When a Native American is the victim of a violent crime by a non-native person on tribal lands, it can be difficult to prosecute the crime. And limited data can obscure how severe the violence against Native Americans remains. A lack of resources and communication between tribal and urban law enforcement can also create more problems. EO Media Group and Underscore News partnered on an investigative project to dig into these issues. Karina Brown is the managing editor of Underscore. Desireé Coyote is the Family Violence Services program manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Laura John is the City of Portland’s Tribal Relations director. They join us with more about how violent crimes against Indigenous people can often fall through the cracks.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Dave Miller. When a Native American is the victim of a violent crime by a non-Native person on Tribal land, it can be difficult to prosecute the crime. Limited data can obscure the prevalence of violence against Native Americans and a lack of communication between Tribal communities and urban law enforcement can create more problems. These are some of the issues that were featured in a recent series of articles by the EO Media Group and Underscore News. Karina Brown is a Managing Editor of Underscore [https://www.underscore.news]. Desiree Coyote is the Family Violence Services Program Manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and Laura John is the City of Portland’s Tribal Relations Director. They all join us now, welcome.
Karina Brown / Desiree Coyote / Laura John: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Dave Miller: Desiree Coyote, first. You are a survivor of domestic abuse. I’m curious how much that informs your current work as a family violence services program manager?
Desiree Coyote: Pretty much 100% informs my work as my ex- was non-Native and the system was not there to help me at any given level. So that’s the work that I do for our Umatilla Tribal Community.
Miller: When you say that the system wasn’t there to help you at any level. What do you mean?
Coyote: I called law enforcement a number of times and it was rare that they would get back to me within the day or two or sometimes a couple of weeks. I contacted the local domestic violence program and the response that I got was ‘See what your people did to you?’ So, it wasn’t worth my time. My case of course did not make it to Tribal Court because back then we didn’t have jurisdiction over non-Natives.
Miller: How much do you think has changed? I mean, if if something similar were to happen today, a report of a sexual assault or a kidnapping were to happen today, how much of what you’ve just described and experienced would still be the same?
Coyote: I think that it varies. This is what I do not like about the system- is how far the case progresses is going to be dependent on the people who do the investigation. So, if we have a great investigator, does everything right, pictures and interviews, etcetera, then it could be pretty successful, and we won’t see what we saw when I was going through this. But again, it really depends on the investigator, on how far that’ll go. The laws are there, but it’s still going to depend on the initial Investigator.
Miller: Laura John, you’ve said that when you started your job in 2018 as the City of Portland’s first full time Tribal Relations Director, you got calls from Native people outside the city about their challenges in getting information about missing people in Portland. Can you give us a sense for the stories you heard, what people would say to you when they would call you up?
Laura John: Absolutely. So right away, being in the position, once the community and tribe started to get word that we as that the City of Portland had a tribal relations program and a point person to talk to, I started to get calls from families who were either in rural locations, maybe from a reservation that is somewhere in the state or just across state lines, so those tribes who have homelands and treaty rights that overlay in the state of Oregon. But even getting calls from as far away as tribes in Montana, Eastern Montana, that third call that I got by the time it was early 2018, really said to me that the City of Portland has an opportunity to be an ally and to help address this,
this epidemic. What I was hearing from families is they weren’t sure, first, who to call. And a lot of the calls that I was receiving were with regards to individuals who had went missing, been reported as missing to their tribal jurisdictions or rural local jurisdictions, and then getting word that that individual who was missing is potentially in the Portland metro area. Now we know that that is a trend, that many Native women, young people also, men, our two spirits communities are being groomed by traffickers. They’re being put on a circuit that brings them through the interstates, and that means that they are coming into Portland. When those families were calling dispatch, for example, in Portland our 911 Center or calling Portland Police, there wasn’t enough knowledge on our side, staff knowledge on our side to understand how best to meet the needs and be culturally responsive to those calls. And so those folks would feel like they weren’t being heard. Some families were told that, ‘Well, maybe your missing loved one isn’t missing at all, and maybe they want to be missing. We’re not sure how to do a missing report if that person isn’t from here.’ So there’s a lot of that, what I was hearing, is that complexity of that jurisdictional tangle that happens between tribal jurisdictions and non-tribal jurisdictions. I know that that happens to some degree with rural jurisdictions,
but I don’t think that is quite as high as when it comes to the Tribal jurisdictions.
