When an Indigenous person goes missing it’s tough to know who to call.
"The missing person's world is a mess… in the Indigenous and in general," said Darcie Parton Scoon, a private investigator who works with the Oklahoma Chapter of Missing and Murdered People.
That’s why, a group of grassroots organizers, law enforcement and tribal nation leaders came together this week to talk about the best way to respond in Tulsa. And they were doing so with the full support of the federal government.
In the fall of 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed two bills to combat the growing number of Indigenous people who go missing or are murdered. The Not Invisible Act was authored by then-New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland, who is now the United States Secretary of the Interior.
Part of the law’s responsibility was to create a commission to figure out how to help families of victims when their loved ones go missing. That commission met Tuesday at the Osage Casino in Tulsa.
The testimony was blistering.
In 2021, the Government Accountability Office released a report a year after the Not Invisible Act and another federal law known as Savanna's Act were passed. It noted that certain benchmarks had not been met, including: implementing requirements to collect better data when a Native person goes missing and coordination between different law enforcement agencies.
At Tuesday's hearing, it was still unclear what had been done to fully meet those requirements.
Accuracy is key to data collection when it comes to missing and murdered Indigenous people. Oftentimes, Indigenous people were wrongly labeled as white — making it difficult to keep track.
The total number of missing and murdered Indigenous people remains unknown. That's because key data points are missing to help identify these numbers. Federal databases sometimes include fields where users can enter tribal affiliation and information as to where the victim went missing, whether it was on reservation land or not, but other databases don't.
Patchwork response leads to problems
It's this patchwork of collection that allows these cases to fall through the cracks. There is NCIC(National Crime Information Center), NamUS (National Missing and Unidentified Person System), NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System) and NVDRS (National Violent Death Reporting System). Each of these agencies has different data collection points.
"In 2021, there were 138 domestic violence related fatalities in the state of Oklahoma. 86 of those were indigenous," Melody Ybarra told the commission.
Ybarra is a domestic violence advocate who works for Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s House of Hope. She said Oklahoma isn't a safe place for Indigenous women.
"In the State of Oklahoma, we are number one in the nation for domestic violence,” Ybarra said. “One in three women and one in four men have experienced violence in their lifetime.”
During the hearing, three other panelists shared their experiences and frustrations about a system they say is understaffed and under-resourced. Communication between grassroots organizations, tribal and local law enforcement is also a problem, the panelists said.
Ybarra told members of the commission, sometimes even when reporting does happen they often face indifference from law enforcement.
"I've had another lady who said that she showed up to the police station in a small town in Oklahoma, and she said, ‘my son's missing, I need to file a police report,’" Ybarra said. "And his comment was, ‘what do you want me to do about it?’ - that's how she was approached."
The Not Invisible Act Commission is made up of 36 professionals who work in a variety of capacities: there are tribal judges, liaisons between the FBI and tribal nations, formal tribal leaders and family members of those who have gone missing.
Shawnna Roach is one of the commissioners.
Roach worked with the Cherokee Nation's Marshal Service for more than 20 years as an investigator. She said the goal of Tuesday’s meeting was for commissioners to listen to members of the community. She recognizes that all Native communities, including Oklahoma, have different issues than those in Arizona or Washington state.
"We want to sit down on these meetings with people that, you know, deal with it hands-on here, because I only see it on the law enforcement side," Roach said.
Olivia Gray from NOISE, the Northeast Oklahoma Indigenous Safety and Education, gave the commission a brutal account of what that hands-on work looks like.
"...one BIA special agent for the state of Oklahoma is not sufficient. It's actually insulting, considering all the cases that we have."Olivia Gray
She talked about a mother whose son was murdered but couldn't be there to talk to the commission about her experience. Gray said the mother lost her job, is living in a hotel and is suffering from PTSD because of the experience. Grassroots organizations like hers, she said, don't get the resources that other agencies do.
"We do this work because it needs it and nobody's doing it," Gray said. "And I'm glad, like a few people have been assigned to take care of this, but one BIA special agent for the state of Oklahoma is not sufficient. It's actually insulting, considering all the cases that we have."
That special agent is Vincent Marcellino. He also gave testimony as a panelist.
"Some of the concerns that I had when I joined was the relations between BIA, local, state and federal law enforcement agencies," Marcellino said.
"The thing that I never thought that I would come across was the attention and respect that victims' families do not get in these cases,” he said. “So what drives me to continue on is that I can provide them with a voice being a mediator between some of the state entities, even some of the tribal entities, and providing them with that information."
Panelists also testified that the working relationships between tribal and state law enforcement vary on what county a person lives in. They also said some agencies are lacking a database that tracks Native people who go missing. So, grassroots organizations make up that gap, often by creating their own data tracking, like NOISE.
20 days or 20 minutes?
Marcellino also mentioned poor communication in missing persons investigations. He cited one case where a person was missing for 20 days before he got involved.
A volunteer tipped him off about the case. When he went to local law enforcement for information, he was told there wasn’t any.
Then Marcellino's office became involved and created a plan to find this person. It only took his office 20 minutes to locate them.
"So we want to be utilized as a resource more than we want to be on the backend. We want to be proactive, not always just reactive,” Marcellino said.
Panelists also complained that local law enforcement aren't up-to-date on federal laws, specifically when it comes to the McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling. Gray said she's had to explain to non-tribal officers what the McGirt decision means and how it relates to cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
"They also need to know their own laws and federal law," Gray told the commission. "I can't even tell you how many times I have had to speak with non-tribal officers and read the law to them. That should be something that's embarrassing. But they get mad."
These and other stories from the panelists will inform some of the next steps the commission will take in creating a database or making sure existing databases that track missing or murdered Indigenous people are more accurate-which is a big problem in tracking and solving cases. The commission asked panelists what can better for reporting these types of cases.
"Maybe it's time that we start writing our own rules about how we're going to do this work because we know what works," Gray said. “Grassroots organizations are writing the protocols now. We're writing the best practices now. From experience, from trial and error.”
But while they wait and organize to solve this problem, Gray said the lives of Indigenous people are hanging in the balance.
The commission's next listening session is in Arizona.
