Why I continue the MMIW Work

I continue the missing and murdered indigneous women work because I recognize myself and the rejection of these particular ‘dead’ women and girls. I also know intimately the integrated systems that perpetuate their disappearance and the lack of response. And I am bound in many ways to this unfolding of God’s work.

First, I have a deep, profound tie to justice that began when I was a child. Not an idea or the ideal justice but the very essence of love.

Second, my relationship with Ancestors and the ground are inescapable. I cannot turn off the flow or remove that ponderosa along my spine that contains the energies of millions of women. They are me. I am them just as much as the sinew and bones that make me, well, me.

Third, I remember the first murder I felt in 2009. I experienced a replay of a girl being chased down and murdered in Fauquier County, VA, in the early 80s. In the moment, I only knew what I was feeling: a girl’s terror and two boys’ glee and trepidation and awe. All those emotions were so powerful that I had to pull the car over to breathe. It was only when I arrived at my destination and shared the experience that I was told about the murder. I didn’t understand how I could feel something so powerful from nearly 25 years prior. I didn’t understand that echoes and energies are not bound my watch or any imagination.

It’s why I didn’t know if, in October 2017, in Ajo, AZ, I was actually hearing the screams of two women being murdered in the moment or if I was hearing an echo from the past. I suspect the former because how the rest of my body and souls responded. But With hundreds upon hundreds of miles of empty desert in front of me and all around me, I had no way of knowing from where or how far those cries had traveled. I only knew they’d made their way to me purposefully.

The fourth reason I continue is because I believe. I believe because other’s have responded in the most dramatic ways: I’ve been shot at in Avondale, AZ; followed in Safeway at Wichita, KS; swatted in Montrose, CO; targeted in Alexandria, VA; and warned by federal law enforcement while asking, “do you have Ace rewards?” that danger had found me in Telluride, too. I’ve had enough civilians who don’t know me insist that wherever I am, I need to get the fuck out to not believe. I know that when I make certain phone calls or stumble upon certain agency operations, the immediate response is for folks to call DARPA to see if I can possibly know what I know. Without the courage to actually ask me face to face.

I’ve enough interactions with Spirit directly engaging between me Native cops to know that I’m on to something bigger than what I can see right in front of me. So 8 years in, I don’t give up.

Back in November 2017, I wrote:

Because I believe the

Heart of a sister

The touch of the Ancestors

The presence of the beloveds

and elephant trunks kissing

my face.

Because a giraffe isn’t just a giraffe. She’s called April and speaks herself into my existence. (There's a story about that!)

Because the heart knows what it knows.

Because I trust the faith of those that guide and those who step in to face the threat with me

And remind me between each breath to become that which has been prayed for:

the called

and the response.

Lastly, I keep at this because it’s time somebody actually did. This is old shit repeating like it’s new shit.

By historians estimates, in the America’s alone, between 1492 and 1900, there were between 2.5 and five million Indigenous slaves.  These numbers do not include those shipped from the east coast of what’s now the United States to Europe or the numbers of which are not known beyond mere estimates.

What is known is that this particular phenomena began by Indians offering their own slaves to Europeans in exchange for goods like food, weapons, metalwork and more. Andres Reséndez has shared:  “What started as a European controlled enterprise, however, gradually passed into the hands of the Native Americans. As Indians acquired horses and weapons of their own, they became independent providers….In the Southwest, the Comanches and Utes became regional suppliers of slaves to other Indians as well as to the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. The Apaches, who had early on been among the greatest victims of enslavement, transformed themselves into successful slavers.”

Things were only slightly different in the Eastern part of the new country. I quote again: “Between the period between 1670 and 1720, Carolinians exported more Indians out of Charleston, South Carolina, than they imported Africans into it. As the traffic developed, the colonists increasingly procured their indigenous captives from the Westos Indians, an extraordinarily expansive…militaristic slaving societ[y]….”   Those Westos and other tribes roamed from Virginia to Florida taking captives to sell to other Indians and to white Carolinians.

When I began this journey in 2017, I knew some of the historical context but I wouldn’t grasp the Bigness or Oldness of a for months. I remember driving south on Arizona Highway 85 into Ajo, a few hours before hearing those women scream, feeling similar to how I’ve felt in other places; the slow-slog foot and wagon travels of long ago, the feelings of lostness and displacement from the places and people that mattered most, and much newer fear layered on top of that, and only then began to recognize the length of time that the ground and others were trying to express. It didn’t begin to become even more clear until I began researching the book that’s gathering dust.

