imstilla.grandma
Believer of Miracles
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****I’ve been reading several threads following and discovering this sad and unfair true trend. So many that I thought I’d start this thread to highlight this opportunity to educate and inform myself and others. Have many of y’all heard about a lot of this going on - the rates of missing and murdered women unreported and/or basically ignored? I grew up,pmlearning mostly about my Indian heritage at school and with family. It wasn’t until much later in life - I went to a LE conference in Vermont. A bunch of us went to the casinos. It was so strange - that I thought it was strange to hear about some other tribes I was under familiar with. I’d forgotten how Indians come from all areas of the US particularly in the north it seems.
The lack of a full accounting of missing indigenous persons in the United States is often referred to as a “data crisis”. While nationwide missing person databases do exist, it is clear these systems do not currently contain records of all American Indian and Alaska Native men and women who have gone missing. There are many reasons for this gap in information collection and sharing, such as lack of clear law enforcement protocols related to missing adults, complex tribal jurisdictional issues, and lack of awareness of the vast resources available to tribal law enforcement agencies, tribal leaders, and family members of missing indigenous persons through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.
NIJ and NamUs staff will continue to provide outreach to Indian country and are committed to providing training and technical assistance to the stakeholders in this community, and especially support struggling families through the new NamUs Victim Services Unit being launched in 2019. While much has been said about the levels of crime and violence in American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities there still remains no conclusive “number”, only the agreement that the levels are staggering. The NIJ-supported study, “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men: 2010 Findings from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey,” released in 2016 found that more than four in five AI/AN adults (83 percent) have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime. Since inception, NamUs has been used to resolve 358 indigenous missing person cases, and is currently supporting another 385 active, unsolved cases of missing indigenous persons. But we know we can do more. We can solve the missing indigenous person data crisis by working collectively to ensure that every missing person is entered into NamUs.
Currently eight states (NY, MI, TN, IL, OK, AR, WV, and NM) have passed legislation mandating case entry into NamUs; Pennsylvania has introduced a bill in the state legislature to do the same. While none of these laws have any “enforcement” component, the continued expansion of state laws, and/or federal legislation, directly mandating case entry would help to address the issue.
Solving the Missing Indigenous Person Data Crisis: NamUs 2.0
The lack of a full accounting of missing indigenous persons in the United States is often referred to as a “data crisis”. While nationwide missing person databases do exist, it is clear these systems do not currently contain records of all American Indian and Alaska Native men and women who have gone missing. There are many reasons for this gap in information collection and sharing, such as lack of clear law enforcement protocols related to missing adults, complex tribal jurisdictional issues, and lack of awareness of the vast resources available to tribal law enforcement agencies, tribal leaders, and family members of missing indigenous persons through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.
NIJ and NamUs staff will continue to provide outreach to Indian country and are committed to providing training and technical assistance to the stakeholders in this community, and especially support struggling families through the new NamUs Victim Services Unit being launched in 2019. While much has been said about the levels of crime and violence in American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities there still remains no conclusive “number”, only the agreement that the levels are staggering. The NIJ-supported study, “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men: 2010 Findings from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey,” released in 2016 found that more than four in five AI/AN adults (83 percent) have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime. Since inception, NamUs has been used to resolve 358 indigenous missing person cases, and is currently supporting another 385 active, unsolved cases of missing indigenous persons. But we know we can do more. We can solve the missing indigenous person data crisis by working collectively to ensure that every missing person is entered into NamUs.
Currently eight states (NY, MI, TN, IL, OK, AR, WV, and NM) have passed legislation mandating case entry into NamUs; Pennsylvania has introduced a bill in the state legislature to do the same. While none of these laws have any “enforcement” component, the continued expansion of state laws, and/or federal legislation, directly mandating case entry would help to address the issue.
Solving the Missing Indigenous Person Data Crisis: NamUs 2.0
