Missing and Murdered: A Time for Justice

In the late winter of 2021, I was fit to be tied as the saying goes. After four years of reading ‘we need more awareness’ from Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women advocates and tribal leadership who actually ignored direct knowledge of where remains are, I met the end of the patience I’d been practicing. Remains across Wind River, Pine Ridge and Ute Mountain Ute communities had interrupted sleep, conversations and lives of myself and others and no one, not a single person, would respond to us.

So I wore a letter to shake the tree across the continent and see what happened. To 450+ elected officials in Indian Country on February 1, 2021, the attached letter (I’ve only included the text and removed an old email address) went. I was pissed and the letter reflects it.

The letter is ego-filled, fueled by fury and the desperation to be heard, for there to be some interest in Indian Country that matched my own passion for justice for women buried and burned without regard. I was repeatedly aghast at the activism, grief, passion, anger and expressions of deep love around bringing home the remains of children from the Carlyle Boarding School and the diametrically opposite choice to ignore those of the women and girls of the modern era. To me, the rank hypocrisy smacked of complicity despite the regularly published messages hollering for “more awareness” and “If you see something, say something”. My logic was, ‘okay, let’s say something this way’.

I spent days crafting the letter, massaging language, trying to temper respect for the positions of power with the demand of receiving the same—if not for me then the Ancestors who I work with. I thought, for sure, out of nearly 500 attempts at communication, there’d be some kind of impact.

Four hundred and seventy some odd dollars in postage and just over two weeks later, I got my impact: two heavily armed tactical response teams banging on my hotel room door because I’d been swatted. Two phone calls made from the Gila River rez had sent them running to potentially save me or take me out in a body bag. Both calls left the impression that those were the two possible outcomes.

The callers knew precisely where I was. The gave hotel staff and 911 my hotel room number. They, or whoever had directed them to call, had received the letter I’d sent and their response was to threaten me and the next day, use the phone number shared on my letter, to threaten me again, more directly. How they knew is because the network is not limited to Indian Country, it crosses the country and despite my unfounded concern that they’d been tracking my phone, a connection they had in Montrose, CO, had seen me. Tater, my 2006 bright orange Mini Cooper, was hard to miss in Gila River or a small town. Someone put two and two together and decided to make a point.

Whether the contact was hotel staff or from the Texan construction crews staying at the hotel, I’ll never know. What I did know then was that they were afraid of me. They know that I know that this network’s hub is on the Gila River rez and the surrounding metropolis that includes Salt River, Phoenix, Tucson, Chandler and Avondale. Casinos, old mines, unmarked mass graves with 20-30 sets of remains in them, gut-shot brown-skinned men left in the remains of the local Japanese internment camp.

What I know isn’t unknown and isn’t fiction. Maybe the folks with the big guns haven’t put together the big picture: the extended relationships with corporate gaming, the formalization of things at Standing Rock, the legitimatization of illicit activity by dint of a turn of the head. However, there’s a reason tribal police report trafficking to the Department of Justice and wonder how to address it. There’s a reason the FBI had set up shop in a PHX-metro casino. It’s the same reason I was shot at, the later threatened with the same when I spoke out to 450+ people. It’s the same reason why Indian Country leadership won’t take a stand: maintaining the status quo works. It works for the federal government at multiple levels. It works for those whose pockets are getting filled. It works for those who need the jobs that bring them into contact with traffickers and those trafficked. It works for those who think ‘we should have just killed them all’ century ago. It works for those who have an orgasm or are thrilled with violence in the sex act that they can’t get away with at home. It works for those who ‘like ‘em young’ but won’t touch their own daughters so they will touch those who most don’t care about. It works for those who have the ‘job’ to lure, threaten and murder upon command. It works for those to whom the monies make it to.

It works for everyone except the girls and women who are trapped into a situation in which there are but two or three ways out and those who love them.

And the future of those left in effected communities. None of this happens in isolation. None of it. There is no vacuum in which rape, pillaging of people and

In addition to a conversation with a Canadian Cree chief who was firm in his stance that, “This is not a political issue and leadership should stay out of it,” the reticence is multi-layered. Cartels may have thought they legitimized themselves in some respects but their capacities for violence are legendary: cutting off the head of a 13 year old girl in Birmingham, Alabama, and many more in Mexico, murdering two children outside of Cortez, CO, in front of their mother to make a point and then murdering her, creating mass graves on tribal lands knowing they’ll never be investigated—much less prosecuted. People have reason to be afraid. It’s a hard thing to stand up for the ‘right thing’ when families are threatened and stories of those threats becoming reality abound. Then, ‘right’ becomes amorphous.

It’s so big that how to hide the laundering and trafficking is part of the bureaucratic processes required for new casinos to be built. Regulation only goes so far and lawyers are skilled. Big money is protected in the way that the ‘little people’ are not. To take on that threat when something feels too big to fall—except your life or that of family—is daunting. I get it.

I’ve written before in My Secret Is Safe With Your Secret about the fear of lay people experience when I or anyone talks about how big revelations interact with the smaller, closely-held ones. Sometimes it’s just all too much, no matter how small or big it’s perceived. I get that, too.

However, when does an individual’s or community’s ‘it’s too much’ to handle become a ‘it’s too much to continue’?

The work I’ve been steeped in is only one aspect of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, however it’s a significant one for is breadth and depth: the victim pool and it’s connections to migration, the use of something meant to do good for tribes becoming a bane, the way that money laundered through Indian gaming makes it way to American groups that eradicate Native Americans and makes it’s way to funding international terror groups. This things are not speculation: counter threat finance from from multiple agencies and research groups show how this happens and to whom it goes. Does all the money go there? No, but it’s significant enough that the irony weighs heavy.

This is not a conspiracy ‘theory’ in the way folks like to think of those things but like the ‘trending audio’ on social media says, “Everyone knows”. It’s the real life theory, an idea, that became a reality that eighteen to 81 year olds know.

There are elected leaders who thought it was a genius idea and got theirs in the deal-making. Maybe they regret it, maybe they don’t. Maybe they didn’t have the foresight or hindsight to think of the whole tribe when they signed on; perhaps not understanding that the type of money we’re talking about can get every household on the Navajo rez water cisterns delivered and filled regularly, fund medical services, roads, electricity and indoor plumbing across Lakota country. Rocky Boy could build more than a jail and put windows in homes without them. Schools, toilets, farms, medicines, ceremonies, arts, living the lives with some ease and relief.

There are elected leaders who have no awareness of the relationships their predecessors, no idea how their office has conspired to invite the enemy into the fold. How meth and coke and gangs and violence and despair have, in turn, fueled the devastation of women and girls across Indian Country.

I get the fear. I live it. Near-daily reminders of how close the new targeter actually is. His scope is awfully close these days. However, I won’t stop. I’m no longer the angry woman who wrote that letter. I settled for being quiet for a bit after being threatened but I won’t any longer. I’m not angry, I’m not afraid. I’m passionately determined. There’s not much of a plan, there never really was one. What there is, though, is a steadfastness that's never left. It hasn't left and I haven't left them behind. And, I never will.

There’s a window of opportunity these days: one for deep healing, repair, intervention and support before the Sinaloa cartel definitively partners with CJNG to further entrench themselves into Indian Country (and elsewhere). It’s a window of opportunity that federal and tribal law enforcement as well as elected leadership can take advantage of and create a healthy foundation to build from.

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