It was not lost on me that the center of this network, though it may stretch to Australia and South Korea, is in the Phoenix metro area. Phoenix has only been a US city since 1868 but the history of those who lived and moved through there predates any written recordings. Maps before modern borders came into being show trade and seasonal migration routes from what is now Central Mexico and into Colorado, Idaho, California, Illinois, and more. Linguists trace the same from Western Mexico along the Gulf Coast to as far east as Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. And artifacts from what is now south of the American border have been found in northern Canada. Before we carved up the land with imaginary lines and paved highways, people moved much farther that we’ve been taught in school and, in doing so, stole, traded and sold much more than we’ve been taught as well.

The beginnings of Indian enslavement in the Southwest have direct ties to the sex trafficking in Indian country today and The Fuckery’s hub in Phoenix. The relationships built over time by families, lawful commerce, criminal organizations, militaries, traders and travelers, particularly along the country’s borders, have been evolving since long before white faces showed up on the continent.

However, the Spaniards discovery of silver and the labor necessary to mine it and refine it, created a mass-commercialization of trafficking that survived it’s illegality and royal antislavery activism and has morphed into it’s current state. The illegality that made it difficult for Spanish slavers to work created an avenue for Indian traffickers to fill the void that continues.

One incident cited by several historians seems to exemplify in rather gross way how these factors came together. “In 1694, barely two years after the Spaniards had retaken control of the province, a group of Navajos arrived [in a market in New Mexico] with the intention of selling Pawnee children. The Spanish authorities initially refused to acquire the young captives [because Indian slavery was illegal by Spanish royal decree]…The traffickers proceeded to behead the captive children within the Spanish colonist’s sight.

That strategy prompted New Mexican officials to reconsider the ban against “ransoming” Indian captives…In effect, the Navajos, Utes, Comanches, and the Apaches forced New Mexican authorities to break the law and accept their captives” so they would be murdered in front of them. Reséndez added after that story, “By the middle of the eighteenth century, these commercial and diplomatic relations had become normalized.”

Archives like government treaties and mission and military communications related how the expansion for more human ‘goods’ refashioned the livelihoods and ‘neighborhoods’ of desert, Plains and Plateau tribes. As horse-heavy Comanches and Utes repeatedly raided, people moved to escape and, when family was captured, those who were left often moved to join other bands.

And those that were captured, if not sold, were married into or enslaved for life within other communities. “The Comanches took many of their captives to New Mexico, where…in the absence of money or silver, women and children constituted a versatile medium of exchange accepted by Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Pueblos and many other Indian groups in the region.”

The flow of the Indian slave trade then saw Apaches sold by Comanches to French colonists in Quebec to the extent that the Apaches came to comprise as many as one quarter of all Indian slaves of known origin in New France.” The opening up of California and the expansion of Europeans across the West only expanded the practice again with new traffickers, new routes and new victims.

Now as then, multigenerational rivalries, intertribal animosities, military history, other lost ties to ancients and to lands and resources still fuel the trade that expanded again when Indian gaming opened up.

Stolen and sold for labor and to increase tribal populations, Indian women and children were the most often taken. Their value was nearly double that of an adult male’s. I don’t know how much a young woman’s ‘value’ is determined by traffickers these days. I’m going to assume it’s a lot more than the $150-200 from the 1850s. 

I do know that the ‘return on investment’ now exceeds what anyone imagined back then. With the advent of modern technologies, the ease of intercontinental travel, and the myriad of ways and number of times a young person’s sexuality can be exploited, the amount of money brought in by thousands of disappeared young people is staggering.

And, in my opinion, the trafficking of women and children for the labor of sexual exploitation, is indeed, normalized and institutionalized. It’s so ‘normal’ that when someone sees something, they don’t say something. It’s so ‘normal’, that the political infrastructure of bringing new Indian casinos into being, long before construction has even begun, includes plans for how to incorporate the sale of sex by slaves in new communities, with new victims, new routes and notso new traffickers.

Human trafficking in Indian Country is, in many parts of the continent, traditional. Perhaps, if I talk about it long enough and loud enough, people will feel supported enough to say something when they see something; say something to their tribal council and white legislators, say something to victims, to those who pimp and pander, to yet others to prevent more victimization; to ask questions, demand accountability, and openly challenge the practices and people that allow it to flourish and rip communities apart. It’s time that this tradition be eradicated.

However, Compounding these fallacies in our common understanding and in my navigating the Fuckery this is absolutely part of the conversation about how we, as a collective value, or choose not to, girls, women and what is between their legs and ears; especially those that exist outside of our vision or ‘vision’ of what is ‘right and proper’. And that’s for a different time.

