Colorado to investigate missing and murdered indigenous people
DENVER — A battle of wills over how to investigate missing and murdered indigenous people ended Tuesday with advocates and the governor agreeing on an office dedicated to the crisis.
Standing in the Capitol lobby, with blood-red handprints covering their mouths — a symbol in support of the thousands of the missing and murdered indigenous people — advocates Donna Chrisjohn and Raven Payment declared a win while acknowledging the work left to do.
“This a huge win for our community and doing what’s right,” Payment, who is Ojibwe and Mohawk, said. “At the end of the day, this isn’t about myself, this isn’t about Donna, this isn’t about our sponsors. This is about our communities and our relatives that have been enduring this violence that, frankly, no one asked for. So to have this big starting place, to have an office in our government to start doing this work in a good way, is a victory.”
SB22-150, sponsored by Reps. Leslie Herod and Monica Duran and Sen. Jessie Danielson, all Democrats, aims to specifically address the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous people in Colorado. Indigenous women in particular face heightened rates of violence, advocates and researchers say. And those crimes are too often not properly tracked or understood.
The murder rate of indigenous women is three times that of white women; more than half of indigenous women experience sexual violence in their lifetime, and 96% of victims face it from non-indigenous people, according to the National Congress of American Indians.
And when indigenous women go missing, it’s not always properly tracked or investigated, advocates say. In 2016, of more than 5,700 missing indigenous women and girls identified by the National Crime Information Center, only 116 were reported in Department of Justice statistics, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute.
The bill creates an office of liaison for missing and murdered indigenous relatives within the Colorado Department of Public Safety. It was initially opposed by Gov. Jared Polis’ office, at least as initially envisioned, over concerns it would create “a broad scope of work, with expectations that are beyond the current mission and skill set” of the Department of Public Safety.