America’s Shame: The Silent Tragedy of Indigenous Women (Part Three)

By Brooke Manuel, Skyline Editor

ALPINE – Since the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis is such a complex issue, offering potential solutions and remedies to the crisis is complicated. 

But according to advocates and policy makers, providing domestic abuse education to teenagers living on reservations, covering MMIW cases in the media, giving tribal law enforcement agencies the jurisdiction they need to effectively oversee their land and allowing Indigenous communities to relearn their core values are all things that can potentially help lower the number of cases.   

Angela Ward, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, spoke of the role that intergenerational trauma plays in the cycle of domestic abuse. 

“The biggest issue is that until we start dealing with that intergenerational trauma, we’ll probably continue seeing...this structure of abuse,” Ward said.  

Ward believes that offering education on domestic abuse to Indigenous teenagers living on reservations may help solve this issue.  

“They should start teaching teens what healthy relationships look like and what unhealthy relationships look like. We gotta get them while they’re young...Maybe something like that could eventually help,” Ward said.  

In agreement with the claim by Jacquelyn Mojica, a 23-year-old Indigenous woman whose grandmother went missing in 1987 and was never found, that cases of violence against Indigenous women are not given the same priority as those of white women from part one of this series, Ward stressed the importance of media coverage.  

“We’re not getting the notices out there like others are. There’s no national T.V. talking about it. There’s no interviews with the family,” Ward said.  

She talked about the impact of waiting longer than 24 hours to start working on a missing persons case and explained that law enforcement agents are doing Indigenous women a disservice. 

“We’re pushed aside...But when you’re putting it off until, you know, 48 hours later, well you’ve already done killed this girl by not caring,” Ward said.  

Due to the Major Crimes Act, tribal law enforcement agencies are restricted as to what they can do about crimes that are committed on tribal land. Ward attributed this as one of the reasons so many MMIW cases go unsolved.  

Even though MMIW is complex, it seems the Biden administration is making an effort to provide funding to tribal law enforcement agencies in hopes of lessening the number of MMIW cases that go unsolved. In March of 2023, President Biden proposed a budget that includes $717 million, an $86 million increase, in Tribal public safety and justice funding at the Department of the Interior.  

In addition to Ward’s beliefs, Roger White Owl, the policy advisor for the three affiliated tribes in North Dakota, believes that a cultural renaissance of Indigenous values is essential to solving some of the problems Indigenous people face.  

“Reconnecting with who we are and that loss of our humanity, because we were forced to view the world in a way that’s foreign to us. And something that most Indigenous communities will agree on is that we have to find our way back to our...way of life and our well-being, mentally, physically, and socially,” White Owl said.  

Brooke Manuel is a McNair Scholar and the editor of the Skyline.