Secrecy and data issues impede progress on missing and murdered Indigenous people

This story originally appeared on Underscore Native News.

Editor’s note: Part one of this series detailed the investigation of the disappearance of Wilma Acosta, an unenrolled Pascua Yaqui woman who went missing in Portland in November. Portland police announced Acosta had “suicidal ideations,” despite repeated denials of that claim from Acosta’s family. Experts say such announcements are harmful. Her body was found in January along the Willamette River near Cathedral Park.

Content warning: This story contains information about suicide and missing and murdered Indigenous people. Resources are available for trauma survivors at the Strong Hearts Native Helpline.

Cedar Wilkie Gillette, citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation and a Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa descendant, stepped into her role as federal MMIP Coordinator in Oregon in June 2020. One of her priorities was the creation of guidelines for law enforcement agencies handling cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Though she completed that task in April 2022, her office won’t publicly share guidelines essential to holding law enforcement accountable.

The guidelines Wilkie Gillette’s office created were extensive. Required under Savanah’s Act, a 2020 law intended to be a federal response to the MMIP crisis, they include guidelines for law enforcement jurisdiction, best practices when searching for missing persons, standards on data collection, reporting and analysis, and identification and handling of human remains, law enforcement agencies responsible for entering information into appropriate databases when tribal law enforcement agencies do not have access to such databases, improving law enforcement agency response rates and follow-up responses to missing persons cases, and access to culturally appropriate victim services.

“Basically, it’s like a roadmap to handle missing persons cases expeditiously,” Wilkie Gillette told Underscore Native News + ICT.

But these guidelines have been made “law enforcement sensitive” so the guidelines are only shared with law enforcement agencies in Oregon. Since the guidelines aren’t publicly available, there is no way to know if police agencies across the state are following them. Asked how law enforcement agencies would be held accountable if these guidelines weren’t met, Wilkie Gillette responded, “That is not a requirement under Savannah’s Act.”

Wilkie Gillette is one of 11 federal MMIP coordinators in states across the country, hired as part of the 2019 task force Operation Lady Justice.

Another major part of Wilkie Gillette’s role is compiling data. Data collection for MMIP has been an issue all over the country. In addition to requiring the creation of guidelines for law enforcement investigations of MMIP cases, Savannah’s Act directed agencies to collaborate and collect data from federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement. But the language in the law simply “encourages” submitting “all relevant information pertaining to missing or murdered Indigenous persons.” This has allowed each agency the choice whether or not to collaborate or collect the information needed to track just how dire the crisis actually is instead of it being a requirement.

Data on Indigenous people either isn’t being collected at all, is incomplete, or is inaccurate often because of racial and ethnic misclassification. To remedy this, the Urban Indian Health Institute, a research and data organization serving urban American Indian and Alaska Native communities, released best practices for collecting data on American Indian and Alaska Natives in 2022, but these best practices have not been implemented in Oregon.

When asked about data for the numbers of missing Indigenous people in Oregon, tribal affiliations and their last known whereabouts, that rate in comparison to the general population and how many of those that went missing were found, Wilkie Gillette declined to provide it.

Wilkie Gillette said that her office is not sharing any information because they are still gathering data.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Oregon released the “first annual” MMIP report in 2021. Wilkie Gillette’s office hasn’t issued another MMIP report since then. According to the 2021 report, which found 11 missing Indigenous people, “comprising six females and five males, and eight Indigenous people known to have been murdered since 1985, including five females and three males. Even without proper statewide data collection practices, Oregon had the 13th highest missing rate of MMIP in the country.

Over four years into her role as MMIP coordinator, that is the only MMIP report the public has received from her office.

According to the 2021 report, Wilkie Gillette planned to “request data from all law enforcement offices that respond to Oregon Tribes or relevant Tribal offices that would have MMIP data. This data would include name, gender, tribal affiliation, missing or murdered circumstances, and case status of all cases of missing and murdered Indigenous persons.” In addition, the 2021 report claimed Wilkie Gillette would “identify and maintain MMIP data from all available data sources, including identifying known MMIP issues like racial misclassification.”

