Five years ago, the Oregon state legislature passed a bill intending to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The bill also authorized an investigation into the problem and the release of a report in 2020 containing recommendations to more effectively respond to it. But as reporting from InvestigateWest reveals, Indigenous activists are frustrated by the lack of progress and a lack of direct engagement by law enforcement with their communities on this issue. Meanwhile, obstacles can exist around filing reports of missing Indigenous persons and sharing information across state, federal and Tribal jurisdictions. Melanie Henshaw, the Indigenous Affairs reporter at InvestigateWest, joins us to share details of her investigation.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Five years ago, Oregon lawmakers unanimously passed a bill intended to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. It led to a report a year later and recommendations for how to better respond to the problem. But as reporting from InvestigateWest reveals, Indigenous activists are frustrated by the lack of progress and a lack of direct engagement by law enforcement with their communities. Melanie Henshaw wrote about this as the Indigenous Affairs reporter at InvestigateWest, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.

Melanie Henshaw: Thanks again for having me, Dave.

Miller: You have been covering this issue for almost a decade now in various ways. What was the spark for this latest reporting?

Henshaw: Well, I thought given the time that had passed since the report came out, it was due to check in and see how Oregon had progressed on its own recommendations, particularly after I had an interview with Governor Tina Kotek, where I asked about the subject and she didn’t really seem to have much in the way of updates.

Miller: Am I right that you had told the governor’s staff in advance before that interview, that this is what you want to focus on for the interview and yet, she didn’t have too much to say?

Henshaw: That’s correct. The interview occurred while I was still the Indigenous Affairs reporter at Street Roots. So Street Roots organized the interview with the governor and we sent over the interview topics ahead of time. And missing and murdered Indigenous people was the primary topic that I was going to discuss. To her credit, when I asked, Governor Kotek was upfront and said that she didn’t know and hadn’t had a conversation about it since 2019.

Miller: What did that tell you about where this issue sits in terms of the governor’s priorities, or more maybe even just the state’s leadership priorities?

Henshaw: Well, it’s difficult for something to be a priority if you’re not even talking about it at the highest levels. So to me, that spoke that it wasn’t a priority. I think that then that also increased my desire to go back and look at the particular recommendations and the findings of the report, and find where Oregon was and wasn’t keeping up with its own recommendations.

Miller: I want to turn to that report and the recommendations in just a second. But can you just remind us of the scope of this problem?

Henshaw: Absolutely. So across the United States, there are thousands of missing Indigenous women and people. And in Oregon and across the nation, it’s impossible to quantify due to a widely recognized problem of really, really poor data collection.

Miller: How does Oregon compare to Washington when it comes to addressing this crisis?

Henshaw: In terms of numbers, Washington actually has the second most missing Indigenous people after Alaska. But in terms of focused efforts to quantify and address data and provide alerts, Washington is doing more than Oregon. Again, it’s difficult to compare directly because of some differences in jurisdictional responsibilities between Oregon and Washington. But for example, Washington has an AMBER alert-like system for missing and endangered Indigenous people. So when one goes missing, they can issue an alert statewide, similar to an AMBER alert. Oregon doesn’t have a similar system.

Miller: Let’s go back five years. In 2019, the Oregon Legislature unanimously passed that bill that I mentioned regarding missing and murdered Indigenous women. Can you give us the broad strokes of what it required?

Henshaw: Absolutely. So first, the bill declared missing Indigenous women a statewide emergency in Oregon. Then it required the Oregon State police to convene a work group that would then study the underpinnings of the problem, the scope of the problem and how best to address it. So it convened a work group and was supposed to hold a listening and understanding tour that consulted with all nine federally recognized tribes within the geographic boundaries of Oregon, as well as a number of urban Indigenous communities. And the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to the listening tour after only five stops. So they consulted with only three federally recognized Native nations and they visited two longhouses at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University, where Native students gather, and held listening and understanding tour stops there. But ultimately, the tour was stopped because of COVID, never resumed and there’s never been any effort to make up for that. So the report was produced without the perspectives of six of the nine tribes.

Miller: What did the report find?

Henshaw: So the report found that essentially the scope of the problem was impossible to quantify due to the poor gathering of data, that there was issues with communication between various law enforcement agencies, that there was issues with law enforcement understanding their responsibilities to tribal citizens and to tribal lands, as well as a huge problem of trust between law enforcement and Indigenous communities that really was pervasive and caused a lot of issues.

Miller: Let’s dig into that one. I mean, because the 2019 law, it called for strengthening partnerships between law enforcement and Indigenous communities. Why was that identified as one of the key issues? What are the ways in which the lack of partnerships has been a problem in the past?

Henshaw: If we’re speaking specifically about law enforcement, to Indigenous communities, there is a long, long history of distrust. Native communities face disproportionate levels of police violence. There is a history of disproportionate interference in Indigenous homes by state entities like police and law enforcement that causes a lot of fear and mistrust. So not only are folks afraid or reluctant to report crimes to law enforcement, they are also afraid of consequences within potentially their own communities when working with law enforcement because of just the massive lack of trust.