Miller: What happened when you took these concerns to the Portland Police Bureau? What did you hear?
John: What was very shocking to me back in 2018, as I started to ask about these situations, but in a broader sense, a lot of what I do in my position at the city is when these specific instances are happening, part of my job is to take a closer look at that and see what the root causes are and how our systems may not be serving people in the way that they need to be served. So I started to ask around, and was really quite shocked to hear from folks in the Portland Police Bureau and in other relevant council offices and bureaus that people had not heard about this missing and murdered Indigenous women epidemic, which was surprising to me because it fills my social media feeds and of course we know how social media works, You see what the algorithms tell you to see. and for me that was a clear sign that we needed to raise awareness. So what we started to do is begin to plant those seeds of letting folks internally at the city know about this issue, starting to have an annual awareness event, providing trainings and networking. We’re reaching out to tribes so that we can figure out where those gaps are, working with the Department of Justice, working with the state, who are all seeing this as a huge issue. What is the role that the city can play? That one example from Montana? It was bittersweet. We shared that example of a woman who had called her family to say that she thought she was in Portland. She was having a hard time staying awake, she’s staying in a tent somewhere, and we were able to reach into our community, our grassroots community advocates, who work in the houseless community, who work in the camps to provide support, some who have lived there, and we were able to find her within 48 hours. We worked with the Siletz Tribe and the Siletz Tribe provided her resources to get home or to get into a safe home. So we know that there are solutions there. It’s just a matter of how do we identify those solutions and then how do we put them into the institution and implement them?
Miller: What role does data collection play in what you’re talking about?
John: For the city, and I see this on lots of levels of government and in lots of areas, I know that Seattle has one of the highest documented rates of missing and murdered women. They have some different circumstances up there; we’re very challenged in Portland and in the state, I think because of where we’re located and because of the history of termination of tribes, which of course, termination hit Oregon Tribes the hardest.
There was a lot of intermarrying; Native people are multiracial, we don’t always present as a stereotype of a Native person, where I think in other areas, if we’re looking at New Mexico or Arizona, Montana, there’s more of a delineation because there’s a larger population. We’re facing that issue here where currently, Portland Police Bureau and I’m hearing that there’s other jurisdictions, do not specifically ask a person who they’re interacting with what their race is. I know that there are some systemic challenges there and some fear of not wanting people to feel profiled. But this, in particular, I want to really hit home – when we’re talking about Native women and people, Indigenous women, people in this country, we’re talking about a group of individuals that have a unique political status that go above and beyond a racial category. So we are Native in our DNA and we may have other racial DNA, we’re multiracial, but many of us have a unique political status where we fit the federal definition of American, Canadian, Alaskan, Native, that says that we are afforded specific rights, entitlements, programs and services, based on the exchange of land, going way back to our treaties. And so I think that there’s a challenge there also in delineating out what the federal definition of Native American is, let alone collecting the information, but then even defining it. ‘Native American,’ according to the federal OMB Office, is anyone who is Indigenous from North, Central or South America. That means that folks that are Indigenous, with that political status will also be checking that box. And so it makes it really complicated. So what we’re looking at as the city is, can we pair those two questions on demographic questionnaires to help give us a little finer look at the data, to understand, ‘are these victims that are coming in, are they affiliated with federal or state recognized Tribes? Are they a first or second degree descendant of a member of a federally recognized tribe?’ So that we can start to tell that story. We can’t get resources to help this issue, if we can’t tell that story with the data.