None of the information that the 2021 report committed to gather over the last three years has been made public. Wilkie Gillette told Underscore Native News + ICT that she hopes to eventually release a second MMIP report, but gave no timeline.

MMIP data was not available from state agencies in Oregon either, despite a 2020 report from Oregon State Police identifying the urgent need to collect it.

UNN requested recent MMIP data from OSP Captain Cord Wood, who sits on Wilkie Gillette’s law enforcement working group that meets quarterly. According to Wilkie Gillette, the working group also includes law enforcement representation from Native nations in Oregon that have their own police departments, Oregon State Police, Oregon’s Medical Examiner’s Office, FBI, Oregon Department of Justice, U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Solicitor’s Office, an agent from the federal missing and murdered unit, and the Oregon Tribal Affairs Director.

According to Wood, there is no system in place to track people who have been found and removed from the OSP missing persons database, so OSP is unable to gather collective data showing the number of missing people over several years or the ways they were found. He also shared that OSP doesn’t track statistics on murders across the state because each department is individually responsible for submitting and tracking that data. OSP does not track tribal affiliation either.

Police accountability

In 2019, Oregon State Rep. Tawna Sanchez, Shoshone-Bannock, Ute and Carrizo, sponsored a bill directing the Oregon State Police to conduct a study focused on “increasing and improving the reporting, investigation, and response to incidents involving Missing and Murdered Native American Women.” The bill passed and a Missing and Murdered Native American Women Work Group was established consisting of Rep. Sanchez and other legislators, a representative from the FBI, representatives from the U.S. Attorney’s office, two representatives for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, several police agencies, and a representative from the medical examiner’s office.

The workgroup traveled to Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the University of Oregon Many Nations Longhouse, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Oregon State University Native American Longhouse Eena Haws, and Burns Paiute Indian Reservation, for listening sessions where they asked about the community’s feelings and experiences surrounding interactions with Native and non-Native law enforcement.

“[The police] heard exactly what we told them they would hear,” Rep. Sanchez told Underscore Native News + ICT. “Suicides are not often investigated, because they’re assumed to be suicides rather than, possibly murders.”

She went on to explain that the work group also heard from people that the assumption is often that the person missing is an addict. Therefore, families believe the police do not make the necessary effort to find the person and if they do it might result in the missing person being jailed or their children being taken from them. Others shared that when they tried to report someone missing, they were turned away by the police who told them that searching for the missing person is outside of their jurisdiction.

“We heard a lot in the focus groups that tribal populations were frustrated with the fact that the police didn’t understand their jurisdictional requirements,” Rep. Sanchez said.

Originally, the workgroup had planned on meeting with all nine Native nations in Oregon and four of the state’s urban centers to gather input. But the COVID-19 pandemic impeded in-person meetings and the deadline for the report was looming, so only five of the 11 listening sessions occurred. Even with just these five listening sessions, the workgroup believes the actual number of missing Native women is underreported.

Oregon State Police released its report in September 2020. It included a number of recommendations, and providing “education for Oregon’s law enforcement officers covering cultural awareness, the history of Native Americans in Oregon, and the complexities between tribal and state law.”

Police training

As a direct result of the 2020 report, another state bill in 2022 directed the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training (DPSST) to submit a proposal outlining an operational plan for training police officers in investigation and reporting of cases involving missing or murdered Indigenous people. The bill didn’t pass but Deputy Director, Training Division Director and Academy Dean of DPSST, Staci Yutzie, examined Savannah’s Act and reviewed the 2020 Oregon State Police Report on Missing and Murdered Native American Women, and connected with Gillette, as well as with the Oregon Tribal Chiefs of Police and the United States Attorney’s Office Tribal Liaison to create a plan for officer training on MMIP cases.

Yutzie created a training called Criminal Jurisdiction Related to Tribal Lands and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons. This training includes information about each federally recognized Native nation in Oregon, treaties and jurisdictional issues. There is also a section on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons that goes over tribal sovereignty.