So the report found that folks didn’t believe that they would be taken seriously. They found that they didn’t believe police would act. They didn’t believe that there would be a concerted effort to find their loved one if they were to report them missing. And then again, there’s that underlying fear based on historical abuses, of state interference, which is one of the reasons why they called for improved trust between law enforcement and Indigenous communities. And subsequently, after the report, there’s been a lot of strengthening to law enforcement, more partnerships between federal state and tribal local improved communication, which according to folks I spoke with at OSP and tribal law enforcement, has made a difference and really improved communication there.

Miller: Within different law enforcement agencies. But not necessarily between law enforcement and Native communities.

Henshaw: Yes.

Miller: What might they do? What are they talking about doing to improve those relationships, those key relationships?

Henshaw: When I speak with law enforcement, they acknowledge that trust is ongoing and that they want to continue to build that trust. But when asked and pressed for specifics of what they would do, it’s more so on an incidental basis, that an officer or several officers might find themselves at community-based events. There’s no concerted efforts organized by OSP similar to the listening and understanding tour, where you have folks going out into community, not arresting people or talking to other law enforcement or government officials, but interacting and showing their face. And building trust by showing up and showing their face as a member of that community, and someone who desires positive outcomes for tribal communities and not punitive.

Miller: You noted in your recent article that Oregon State Police hired their first tribal liaison last year. Glendon Smith is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. What’s he been doing?

Henshaw: So he has been consulting with all nine tribes. I was not able to speak to him because he did not respond to my request to, and he is consulting on a number … But I did get the scope of his duties from other folks at OSP.  [He’s] consulting with all nine tribes on a number of issues, everything from fish and game to including MMIP, but not specifically. So he’s conducting those visits and supposed to be improving those relationships with tribal governments.

Miller: You mentioned the problem of data collection that has been identified in a number of reports, including the Oregon State Police report in 2020. How does that actually play into this? What is wrong with the way data has been collected?

Henshaw: Right. So there’s a number of issues that cause the data problems. One of them is something called racial misclassification, which is where Indigenous folks are marked as a different race when their report is cataloged. So therefore, they’re not included in overall data. You also have an issue of, you have no centralized point place to house all the data from different law enforcement agencies to quantify all of this. So essentially, between the different reports that I look at, you’re looking at different numbers.

Miller: So if this is something that’s been identified over and over, is it improving? Has the state made progress to improve data collection?

Henshaw: When I spoke with folks at OSP, it was essentially framed that they can’t make unilateral changes. It has to be on a more federal level that these changes occur and that they are working to improve communication again amongst each other. But in states like Washington, you do have essentially a partnership or a cohesive relationship where all the jurisdictions are able to pull data together to produce weekly reports of missing Indigenous that are updated every week.

Miller: This gets to another issue that you’ve identified and which the report has identified, which is jurisdictional issues. One of the requirements is for all new law enforcement agents to be trained on jurisdictional challenges or issues. What are the challenges?

Henshaw: So when we’re talking about criminal jurisdiction in Indian country, it’s incredibly complex to say the least. And essentially, what we’re looking at here is in Oregon, under a law called Public Law 280, Oregon has criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians for crimes occurring on tribal land, with the exception of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. So that means officers have to show up in places for crimes where they might not show up if the person’s Indian status is different. And we’re speaking specifically about citizens of federally recognized tribes here.

But all that to say, that’s just the law I just mentioned. Public Law 280 is only one law that’s concerning jurisdiction on tribal lands. There’s a ton of them. And essentially the jurisdictional training is, I haven’t reviewed the course material myself, so I can’t speak to specifically what’s in there. But as I understand, it is telling officers, generally, when they have responsibilities to enforce laws on tribal lands and within tribal communities. And then also there was some education in there about histories of Native communities and interacting with marginalized communities as well, but it’s only a one day training. It’s a one time, one day training that they offered to all new officers. And then they also offered a one time training in 2021 to all pre-existing officers, to bring them up to speed.

Miller: To a great extent, a lot of what we’ve been talking about, it falls into the category of responding to reports when they’re made of missing or murdered Indigenous people. Where do violence prevention efforts stand right now?

Henshaw: Right. So you have a lot of efforts on the part of private organizations as well as departments within tribal governments that are focused on family violence prevention education, really starting from the root of building healthy relationships and healthy interpersonal relationships without abuse. And on a state or federal level, there are a lot of pushes by advocates for full restoration of tribal criminal jurisdiction, because overlapping criminal jurisdictions on tribal lands often occur. Native folks, women and also queer, two spirit Native folks, often they exist in a legally, very vulnerable space. So by providing tribal nations full jurisdiction, you’re going to be closing some of the gaps and just overall decreasing their vulnerability legally.

Miller: Democratic State Representative, Tawna Sanchez, is the lawmaker who sponsored this bill back in 2019, that passed unanimously – a bill that, in your reporting, she basically acknowledged has not accomplished all of what she wanted. What is she pushing for now?

Henshaw: So Representative Sanchez has been a long-time advocate for preventing and eliminating violence against Native people. And she’s now pushing to write legislation that will increase the visibility of notifications of missing Indigenous people, perhaps similar to Washington. Of course, she says she hasn’t written the details of it yet. And the other part of it would be to hopefully improve some of the data collection efforts.

Miller: Melanie, thanks very much.

Henshaw: Thanks so much, Dave.

Miller: Melanie Henshaw is the Indigenous Affairs reporter for InvestigateWest.

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