San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tracking down ‘stolen relatives’
Yurok assembles team to solve cold cases in epidemic of violence against Indigenous people
Julia Oliveira has one of the most sprawling territories of any law enforcement officer in California. An Indigenous person originally from Oklahoma, she investigates cold cases — unsolved killings and disappearances — for the Yurok Tribe of Northern California, whose reservation stretches through the soaring sequoias of rural Humboldt and Del Norte counties.
It’s a 21⁄2-hour journey to drive across the tribe’s land; there’s cellphone service for only 10 to 20 minutes of that trip. Oliveira’s office most days is a Ford Explorer.
Indigenous people, particularly women, experience violent crime at higher rates than the rest of the U.S. population, and California has the most Indigenous people of any state. California tribal leaders, courts and government officials have described the rape and killing of Native people as an epidemic. A 2020 study found 105 instances of missing and slain Indigenous people in Northern California alone.
Yet many Indigenous communities are so remote — and generational trauma has sowed so much distrust of outsiders — that the true scope of the problem has long been hidden.
The violence was “like internal bleeding,” said Oliveira, 58. “Nobody really noticed that it was happening, this wound. And suddenly, somebody did and said, ‘Enough.’ ”
Oliveira is the first fulltime investigator of missing and slain Indigenous persons in California history. She’s part of a unique push by the more than 5,000-member Yurok Tribe, California’s largest, to bring fresh eyes to old cases. In the past several years, with grant money
from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and others, the tribe has hired and outfitted a small team of prosecutors and investigators. They’ve also linked up with the U.S. Marshals Service, which started a federal pilot program last year called the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative and selected the tribe as its first partner.
“Our favorite phrase here at the Yurok Tribe is that we’re building the plane while we fly,” said Rosemary Deck, 39, the tribe’s chief prosecutor. “We’re 28,000 feet up in the air and drilling things on the machine.” But the work “is so important that it can’t wait,” she said.
Three years ago, the tribe started gathering data on “our stolen relatives,” beginning a program called To’ Kee Skuy’ Soo Ney-Wo-Chek,’ which means “I will see you again in a good way” in the Yurok language. In three annual reports since, the tribe documented 105 cases of missing and slain Indigenous persons in Northern California spanning 28 tribes, which is almost certainly an undercount. Many of the cases are unsolved and don’t appear in law enforcement databases. In the reports, the Yurok Tribe recommended new approaches for solving the cases.
In the middle of that work, in 2021, the tribe established a tribal prosecutor’s office and hired Deck, an attorney and public defender from Toronto, to lead it. Since then, her team has grown to seven people, including Oliveira, who had spent two decades with the Humboldt County Sheriff ’s Office.
“She knew the system,” Deck said — and unlike Deck, Oliveira is Indigenous, a citizen of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, which helps build trust with Yurok members, Deck said.
“It’s something I felt very passionate about when the opportunity came up,” Oliveira said.
Since then, Oliveira has developed or dug into about 15 case files related to missing or slain Yurok people. These victims include Emmilee Risling, a University of Oregon graduate and mother of two who went missing on the reservation in October 2021. No cases have been solved yet, but the effort is young. The team is still procuring equipment and people, like ground-penetrating radar and canine handlers to search for human remains.
Due to federal law, tribe members don’t have jurisdiction to prosecute serious and violent felonies committed on their land. But by opening their own case files, they can supplement the work of county law enforcement and spur them to investigate
“You’re never going to fix it all. What I hope to offer to some of these families is resolution.”
Julia Oliveira
further. Oliveira has already gone into the field with a county drone operator, surveilling remote stretches of the reservation: “In a rural area,” she said, “a drone is invaluable.”
The Yurok Tribe’s partnership with the U.S. Marshals Service also expands its reach. The relationship grew out of a White House task force called Operation Lady Justice, begun to address violence against Indigenous people.
“The Marshals Service mission is simple,” said Lori McPherson, a senior policy adviser with the agency who has spent years investigating missing children cases. “We go find fugitives. We arrest bad guys. And we look for missing kids. We’re good at finding people. So why not see what we can do to expand that out to Indian country?”
She said the goal of the partnership is to “build capacity for the tribe” so it can solve cases on its own. But the Marshals Service is also helping the tribe connect with experts in federal law enforcement, including people at the FBI and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
“Having that guidance,” Deck said, “has been so invaluable.”
There are no shortcuts to investigating cold cases. For Oliveira, it’s a slow daily grind of going out into a vast rural region and talking to people.
The sleuth has an office in Klamath in Del Norte County, but she spends most of her days in the field. From the outside, her “rolling office,” the Explorer, doesn’t look like a cop vehicle. Police markings, Oliveira said, would only scare people away.
Often she talks with victims’ families on the reservation. Sometimes she heads into town and confers with county law enforcement, gathering records and chasing down leads. The investigator also checks in with tribal citizens who deal with mental health issues or are vulnerable to domestic violence. The farthest edge of the reservation is an hour and a half from the nearest mental health facility, and in the winter, the roads can be impassible, Oliveira said.
“You’re never going to fix it all,” she said. “What I hope to offer to some of these families is resolution. But also the feeling that somebody has the time to put as much as they possibly can into that investigation.”
Then, hopefully, “Somebody who knows something will step forward.”