Significance of alert system for Indigenous communities

Part of the issue in sufficiently addressing the issue of missing Indigenous people across the country has been in the ways that information about these cases has been collected and recorded, advocates say. Indigenous people, especially women and girls, are more likely to go missing accounting for overall population numbers. Historically, the numbers on record have underreported the magnitude of the problem due to issues that include racial misclassification and incomplete data collection. But with changes to the way this information about missing and murdered Indigenous people is being collected, including in a new alert system in Washington state, advocates expect to see changes that more accurately reflect what’s happening to their communities.

Abigial Echo-hawk, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, is the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, a division of the Seattle Indian Health Board and one of a dozen tribal epidemiological centers in the nation that works to make sure that tribal people living in urban areas in the United States are properly represented in data evaluation and research. The institute has specifically focused on violence against Indigenous women and girls — and the data that has been missing about this group — in order to provide that information to policymakers, tribal leaders, and other advocates to ensure that “the resources, intervention, and prevention efforts flow to our community.”

She took some time to talk about the new statewide alert system in Washington, reportedly the first in the nation, and its significance in more comprehensively responding to the crucial issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people in the U.S. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdutlisa-deaderick-staff.html.)

Q: Can you talk about why an alert system specific to Indigenous people is necessary?

A: Having an alert system like this, that when a person who has gone missing is identified as Indigenous and they are put in this statewide alert system, we will begin to have coordinated efforts and opportunities for the rest of the community to be engaged in assisting us in finding our loved ones for the very first time. And, for the very first time, we’re going to begin to see elevated visibility of those most likely to go missing within the state of Washington, which is Indigenous peoples.

Q: Another bill was also signed in Washington last month that requires county coroners and medical examiners in the state to identify and notify family members of murdered Indigenous people and return their remains. This seems to address one of a number of issues around the collection of data for missing and murdered Indigenous people. Your agency’s 2018 report — “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls” — talks at length about the process of accessing accurate data in this area. Can you talk a bit about some of the main takeaways from that report?

A: Right now, there are significant issues with racial and ethnic classification. That is, coroners, medical examiners, funeral home directors, those who are classifying race and ethnicity, specifically of murdered individuals, very often don’t ask the families, or they make a decision on that person’s race or ethnicity based on looking at them visually. In doing so, they often misclassify them. In addition to that, law enforcement databases very often were not collecting the race and ethnicity of American Indians and Alaska Natives; it wasn’t even an option. They were often placed in a category called “other,” which basically effectively hides people who aren’t in the little boxes that are given in a database to correctly identify their race and ethnicity. To begin to look at victims of violence, victims who had gone missing, there wasn’t even a box that existed for these folks. The study found an instance in Fargo, N.D., where the system was automatically defaulting to “White” if the race and ethnicity of an individual wasn’t collected, effectively hiding them. So, the numbers that we were able to find, and the numbers that currently exist, are an absolute gross undercount. We have many more people missing and who have been murdered that we simply have not been able to properly account for because of these issues around the data.

Q: How does having more comprehensive data enable or equip Indigenous communities to better protect women, girls, nonbinary, and two-spirit people in their communities?

A: This is the hard part about it: Our communities know our people are going missing and murdered. They know who these people are. It’s not about them having the data because it’s new to them; it’s about us having it in an official way in these database systems that are believed outside of our community. What we often find is people do not believe us when we say our people are going missing and murdered at these incredibly high and disproportionate rates because when law enforcement pulls the data, because of all the issues I just talked about, it doesn’t show what we are actually experiencing. So, when we collect the data, what we are doing is truly representing the impact of these murders, of the trafficking, of these kidnappings. We truly represent the experiences of our communities in the numbers instead of hiding them, so that when our community members come forward with the stories of their loved ones, they also have the data to back it up. It’s about us using it as a tool and, in a sense, as a “Here, it’s in your face, you can no longer ignore us.” It becomes a weapon for us to be able to say, “You can no longer not address what’s happening within our communities.” So, community organizations, grassroots organizers, family members, tribal councils, and urban Indian organizations use the data to say, “You cannot make us invisible anymore.” Then, for the outside community, for those who needed proof, now it’s there and they can no longer ignore it. Those who wanted to be in allyship or work with our communities, it also gives them a tool to say, “Hey, this is happening in Indigenous communities and this is something that we need to address.”

lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com