, I watched ‘the watchers,’ those with invisible badges observing one hand connecting to another to a third, then 30th as women, girls and money changed hands. I knew they were listening to brown-skinned girls and women be sold over radio channels during a Nascar race. I knew that they, too, wanted to know how I knew things that I wasn’t ‘supposed to know’. (Someone’s supervisor may, to borrow a phrase, shit the bed when he reads this).
Folk tend to speak of some Ancestors in a reverential way but forget that all who pass on are Ancestors. Those who we think we should admire are given quarter, blessings, food and prayer and those who remind us of the fault lines of our collective psyche are disappeared a second time into secret gravesites, forgotten by all but those closest to them.
I have said many times over the years that we’ve forgotten how intimately the natural worlds, visible and invisible, move through, with and around us. This is how I know: the winds, the roots, the ground itself that knows The Waters and moves to Her through the paths of least resistance. And, frankly, Ancestors tattle on their kin in a unified unfolding for relief across Nations.
I sometimes watch documentaries and read books about world changers and systems shakers to buoy my resolve. There’s movie out on Youtube called YANUNI. Eight seconds into the intro the concerned voiceover says, “Indigenous people are dying at alarming rates” due to conflicts around illegal mining. I highly recommend the movie for a number of reasons and I highly recommend watching it with the following lens: Effective efforts to SAVE THE MOTHER (earth) cannot exist while permitting the intentional disappearing of Her Daughters for commercial sexual abuse, for their organs and infants; whether they’re from the Amazon or America.
At the risk of beating a drum enough to become a broken record, calls to Protect the Amazon (or Bears Ears or Oak Flats or Boundary Waters or…) and celebrate Ancestors’ relationships with Earth-things without protecting the daughters of the world is a conundrum that few want to say out loud. Indigenous women and girls are dying at a rate we can’t fully know because we cannot count the dead.
I am the constant reminder that girls and women in Indian Country are being disappeared and dying at alarming rates due to the histories of across the continent and the perpetual shrugs of those in positions to do something about it.
It also bears repeating that this single aspect of MMIW cannot be teased apart from the others; repeated patterns of femicide at the hands of family and ‘friends’ for reasons connected to cartel activity and not. It cannot be separated from the communities where over half of females have their first sexual encounters before puberty at the hands of adult carers.
It cannot be separated from the fact that child sex abuse investigations accounted for about 30% of all major crimes on reservations closed by the FBI each year — more than any other type of crime, including murders and assaults. In addition, FBI has “closed administratively” more than 1,900 criminal investigations of child sexual abuse in Indian Country between 2011 and 2021.
It cannot be separated from boarding school atrocities, from hypocrisies, false treaties, the fear of bringing remains home or our current federal administration.
This is not a shrug. It’s a fully loaded exercise in the pursuit of justice, the reimagining of a world for brown-skinned women and girls. The novels have been written, the movies made, tears shed and prayers prayed. This is where those things meet the practical world.
We are, indeed, the forest, the water, the air. We are the earth and of it and I want the girls and women of Indian Country to be as valued as we say those things are. I want it to be recognized that the exploitation of vaginas is as detrimental to the Earth as ore mining and deforestation are; that the territories of the heart, soul and psyche are just a fragile and reparable as those territories on the ground. I want the remains of discarded women in Doña Ana County, NM, to receive the same outpouring of rage and interruption as that awarded the fight against data centers.
I want law enforcement to be relentless in the pursuit of justice and actively participate in the repair their histories have caused. I want those buried surreptitiously in that same ground we claim to revere be held as worthy of honor, respect and love as monuments of stone.
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