‘How can we help?’
Navajo advocates take community approach to sexual violence.
MONTEZUMA CREEK, Utah – Navajo Nation Council Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty wore her grandmother’s delicately patterned yellow, blue and purple scarf as she spoke before members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Montezuma Creek on Wednesday.
The scarf ’s colors, she said, were chosen to honor the memory of Ashlynne Mike, an 11-year-old Diné girl who was sexually assaulted and murdered near Shiprock, New Mexico, in 2016, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Agents from the FBI office in Salt Lake City traveled to southern San Juan County to award Utah Navajo Health System (UNHS) for its victim advocacy program, which Crotty and others hope will become a model program for supporting victims of sexual assault and domestic violence across the Navajo Nation. But amid the pageantry and congratulations, Crotty reminded the federal and tribal law enforcement officials who were present about the stakes of the issue.
“This is very hard work,” she said. “It has a stigma to it. Nobody wants to talk about it.” But facing the issues head-on opens the space for dealing with the root causes and healing, she said.
“In 2016, when we lost Ashlynne,” Crotty continued, “we as a community remember how vulnerable we felt as mothers and fathers, knowing that our children should be safe here in the communities that they love, the community where they were raised. We started taking a coordinated effort and looking, ‘How can we help? How did this happen? How can we prevent it?’”
Crotty helped convince Congress to pass legislation in 2018 that extended the AMBER Alert system to the Navajo Nation and other tribal nations in the United States, a bill known as “Ashlynne’s Law.” Later that same year, Crotty wore the scarf when she testified for three hours before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs about the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, men, children and transgender people, issues that are compounded by underfunded tribal law enforcement services. And a lack of solid data collection makes it difficult to assess the full extent of the problem.
Recent federal legislation such as Savanna’s Act, which became law last year, seeks to address those issues, but Crotty acknowledged on Wednesday that local, on-the-ground efforts such as the program developed by UNHS are equally important.
UNHS currently employs four victim advocates who run a hotline and provide resources in southern San Juan County, including connecting families fleeing domestic violence with shelter services.
“I always say, ‘We shouldn’t be this busy,’” said Tonya Grass, a UNHS victim advocate for the Monument Valley area. “We’re busy like we live in the inner cities.” Grass and her colleagues Lynn Bia, Danialle Whitehat and Jessica Holiday were the recipients of the FBI’s Community Leadership Award for their work to overcome the challenges advocates face in a rural area where addressing crime can be complicated by the overlapping jurisdiction of county, state, federal and tribal law enforcement.
“A lot of these victims, they get discouraged,” Grass, who is working on a master’s degree in criminal justice, said. “They get bounced around from agency to agency, and they have to figure things out. That’s what we’re here for (as victim advocates). It’s very complex, and I’m glad that service is here so we can let everybody know how it works.”
Bia, who was hired as UNHS’ first victim advocate in 2014, covered the entire southern portion of San Juan County from Aneth to Navajo Mountain when she started, and she said it took years to build the program into what it is today.
“There were no resources here,” Bia said. “I had to Google stuff. I had to go by common sense, and I started slowly working to build up our resources.”
Many of the advocates noted law enforcement needs to play a key role, which requires improving coordination between the county sheriff, the Navajo Nation’s police force and the FBI. Bia said she considered becoming a police officer with the Navajo Nation when she saw the local needs but decided instead to continue with her current role.
At the ceremony, Navajo Nation Council Delegate Nathaniel Brown called on the FBI to send more resources to the Navajo Nation.
“We need more visibility from the FBI,” Brown said. “We need more prosecution of these individuals who are committing these heinous crimes.”