My first encounter with the intentionally disappeared was in the first or second grade. In the safety of a classroom, the lights went down and the 1970s stranger-danger movie went up. The only thing I remember of it now though, very clearly, is the final scene: a single white tennis shoe floating down a slow-moving, shallow stream, indicating to us impressionable youngsters that the girl in the movie who had talked to the stranger had, indeed, met danger. I think it It occurred to all of us in the moment that there was a distinct resemblance of the creek on the screen to the one that ran behind the school (though that didn’t stop me from sneaking across it to get to Eastover Shopping Center or talking to strangers).

For many, many years after that, the disappeared remained characters of fiction, the focus of the detective stories I devoured. In the stories, my favorite grizzled, curmudgeonly cop, irritated by the younger generation and modern technology, determinedly plowed through his hangovers and bureaucracies to find the missing woman or the bad guy that had disappeared them.

However, in college, while researching Los Desaparecidos for a college course, I was disabused of all notions of fiction and clear delineations between good guys and the bad, and staggered by the realities of the scale of mechanized systems of disappearing people. No imagination was needed or, to me, even possible to conjure the enormity of what Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and the military junta of Argentina were able to accomplish in a short time (with the complicity of the United States’ government).

The research paper I wrote has long been forgotten but as I have moved through the past eight years, similar emotions have arisen: anger, despair and impotence. The singular question, too, remains: Why? For me, the answer “for greed and power” is not enough. I want to know what is beyond that. What, truly, is the foundation holding the systemic and government-supported disappearances of girls and women for sexual exploitation in a steady-as-she goes pattern?

I continue the tradition of others who have come before me. Like Jaswant Singh Khalra. He wasn't always a human rights hero and I’m willing to be that no one reading or listening to this has ever heard of him. But In the 1980s, Khalra was a Director of a farmer’s coop bank when a couple of colleagues suddenly ‘went missing’.

Kahlra began looking for them, and his search led to a horrifying discovery: evidence that the Punjab police had murdered and cremated thousands of Sikhs. At least, 25,000 by his and other estimates. For his work, he was rewarded with being disappeared himself and murdered by the same police. Just before he was murdered, he visited Canada where he planned to tell the world about the severity of human rights atrocities in India.

Some of his supporters, worried about the increasing threats to his life, urged Khalra to stay in Canada as a political asylee. However, Khalra responded that “a truly wise person knows the truth and justice are greater than fear.”

Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, because there are no mistakes in this unfolding, the day that the Navajo cop sent me the missing persons flyer in 2017 that got me into all this—September 6—is recognized by the global Sikh community as the day he was disappeared and murdered. Part of me likes to think that at least part of the purpose of Durga’s visitation that night wove Jaswant and I together.

Like Jaswant and I, las abuelas de la plaza mayo, dedicated themselves to finding those desaparecidos and those born from forced pregnancies and adoptions (also a familiar thread in the US as well) in Argentina’s Dirty War. Victims' relatives and human rights groups have done the same in Chile. Even more women do the work in Mexico, discovering mass grave after individual grave and dump site after dump site across the country.

The only difference here is scale. There are those who may argue that ‘it’s not happening here like it did there’ and other than the numbers, I disagree entirely. Here, it happens with as much impunity as it did across other places in the Americas.

One of the reasons I’m becoming so much more vocal is that the Trump administration is in the early stages of disappearing people just like it’s happened in the past. He’s not yet ordering people thrown out of helicopters and planes here that we’re aware of but I can see that happening if CIA’s SOG and PAG do end up manipulating things in Venezuela. Because although history doesn’t repeat itself, people repeat the behaviors of the people before them.

In addition, the absolute objective hypocrisy of this Adminstrations’ murder of multiple civilians—from another country—on the high seas over 1000 miles away—to create a false show of force against cartels while continuing to give the Sinaloan cartel (perhaps now in partnership with CJNG) direct access to the most impoverished and vulnerable communities to protect his relationship with gaming or whatever twisted reasoning he and Mr. Vought might have is astonishing.

Beyond where remains are, there’s little I know that federal and tribal law enforcement don’t know. FinCen and other counter threat finance groups know how the money laundered through indian gaming makes its way to Al Qaeda and home-grown terrorists—who, in a grand display of irony—would love Indian Country and the Mexicans who fund them illicitly to not exist.

Tribal law enforcement has repeatedly reported it’s awareness of sex trafficking in INdian casinos across the country but their response is limited because of jurisdictional issues, the lack of interest from federal law enforcement, and the fact that those within it’s ranks are also participants and beneficiaries. This discussion doesn’t’ even include the role of the Sinaloans in moving drugs into and through damn-near every rez.

So I’m speaking again publicly and repeatedly. As I stir the shitpot, we’ll see what and who rises to the top.