Miller: Karina Brown, you did a lot of the reporting for this series. Among the people you talk to is a Portland Police Sergeant named Mike Myers, who, if I read his quotes correctly, really seems to push back against the usefulness of collecting this data. Can you explain what you heard from him?
Karina Brown: Yeah. He expressed worry that if he focused his unit’s efforts on one certain group of people, on one category of people, that he might be criticized for not focusing on another group of people, so like worrying about any certain focus. He also said that there was really no reason, really no reason to sort of delineate cases according to whether they might fall into the group of missing and murdered Indigenous people because he didn’t see that there might be any connection among those cases. And he wanted to just look at every case individually.
Miller: What did you hear about this from Brian Dubray who is the Police Chief for the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians?
Brown: Well, Chief Dubray is part of a workgroup that is creating like a list of best practices for police departments to follow in cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people. And he said it’s really important to have a specific response to this specific type of crime, that that is definitely a best practice. He also said that immediately notifying tribes when a tribal member goes missing and having those lines of communication open is a big best practice. And that’s something that Sergeant Myers said that he didn’t do.
Miller: Desiree Coyote, under federal and now Oregon state law, in addition to directives from the State Attorney General, and for example, Portland’s former police chief, local law enforcement has to treat a tribal court order like a protection order for domestic violence the same as they would treat a protection order from a state court, from some other state court. It seems, has been really unevenly followed or applied. How do you explain that?
Coyote: Well, in our struggle to ensure that our tribal protection orders were enforceable off the reservation, it was a terrible dance, basically, with the systems. And for me, because of the work I do with the victims themselves, the lack of education or the ignorance of the systems in regards to the existence of tribal nations for one, and then two, to understand and know that tribal nations are a sovereign nation and we are able to do these pieces. But understanding… because in doing this work, it’s spent a lot of time helping non-Native systems, no one understands how to work with tribal nations, not just the jurisdiction but being able to enforce those pieces, and fortunately for our tribe, we have a number of staff who are very good about ensuring that we keep saying the same things over and over about the enforcement of tribal protection orders, having to work with the Oregon Department of Justice and ensuring that the training is shared around the state including tribal nations, so that it’s not complicated. It’s just I don’t think people still want to see that we are still here as Indigenous folks.
Miller: Laura John, briefly, before we have to say goodbye, what kind of education or training would you like to see statewide?
John: What I would love to see and I’ve shared this with our policymakers, is that in the State Police Academy Training the DPSST Training, that there is full inclusion of training and education about tribal law enforcement, jurisdiction and how tribal sovereignty and retained rights through treaties applies to law enforcement field of work. Also, ensuring that every graduate of that academy understands that there is a state and federal statute indicating that there needs to be full faith and credit given to tribal court orders. We’ve done that at the city, and put that in a standard operating procedure and are making sure that we’re doing regular reminders so that new officers coming in are understanding that; that has gone a long way, that’s the one bite of this big giant elephant in the room that we need to take up to continue to move forward. That’s one step. And we’re looking for additional steps that we can take. I’ve had conversations with tribal leaders at the Umatilla, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indians. We are talking about collaborating our 911 call center staffs to learn from each other. We’re talking with other tribal law enforcement specialists and having discussions to bring them in to do trainings with Portland Police Officers, with our Portland Street Response and other programs within the city that may come in contact with these types of situations and cases.
Miller: Laura John, Karina Brown and Desiree Coyote, thanks very much.
John / Brown / Coyote: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Miller: Laura John is a Tribal Relations Director for the City of Portland. Desiree Coyote is Family Violence Services Program Manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and Karina Brown is a Managing Editor of Underscore. There is a link to their five articles about these issues on our website, opb.org/thinkoutloud. Coming up after a break, we’re going to hear about the most infamous tiger in India and what his one story says about conservation, humans and wildness
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