The new training was implemented in the Basic Police Academy in February 2023. According to Yutzie, all officers who have attended the Basic Academy since February 2023, about 660 new officers as of May 2024, have received this training.

It is unclear how many officers employed before this new training was a required part of the police academy have taken the new training. Police departments can elect to have their officers complete the training, but it is not a requirement of officers who already completed basic training and were employed before February 2023 to take this new training.

The last few recommendations from the Missing and Murdered Native American Women Work Group include establishing a partnership between Oregon law enforcement and the new federal task force headed up by Wilkie Gillette and move toward solving open and cold case missing persons investigations. No information on the progress of this partnership has been shared with the public.

Racial misclassification

The 2020, the OSP report on MMIP also addressed the need for proper racial and ethnic classification for any new law enforcement guidelines.

“There’s a lot of assumptions made based on names, based on skin tone.” Sanchez said. “Police don’t like to ask those types of questions.”

Wilma Acosta, an unenrolled Pascua Yaqui woman who went missing in Portland in November, was identified by Portland police as “Latina” in the original missing persons announcement and “White” on the OSP missing person clearinghouse. It wasn’t until her family came to Portland to search for their daughter and connected with local Native community members that the public became aware that she was Native. She is still listed as “Hispanic or Latino” in her case file, which is true but only part of her identity.

This is consistent with other themes that surfaced in the data analysis and listening events that informed 2020 OSP report. The report described “inconsistent data sharing and reporting of crime statistics, confusing and inconsistent access to law enforcement resources, and under or non-reporting of missing persons in the Native American community.”

Visibility vs. impact

Although many of the issues described in 2020 are unresolved, there has been a positive change, according to Wood, a state police captain.

“I looked at the data, I saw that we had more people missing or reported missing who were Native American than we did when we wrote the report and in part, I believe that’s due to an uptick of reporting from the tribes,” Wood said. “Having those people reported to us as missing is positive because we don’t know to be looking for them if they’re not reported missing.”

Dedicated efforts and focus on MMIR in recent years have also improved media coverage of missing Native people, according to Sanchez.

“The fact that [Native people] actually make the news, that there was an actual public media awareness of that person being missing, that was hugely important to Native populations, because it wasn’t something that was normative behavior,” Sanchez said. “It wasn’t normal that Native people got any recognition for having been missing. In this state and in any kind of media, we were doing our own social media blasts about people missing.”

While there seems to be more awareness, the actions that have been taken are not meeting the need. In June 2023, OSP hired a tribal liaison, Glendon Smith, Warm Springs, Wasco and Navajo descent, who consults with the nine federally recognized Native nations in Oregon. In Smith’s role he hears everything from the need for improved highways, to concerns about looting at cultural burial sites, hunting violations, the transportation of narcotics, and missing and murdered Indigenous people. He shared with UNN + ICT that as a “one-man show,” he hopes that one day he’ll have a team to support the need he sees.

Gillette has been in a similar position. Her original role was expected to reduce data gaps that span all city, state and federal agencies in the state of Oregon. She said one of her first questions when starting her role as coordinator was, “What are the numbers for Oregon?” But she didn’t realize how difficult getting the data was going to be. This large task is just one of the many expectations of her original role.

In May, Oregon’s Attorney General’s office announced that Gillette’s role would be expanding even further as the regional coordinator for the Northwest Region under the Justice Department’s MMIP Regional Outreach Program, which includes the states of California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. This expanded role spans 165 federally recognized Native nations, Native Hawaiians, urban Natives and non-federally recognized Native nations in the region.

State and federal agencies have issued reports calling for consistent and mandated data and information collection and sharing on race, ethnicity, gender and tribal affiliation, transparent processes and communication between law enforcement and government agencies, and mandated processes for collaboration across local, state and tribal law enforcement.

But for now, many of these steps remain voluntary. Awareness of the problem may have increased in Oregon, but Native community members are still going missing and murdered at alarming rates, rates that are consistently undercounted.

Underscore Native News is a nonprofit investigative newsroom committed to Indigenous-centered reporting in the Pacific Northwest. We are supported by foundations and donor contributions. Follow Underscore on Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok.