Seattle City Council Civic Development, Public Assets, and Native Communities Committee 6519

All right, everybody, thank you for being here.

Good afternoon.

This is a meeting of the Civic Development, Public Assets, and Native Communities Committee.

Today is Wednesday, June 5th, and the time is 2.06.

I'm joined by Councilmember Gonzalez, Councilmember Mosqueda, Councilmember Sawant, and my understanding is Councilmember Bagshaw is on her way.

I want to thank my colleagues for being here today.

I want to start with, I want to recognize a couple folks that we have here.

We have Chris Fisher from SPD here today.

Thank you, Chris.

We have Julie Klein, Senior Policy Advisor to the Mayor's Office, who's also here today.

Thank you, Julie, for being here.

And we have John, John from the City Attorney's Office.

Okay, oh, and we also have Liz Tale here from the Kalitz Tribe.

Good, Liz, good to see you.

And let's see, my daughter's supposed to be here, but she's not, so I'll just let that one, I'll just let that go.

So let me do the chair's report.

Today is a very special meeting for me and for our community, the Native American community.

We have one item on the agenda and it's a presentation regarding an epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women women and girls across our nation.

United Indians for Health Institute, UIHI, is a division of the Seattle Indian Health Board which focuses on the nationwide urban Indian Indians and Alaska Native populations.

UIHI provides public health information systems, investigates diseases of concern, and engages vital health information and resources with other public health authorities.

I'm honored to have the Seattle Indian Health Board's Chief Research Officer and CEO, Ms. Abigail Echo-Hawk, and the CEO, Ms. Esther Lucero, and their team to present their research and findings on this topic, Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and How Seattle is Affected.

This is a very special, emotional, and personal meaning to me, not only as a Native woman, as a mother, but to this community.

This issue of missing murdered Indigenous women has been on the radar, not only in this country, but in Canada for well over a decade where we start finally taking notice.

I think what we're going to hear today, some of these issues may be triggering.

I know it certainly was for me.

I'll talk a little bit later in some comments about the recent report that came out Monday, the Canadian report.

But those of us who grew up in Indian country and those of us who work in Indian communities and those of us who know and what our relationship has been with public safety and the value of Native women in our lives have lived this history.

And I want to thank you all for being here.

So what we'll do first is we will go to public comment.

After public comment, I will have our presenters come forward and introduce themselves.

I will make some brief comments or have a statement that I would like to make, and then I would like them to move into their presentation.

So with that, we'll go to public comment.

Negin, how many people do we have signed up?

We have five people signed up for public comment.

When your name is called, please come to the microphone.

You have two minutes to address the item on the agenda.

And, of course, that is the presentation on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

And please, before you begin, state your name.

And please mind the time.

I hate to be the person to tell you when your time is up.

With that, let's, Negin, go ahead and call out the names.

First we have Margaret Rashard, and then after that, Anitra Freeman.

Yes, good day everyone.

Is this thing on?

Yeah.

On behalf of myself and other Native people, I consider myself Black.

Black Native, maybe.

And I think it's, yeah, it is bad to see something like this, just like it's bad to see black people's bones in the Atlantic Ocean.

And I'm from here, so if you're looking at me like, where did you come from?

I was born here, Seattle, Washington.

So it's very important, and yeah, and I'm a woman.

Yeah, and that's important that women continue continuously and girls speak out for what is harming them because the dead can't talk.

So as long as I'm around, I'm gonna speak about what has happened to me.

And you got the Indian Health Board on program and I was discriminated at the Indian Health Board.

You say, oh, but Queen Pearl, you're a native.

They didn't do that to you.

Cancer is murderous and if you don't kill it, it'll spread.

And so that's why I said, look at this.

It was on the front page saying that they were missing, but we done come up missing too.

And I have native blood in me.

I don't really know much about that and how much, but yet and still it is a problem.

So I hope you can fix your problem just like black people are still trying to fix their problem about how they're coming up missing and dead and treated indifferent just because of the color of their skin.

I'm still fighting, I'm a warrior, I came here a warrior and I'm a die one, okay?

And so I hope, like I said, that you will get everything that you asking for with this finding out about why these girls and these women are coming up missing as they do.

Have a good day.

Thank you, next.

Wow.

Anitra Freeman, and then after that, Linda Soriano.

Yes, my name is Anitra Freeman, and I stand with real women in black whenever somebody homeless dies outside or by violence in King County.

And we have stood for Native American women, including Davina Garrison, who was murdered in 2005, and her murder is still unsolved.

Thank you very much for doing this study.

We want justice for these women, too.

We want justice for Sandra Smisken, for Davina Garrison, and for others that we don't even know what has happened to them.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'd like the record to reflect that Councilmember Bagshaw has joined us.

Thank you.

Hi, Linda.

My name is Linda Soriano.

I'm enrolled with the Great Lummi Nation here in Washington State.

First of all, I just want to thank everyone that has an interest in this and that you even take the time to give attention to the missing and murdered indigenous women.

When this started going global in Canada, there's becoming a lot more awareness I have a very close friend who's concerned, so I went and I did my own research.

Yes, we have a high number of murdered and missing indigenous women, but however, the men and the boys are twice as likely to be missing and murdered, and that's here in the U.S. and Canada.

Now, when I arrived here today, I asked the assistant here to put one of these on each of your, in front of each of you.

And the reason I did that is to point out that we, just prior to this, being here today, we were standing silent vigil across the street.

for another homeless death.

What I wanna point out is over the years, how many has been found murdered or whatever the cause of their death is, in my heart, I know from my own experience, a high number of those homeless deaths are Native American.

I know for a fact, I have been doing my street outreach, unsponsored, alone, since 1999. My husband and I married in 2012. Now that is our marriage ministry.

We often encounter people who are suffering out there.

So this is why, although I don't know a lot of the people that we stand silent vigil for across the street, it's important to acknowledge those deaths.

But the murdered and missing indigenous women and girls, it just tears at my heart because so many of them are still missing.

They're still missing.

And the men and the boys across the board, US and Canada.

Thank you.

Thank you, Linda.

We have Randy Peters and then after that, Joey Gray.

Oh, Jim.

My name is Snoop Skibu, and this was passed down from my ancestors.

Since the beginning of contact, we've been having this trouble of missing a woman, missing children, and now it's boys.

And if we can bring attention to this issue, we ask you, please, we need your help.

We need to bring this out in the open so that it stops.

Because I had sisters taken away from up in Canada to California.

And they got a hold of the RCMP.

That is how they got away from it.

And every day, this is happening to families where we lost loved ones.

And we need your help.

We plead with you.

We need your help.

Because too much sorrow, too much pain.

Usually, a lot of people don't bring this to attention, that They just hide it away in our hearts.

And people are hurting.

Families are hurting all the way through the country.

So this we plead with you.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

Thank you for your words.

Nikki?

Oh, could you?

Hey, Joey.

Hi.

I'm Joey Gray.

Thank you so much for bringing this important issue to this body and to the city of Seattle.

My name's Joey Gray.

I'm Okanagan and Metis.

My family's been in Seattle since the 1920s here as a guest on Coast Salish land.

And my auntie gave me this letter from 2001 just recently that I hadn't heard of until then.

And it's from my uncle to my dad.

Their family was from the Okanagan.

And I'll just read it.

This is my testimony.

This lady that my uncle met now in her 70s was the daughter of one Lula Bovet, the youngest member of our clan and the one that their mom, my grandma, would sometimes longingly and sadly refer to, who went to Los Angeles, presumably in the 1930s, then to San Diego and disappeared from view.

I guess she had this daughter who was sent back to our grandfather in Kelowna, who raised her, and she disappeared.

No one ever found out why or how.

And their auntie certainly remembers that mother.

and their mom talking in the same tones as our mom, my grandma, about the missing sister.

I don't know whether there was a hint of scandal or not in this matter.

So this was in 2001 that this was talked about in our family that way.

And it's been going on, like other testimonies said, since contact.

So thank you again for raising this issue, for bringing the most uncomfortable topics to this public light and dealing with it.

Thank you, Joey.

Are we done?

Is there anyone else who needs to speak before we close public comment?

Okay, with that, we will close public comment and move on to our agenda.

Can I have you read into the record, and then we'll have one of our folks come on up and have a seat up here.

Go ahead, Nageen, why don't you read into the record first.

Agenda item one, missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.

Madam Chair.

I just want to thank you for the invitation to attend and just let you know I'm going to have to leave a little early, so I apologize if I get up in the middle of a presentation.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for being here.

I'm going to do something a little bit different than I normally do.

I'm going to ask our presenters if they can just briefly say who they are, and then I want to make a statement, and then I want to turn it over to you three to go ahead.

Aaron, I'm sorry.

I should have said your name earlier, and you can say who your title is.

Because I want to get you on the record first, and then I want to put some of this into context.

So if I can have you introduce yourself, your tribal affiliation, of course.

And as you know, my name is Natui Misti Stake.

which means Holy Mountain Woman in Blackfeet.

And as I always joke, I did not get my name off the internet.

There was a whole ceremony that went along with that, three days long.

I gifted my friends here today with the most sacred place from our place, Chief Mountain, and the Two Medicine River.

So with that, if I can have you introduce yourself, and then I'm gonna make some statements, and then I'll hand it back over.

Yá'át'ééh, everybody.

My name is Esther Lucero.

I'm Diné and Latina, and I'm the CEO for the Seattle Indian Health Board.

It's an absolute privilege to be amongst friends when I'm sitting at a table of council members, and we're all familiar.

It's wonderful.

Thank you.

Hi, good afternoon, everybody.

NOAA.

My name is Abigail Echo Hawk.

I'm an enrolled citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, and also a proud member of the Upper Ottawa Athabascan people of Mentasa Lake, Alaska.

And it is a privilege and an honor to be here with my friend and loved one and Councilwoman Juarez.

And again, thank you for this opportunity to be able to share what is happening in our communities and to offer solutions.

My name is Aaron Spark.

I'm the Government Affairs Officer for the Seattle Indian Health Board.

I'm Chupic from Western Alaska.

In my language, I said hello and thank you for allowing me to do my part for our community.

I'm also the father of two young Native girls.

It's age seven and four.

That's why this is, I'm having a little bit of a tough time talking right now.

I normally don't get very emotional, but this is something that hits very close to home.

Thank you for being such a champion for MMIWG Chairwoman Juarez.

Thank you.

For those of us that were raised in Indian country, before I make my comments, it's been a little different for me to make this transition from what I used to do to being on city council and our Roberts Rules of Order.

and how we do things, but I would like to do it in our traditional way, that we start, we don't call it a prayer, but we talk about a moment that we ask the Creator to make us move forward in a good way, and we make choices and have good words that come from a good place.

And as Uncle Billy would always say, at the end of the day, we will all be healed.

So with that, I want to make some comments.

And if you can just bear with me, I want to put this into context about why we're here today.

But I will allow the experts to, of course, really share with us why we're here today.

The missing murdered indigenous women in a more historical and political and cultural context is what I want to address.

And as I was sharing with my colleagues before the microphones were turned on, at the root of this is about colonization.

And colonization is and was more than just the taking of our land and our resources.

Colonization as a government policy or law took our lives, our health, our culture, our language, our land, our children, our spiritual place and practices that even took our hair.

The irony of Native Americans being the most regulated ethnic minority, as we are political entities and sovereign nations, that under such scrutiny and attempts to erase us, there were no collective attempts of humanity to find us, to protect us, and to value our lives.

And we're still here today.

The historical contacts with the United States and indigenous people of us, our country.

I can't do federal Indian law history 101. but I can share the history that brings us here today right up to 2019. I want to go back in time just a little bit and put into context about what our people, our indigenous people, all of North America, have been dealing with.

In 1783, President George Washington, in his earliest writings, in their attempt to purchase our land before war, before treaty time, After, during genocide and termination, we were seen as quote-unquote wild beasts.

We're savages and quote-unquote savage as the wolf, both in being beasts of prey, though they differ in shape.

In 1824 to 1849, the Indian Affairs was in the War Department.

Our political genesis in our own country began in the War Department with the military occupation of our land and our people.

It wasn't until 1849 the Department of Interior took over what they called the Indian Problem and the Indian Issue.

Yet in the 1870s and 80s, there was a huge congressional push to put Indians, quote unquote, back into the War Department for more military oversight as they put us on reservations.

Some of this history that I had to go back to was very painful in the last four days, because even though I'm on city council, when I practice law and represented tribes, I know a lot of these facts off the top of my head, and it's been a while since I've looked at PRUCA and US v. Washington and all these issues, and I did.

So I can tell you that we are dealing with over 500 years of colonization, over 300 years of U.S. tribal relations, and federal Indian law and jurisprudence.

We are dealing with laws that were, the policy was to exterminate us.

Laws of genocide and removal, termination, reservations, and we know our history.

These colonial roots run deep and are tangled in the bloodshed of our people.

And that's not just hyperbole, that is true history.

A history of bloodshed, war, genocide, and greed.

And it hasn't changed.

So if we fast forward to 2019, we're here today because there are two reports.

First and foremost, we're very proud of the report that came out of the Seattle Indian Health Board and the work of Abigail Elkohawk and Estela Cerro and their team that came out this spring that talked about Seattle having the highest number of missing and murdered indigenous women.

And we have a second report that came out Monday, the Canadian report, called Reclaiming Power in Place.

That is a 1,200-page document, and this is the quote, reportedly blames the disproportionate violence faced by Indigenous women on deep-rooted colonialism and state inaction.

Those are 20 very powerful words.

I want to briefly share something with you, and then I know that Nagin had prepared a memo, and I believe it's up here, and I'm going to make sure my colleagues have a copy of it.

The recent memo, Reclaiming Power and Place, National Inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, the Canadian report, started in 2016 and was finalized just this Monday in 2019 and was released.

That final report is over 1,200 pages.

The executive summary is 117 pages alone.

There are many facts related to this report, but there are two of them that I want to highlight.

One, about Aboriginal people in Canada account for 4% of Canada's population, yet on average suffer from the highest rates of crime, poverty, and addiction.

Again, the root cause is persistent, and this is the quote, persistent and deliberate pattern of systematic racial and gendered human indigenous rights violations and abuses perpetuated, excuse me, historically and maintained today by the Canadian state.

designed to displace indigenous people from their lands, social structures, and governments, and to eradicate their existence as nations, communities, families, and individuals.

And that's from the Chief Commissioner Buehler in the report.

There are key basic principles in this report and their call for justice.

That is to reaffirm basic human rights, to look at major policy and legal reform, to have trauma-informed services, and have a regional focus with attention on northern and remote communities.

And finally, an acknowledgment of culture and language of tribes across the nation and the identities within those tribes.

Now, without going into the four 15 areas on their call for justice, I think it's important to note that they highlighted the human and indigenous rights and the government's obligations, culture, wellness, human security, and justice.

And from that, I don't want to go into all 15 because I'm going to get a little bit too wonky.

It's important that this report is coinciding with your presentation, because a lot of it is the same, and I think they did it right.

And what I really like about it, it wasn't just about information.

The government will be deliberate in a process to address why they have so many missing, murdered, indigenous women and girls, and nobody did anything about it.

My understanding is they interviewed more than 2,380 family members who are survivors of violence and experts and knowledge keepers.

And they went through the country to gather this evidence, something our country has yet to do.

So both reports must be read, as I shared, again, within the violent and historical context of colonialism.

Colonialism to me, from what I understand, it is more than just this new term when people talk about decolonizing.

For us, it means trauma and historical trauma that manifests itself through many, many generations.

And I know Abigail and Esther and Aaron will speak more intelligently, more articulately than me.

But I want to end with a simple analogy That's both complex and painful about the human condition of trauma.

Historical trauma is like a flooded river, like when a river floods and breaches its banks.

The water, like pain, cannot be contained anymore.

And that pain, like that water, has to go somewhere.

That pain has to settle and sit somewhere.

And I think why we're here today is we're here to discuss that pain in the history and the trauma, the historical trauma, and what we will do about that.

This is just the beginning.

And I'm glad that I have my colleagues here today because these are the people, these are the women, who are going to work with you and all of us of how we are going to address this, what we're actually going to do, what legislation we're going to pass to protect our women.

It is sad to say that Seattle has the highest number of missing murdered indigenous women and girls in the country.

It's not a fact that we're proud of, but I assure you in my word today, that is something that we are going to fix.

And so with that, I will hand it over to the experts in this area.

And I want to thank you again.

Thank you, Chairman Juarez.

Again, it's interesting because we are often in forums like this and we come with our suits and we come here with our fierce faces, right?

And then you hit us with opening in a good way as Native people.

And what happens when you do that is we have to come as whole people.

And that means we carry emotion a bit.

And so I'm not surprised that Aaron expressed that.

And you might see that from all of us because we've all been impacted by this problem, this challenge in many ways.

So thank you for that.

I'd also just like to say that I appreciate you making space for all of us here.

The Seattle Indian Health Board has gone through a tremendous transformation and we do everything as a team.

And I count on the expertise of my team members to carry this message forward and others.

Let me just say something about the Seattle Indian Health Board for a moment.

Seattle Indian Health Board rose from social justice movements of the late 1960s, early 1970s.

We are a service organization that's committed to our communities.

We're probably best known for our health and human services because we're an urban Indian health program, so our authority lies in the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and is permanently reauthorized through the ACA.

I say that because people aren't often as familiar with the fact that we have a legacy of advocacy and that we host the Urban Indian Health Institute, which is one of 12 tribal epicenters in the nation and the only one that has a national scope because we serve the urban programs across the country.

I'd just like to remind folks that 71% of all American Indians and Alaska Natives live in urban environments, and we were one of those core relocation sites.

And so what we are going to share with you today is an extension of work that originated with grassroots movements, right, that started back in the 1930s.

And so we as an organization, because we're committed to our people and our community and we center ourselves in culture and traditional Indian medicine, are coming forward today to offer our gifts to this movement.

And those gifts are grounded in research and they're grounded in understanding how policy and advocacy works.

And that's why we're at this table.

But that is not to overshadow the many marches that have occurred or the many voices that are carried by our families who have experienced this recently and even in the past.

So with that, I just want to hand it over to the expert in our organization who we depend on to champion this work for us.

So again, good afternoon, everybody, and thank you, Esther, so much.

As she said, we are a team, and it is, you know, and having her leading this organization has been integral to us being able to do research and data collection in a good way.

So when we talk about decolonizing data, which is up on the screen, people often ask me, what does that mean?

And I think about myself not as a researcher from a Western academic model, but I rather see myself as a storyteller.

And story in our communities has always been part of who we are.

And in fact, in most communities, it was always part of who we are.

But when we get into Western science, there's often this idea that our stories are meaningless unless we have the numbers.

And very often, when we look at marginalized populations, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Hispanic Latinos, and many others, We, in this Western system of colonialism, are very often not given the opportunity to gather our own numbers, to tell our own stories.

So when I talk about decolonizing data and the work that we have done in violence against indigenous women and girls, is that it is the reclamation of our traditional ways of gathering information, numbers and stories, and using them to move the health and well-being of our people and of our community.

And we are doing it for indigenous people, by indigenous people, and we will be the one shaping not only the stories, but the solutions.

And I think that is why we're here today, is we're going to share with you stories that are hard to hear.

Stories that families have shared with me, numbers that maybe you have never seen before, but because of the silencing of them through the Western research and through the non-gathering of our stories, because it justifies the taking of our land, the killing of our people, and the bloody genocide in which our organizations, in which our bureaucracies, in which our homes currently are.

Instead, we are going to reclaim our strength and our power, and being here at this table today is part of that.

So you're part of our decolonizing data.

So welcome to a journey, because it is that, because it requires us to think differently and to make different choices in recognition of the things that Councilwoman just read, because it is an ongoing genocide against our people as we look at our women and girls who are missing and who have been murdered.

I just want to start with a little bit of background.

And this is from national data that shows that Native women are two times more likely to be raped or a victim of sexual assault than the rest of the country.

So we're looking at all of the racial and ethnic groups.

Why are Native women more likely to be raped or to be victims of sexual assault?

This is a question that many people have never actually addressed.

And when I look at this data, in my heart I knew, and from the stories that I've been told nationwide, I've done research with more than 150 different tribal communities across the United States, both in urban and rural settings, is that I know our stories tell that this isn't even near the number of actually of those of us who have experienced sexual assault or have been raped.

I identify as a woman who has been a victim of rape and sexual assault, and I know that I am not the only one.

When I first started the Seattle Indian Health Board about two and a half years ago, one of the first things that we moved to do was to release a study that had been done specifically with American Indian and Alaska Native women living in the city of Seattle.

And this is the results of those studies.

This was the beginning of a series that we titled Our Bodies, Our Stories.

In this study, we found that more than 148 native women that we talked to, 94% of them had been sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

These are native women that were living in the city of Seattle.

When you look at this graphic, again, this is part of our decolonizing data, is that there's a reason that we use this imagery very specifically.

This woman is wearing a type of native regalia called a ribbon skirt.

And what we wanted to represent is that this data, these stories, these beautiful voices who shared this information with us, that even though they have had these ribbons of trauma, they are held within prayer, and they are held within the hands of their community and those allies who have a responsibility to ensure that this trauma does not continue.

I'm just going to go briefly over the findings of this study.

We talked to 148 native women living in the city of Seattle, and as I said, 94% of them had been sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

Now, this data is more than has been seen in any other city, although I will say very few have actually done this kind of research.

It is more than what the national averages are, and it's more than is reported in King County Health.

This data was something that had never been seen before.

Why were they willing to tell us?

It's because it was done by indigenous people for indigenous people.

We sat, and those who did those interviews, as these women shared, up to four hours sitting down, crying and weeping, and sharing their stories, and why did they do it?

Why would you relive that kind of trauma?

They did it because they wanted their stories to make a difference here in this city.

They did not want those next generations, their daughters, their granddaughters, their great-granddaughters, to experience the same kind of trauma that they had.

Because the trauma that they experienced are things that you at this table deal with every day as you make your policy and programming decisions here for the city.

We found that 42 percent of the women who are in this study had attempted suicide in their lifetime.

we found that 53% of them lacked permanent housing.

What if we change the dialogue on homelessness and those who do not currently have houses over their heads that they, or couches to sleep on, or even safe spaces on the street?

What if we change that to think about it from a narrative of, these are individuals who have experienced extreme trauma, and as a result of that trauma, they work to just survive.

So when I think about 34% of them in this study had also experienced binge drinking, approximately 32% of them were also using illicit drugs, primarily opiates, they're treating their trauma.

They're treating their trauma that nobody else even acknowledged existed.

Because when we looked at those numbers of those who reported it to the police, Only eight percent of the cases that were reported actually saw a conviction of the perpetrator.

And when we looked at the data of those who were assaulted over the age of 18, the primary race of those that were assaulting them were white men.

This is a problem in the city of Seattle.

Our women are being assaulted, and they're not reporting.

Why aren't they reporting?

Lack of trust within the system.

And we see that in the results of only 8% of them actually seeing a conviction within this King County court system.

Why would they report?

What we did find is those who did tell someone about their assault, that the primary person they were talking to were family and friends.

And we know this to be true amongst all women who experience sexual violence, is that the primary person they talk to is family and friends.

How are we in this county preparing family and friends to talk with their loved ones who have been victims of sexual assault?

And do you think some mainstream organization, when approached by American Indian and Alaska Native communities, are they prepared to talk about the ongoing trauma, the results of colonization?

And when we look at the 148 Native women, 86% of them indicated that they experience or have been affected by historical trauma.

So I'm going to define historical trauma for you.

It is defined as a cumulative massive impact on a population just not one generation, but ongoing.

So the things that my great-grandmother experienced are currently affecting me.

So we ask them questions like, do you feel a loss of land?

I don't know how many of you at this table wake up every morning and feel a loss of the land of your people, but I do.

And I know that is unique to American Indian and Alaska Native people.

We ask them questions like, Did you or a member of your immediate family, were you removed and put into the boarding school system?

And we know, particularly in this area of Washington State and across the country, that there was a time in this government's history where they took our native children not because our families could not provide for them.

And in fact, they took them because our families were providing too much for them.

They were providing too much love and support and culture and connection to family, to tribe, to land, to people.

They took them because that connection, in the government's eyes, could not continue, because they needed, as they said, this was actually a motto from the individual who first started these boarding schools, by the name of Richard Pratt.

His motto was, kill the Indian and save the man.

And the intention of these schools, which the last ones didn't shut down until the late 1990s, was to take our culture, to cut our hair, to remove our language, and to disconnect us from each other and from our culture with the intention of assimilating us into mainstream society where we would just be molded into the perfect white man.

They weren't even trying to mold us into the perfect white woman.

86% of these women who participate in this study have been affected by historical trauma.

And when we think about the need to invest in and to ensure that our culturally attuned care, such as the Seattle Indian Health Board and other organizations like the Chief Seattle Club, United Indians of All Tribes, Naha Ili, and I could just keep naming the names, is that we are the ones who know how to serve our people.

We know, because we've experienced this exact kind of colonialism.

I've experienced this exact kind of sexual violence.

And in fact, the sexual violence that was perpetrated against me, which happened in Alaska, as a result of the barriers of what exists between the federal government and tribal lands, I never saw what anybody would see as justice.

Because nobody cared about a little Indian girl that had been repeatedly raped.

And I knew it.

And my family knew it.

And to this day, my community knows it.

Because I am just one of a very few stories.

This was on the front page of the Seattle Times in August of 2018, and after that, I was inundated on every social media platform that I have, and including my email address, I'm not sure how everybody got that, with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, I cannot even tell you the number of messages, from Native women across the country, who all told me their stories of sexual assault.

What was really surprising to me was this line down in the bottom.

in almost every single one.

And they said, I just wanted to tell somebody who would understand.

We all want to tell somebody who will understand why hasn't anybody been listening.

And we know that we live in a culture that blames us for our sexual assaults, that judges what clothes we wore, what street we were on, what we did for work.

I am here to tell you that Me being Native is not a risk factor.

I'm not at risk because I'm Native.

I'm not trying to beat the odds, and I don't want my children and my nieces to have to beat the odds and not be that next woman who is raped.

Why aren't we changing the odds?

We need to look beyond the individual symptoms and what is the larger underlying issue that is allowing for this kind of violence to continue.

And in this city, we have an epidemic of sexual violence.

How are we going to address this?

How are we going to ensure that these voices, these stories are honored?

I did a lot of interviews during this time when we released this report, and I had one reporter specifically who, in the Seattle Times article, my sister, Colleen Echo-Hawk, who's the executive director of the Chief Seattle Club, one of the things she's quoted in that article and saying is that, at the very least, they have one rape a week reported at the Chief Seattle Club.

every week, and we're seeing at least one.

So many weeks, there are more.

I was surprised by the lack of outcry from this community as a whole.

when we saw on the front page of the Seattle Times that there is at least one rape a week in just one organization being reported.

And I shared this with that reporter and I thought, you know, I go to LA Fitness, I pay my $20, I got a discount for a year, you know.

What if at my LA Fitness, which is in Seattle, what if that staff was hearing once a week at least one of their members, at least one of them was raped every single week before coming to LA Fitness?

the news crews would be there, the police would be there, there would be a big public outcry.

I was sharing this with this reporter, and she looked at me and she told me, she said, oh, well, you know, I don't think you can make that comparison because at LA Fitness, they pay.

And I sat there, as we talk about personally impacting, I had just told her I was a victim of sexual violence.

And when we think about the callousness that we experience as women, as women of color, and as even more marginalized American Indians and Alaska Natives who are homeless and being sexually assaulted on land where a thousand years ago that never would have happened.

But yet it went back to the economics of it, because I paid $20 at LA Fitness.

So, you know, you're worthy not to be raped.

but all those homeless women who every day go into the Chief Seattle Club to go to the bathroom and take a shower and to contact their relatives, to see our nurse from the Seattle Indian Health Board to get that meal.

They deserve to walk into that organization every single day and not have been raped 24 hours before.

The conversation in this city has to change, and that's just my interactions with media.

This has been something since the release of this report that I have been quite surprised by in the work that I've done is that I have actually gotten more compassion when I talk about heart disease than when I talk about sexual violence.

One of the things that we've seen, and I know that there are members of the council who sit on this, is the King County Council has recently created a subgroup for the Board of Health that is specifically addressing missing and murdered indigenous women and sexual violence, and I am one of the co-chairs of that.

Because we are specifically going to take this on.

It is a direct result of institutional and structural and individual level racism that makes sexual violence against indigenous women and other women of color, in a sense, OK.

Because if you're not prosecuting it, if you're not addressing it, if you are not mobilizing community for it, you are complicit in the sexual violence that continues.

So I'm very thankful to see the King County Board of Health take this on as an issue over the next year and expect to see some things come out of that.

We have an incredible group of people.

It has to be done and we have to shift and change this narrative.

Very often people keep asking me, well, what does this report, the first one you did, have to do with missing and murdered indigenous women?

The reason we started this, and this was the first of our series, and the second report was our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, is that we wanted to look at one city.

What is happening and how are Native women being affected by violence there?

And if we can be sexually assaulted in the streets, if we can never see justice within the King County justice systems, if we've been affected by historical trauma and that is ongoing and continuing, if we can see these behavioral health issues as a result of this trauma, what else is happening?

It was then that we released the next report in November of 2018. And I want to start with a statistic from the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, that murder is the third leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women.

I actually think, personally, I believe this statistic is wrong.

And I'll tell you why.

The data isn't being captured.

For what data there is currently available, we know that murder is the third leading cause of death for all American Indian and Alaska Native women.

I believe, personally, that it's number one.

But because nobody's gathering the information, nobody really knows.

except for our communities, because this ongoing violence didn't start again 10 years ago.

It started 500 years ago.

And I can tell you historical stories to stories from two weeks ago that are so parallel in what's happened that it is incredible that it is still continuing in my eyes.

We have an epidemic of murder, and we have an epidemic of our women going missing.

And the sexual violence report, as we showed, It's so invisible.

Nobody's listened.

And up until this point, very few people have even cared outside of our community.

Our report was titled, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

It's available on our website, UIHI.org.

I believe all of you have a copy of it.

And we did this report for one reason and one reason only.

our women's voices deserve to be heard.

This report was led by Anita Lucchese, who was working with us at that time as a fellow, and she had been doing incredible work both in the United States and Canada, and had created the only database of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in North America.

The only one, and it was done by that time, she's a doctoral student, by a doctoral student who wasn't getting paid.

At that time, I reached out to her because I wanted us to be able to support her work.

And again, we had been hearing cries from across our community that missing and murdered indigenous women and girls was happening.

And in fact, over my years in working with tribal leadership and sitting in on listening sessions between the Department of Justice, different agencies at the federal government, I would see tribal leader after tribal leader get up and say, our women are going missing and are being murdered.

What are you going to do about it?

Why are you not working with us?

Why haven't we seen any information?

Why isn't this being acknowledged?

And what are the answers that they heard?

Oh, you know, it's going to cost us too much money.

We'd need allocations from Congress in order to do a really good look.

You have one or two or three stories, but the data shows us that it's actually not a problem, because in our data, it doesn't say that there's very many who have gone missing or murdered.

We heard tribal leadership being told, it's your problem, it's happening on your reservations.

This is an issue of your people.

Year after year, decade after decade, our tribal leadership has called for something to be done.

With the work that Anita was doing, we had the opportunity as the Urban Indian Health Institute, and again, I am so thankful for the support of our CEO, Esther Lucero, the entire executive leadership team and our board, who supported us in saying, you know what, now is the time.

We're not gonna wait anymore.

I'm not waiting for money from the federal government.

We are going to take the steps ourselves.

So we started this project 100% unfunded.

And we ended this project 100% unfunded.

And in fact, the $20,000 that paid for this, what is being called a groundbreaking report that has been used to shape federal legislation and legislation in more than 16 states across the United States, was actually fees that my team and I charge for whether it be speaking or services here and there.

That's how we paid for it.

We didn't need an allocation of Congress.

Because again, the indications are They didn't do it because the money wasn't there.

They didn't do it because they didn't care, nor were they going to be held accountable for not caring.

So they just didn't do it.

we decided we would do it in partnership with ANITA.

And what we found is we submitted public records requests to 71 cities across the United States, 70, I'm sorry, and then the 71st one was to the state of Alaska as a whole, because we recognize that Alaska has, from what we estimate, some of the highest numbers, and if, when we get the data that we're looking for, it is possible that Alaska will be the epicenter of missing and murdered indigenous women in North America.

And so we also got data from, we're looking for data from the state of Alaska.

We submitted public records requests, federal FOA requests, including to Seattle and to other states, or other cities here, including Tacoma and Spokane, and also in these other cities.

We, these cities that we identified, I get asked all the time, why didn't you do every city in the United States?

We were unfunded.

And these are cities in which we provide technical assistance and other services to as the Urban Indian Health Institute.

We know in these areas there are high populations of urban dwelling American Indians and Alaska Natives.

And what we found is what I wanted to be able to do originally was to establish a baseline to say, hey, this is what's happening nationally in these cities once we receive the data.

Over the course of the year, what we realized is that I can't tell you what's happening nationally because the data is so bad.

And in fact, the 506 cases that we found of missing and murdered indigenous women across the country is such a gross undercount, I can't even estimate on how bad those numbers are in terms of not truly representing.

Are these numbers true?

100%.

Are they an undercount?

Yes.

Personally, I think it's triple, quadruple, if not more, that we were unable to capture.

And in fact, when we look at the numbers that we found, we had 128 were cases of missing indigenous women, 280 were cases of murdered native women, and 98 were in an unknown status.

And that means we weren't quite able to tell what had happened with those specific cases at this time.

However, When we got this information, what we experienced was what our people always experience when working within bureaucracies and governments.

We were stopped by people who simply did not respond to our public records requests, which puts them out of federal compliance.

They did not comply with public records requests at all.

We had other ones who did comply, however, they wanted to charge us a bunch of money in order to access the data.

If I had had $4,000 more, I would have had data from six more cities.

I didn't have $4,000 more.

So the data and that it should be public information was not accessible as a result of the fees that were charged in order for us to access that data.

We came across police departments who said, you know what, we can't actually differentiate because we don't capture the race and ethnicity of American Indians and Alaska Natives.

And in fact, we found one city like that in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The primary populations of minority populations there are Hispanic and Latino and American Indian and Alaska Native.

And they're not capturing the race or ethnicity.

Why would they not do that?

That is when, again, we talk about the institutional and structural racism that exists.

If you are not accounting for the data, if you're not capturing that information, you are able to effectively hide it, and you are not held accountable to it.

In addition, there were other cities where they were actually defaulting in their data to white if American Indian or Alaska Native was not captured.

Race is not a default.

I'm not sure what kind of programmer or what city made that decision or why they made that decision.

It's in our report if you want to look at the cities, but Fargo, North Dakota is one of them.

Right next to major tribal populations.

When we look at white as a default, as that is the white washing of America, that again, you hide what is happening.

And to me, it is an absolute illustration of why and how white supremacy is still playing out in our communities.

Because we are not defaulted into white.

we should never be defaulted into white.

But yet it is happening across this country.

Another example of how and why we have to address the systems and the structures in order to break down these barriers.

We also found that not everybody was entering in race and ethnicity and their law enforcement officers weren't being held accountable to ensuring they're capturing race and ethnicity.

I know you've all seen, I know they're in like Walmart and other places, we get these amber alerts on our phones, and one of the descriptors are the race and ethnicity of individuals who have gone missing.

Why are they not giving that same descriptor for everybody?

How do we find our people when we don't even know from whom they come?

And yet we know it's happening.

The invisible 153 in our report was 153 cases that were not accounted for in the public records requests and the data that these police departments send to us.

This number is shocking.

153. So where did we find these?

From the families.

From the community.

from social media where they had put up a missing persons notice when the police wouldn't take it because they said, oh, your daughter runs away.

You know, wait for a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks.

Maybe we'll take it then.

They're from murders that have remained cold cases that nobody has ever bothered to look at again.

And in fact, many of the police didn't have in their systems.

The infeasible 153 are a number of Native women who are racially misclassified within the data that we knew were Native but didn't come from police departments like the Seattle Police Department, and I'll tell you of one case of that specifically in a minute.

But yet, these stories are here, and we honor them despite them not being in that data.

We honor them as those communities, as those loved ones, as a hurt and a loss to their community.

For mothers who weep for them, who children who cry for them.

They deserve to be represented and more data.

They deserve to be represented by those who have been entrusted to protect and to serve them.

Top 10 cities with highest number of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Again, we did not get information from all of the cities, and I know that many of those cities' information is wrong.

However, I will tell you that when we look at the high number, 45 for Seattle, We know that those 45 are missing or murdered in Seattle.

The number we actually received when we got our data back from the Seattle Police Department was 33. And I know that they probably see that there is a discrepancy there.

And there absolutely is a discrepancy there.

We do know that some of the data that we did not receive is a direct result of racial misclassification.

the fact that they are listed as white women within the data, or they're listed as other races.

But we know that they are American Indian or Alaska Native.

I also know, as a result of that racial misclassification, that Seattle has more than 45. absolutely has more than 45, and in fact, every one of these cities listed have more.

Again, this is absolutely a gross undercount.

We have to look at the, also listed on here is Tacoma, Washington, and we know that many of our people are going back and forth, and that some of us live and work in many different places.

Me being Native should not be a risk factor in a city that I'm in.

I shouldn't be more at risk because I'm Native.

How are we going to be not saying, beat the odds, but rather change them?

Washington State ranked number two in the top 10 states with the highest number of missing and murdered Indigenous women cases.

When we look at this, we do know that we have seen some state-level legislation that has passed in the last two sessions, led by Representative Mosberger, and have seen incredible leadership from the tribal communities, both urban and rural, meeting with the state of Washington and pushing for accountability in the fact that we are number two for missing and murdered indigenous women.

However, those efforts and we saw a report released on Friday from the Washington State Patrol as a result of that very first, in fact it's on the front page of Seattle Times today, for that first legislation that was passed.

This is a picture that came from the Seattle Times and an article that was done on Nicole Westbrook.

And the reason I want to tell you this story is because it was detailed in the Seattle Times and multiple different articles and speaks to the issues that we're experiencing as indigenous people who are calling for justice.

Nicole Westbrook was killed in 2012 in Pioneer Square.

She was shot while coming back from an event with her boyfriend.

She had only lived here for a couple of weeks.

And she had come here, according to the article her family shared, that she had come here to Seattle to go to culinary school.

She was enrolled, they had already bought her all of the supplies, and she had come here to make a better life for her family, for her children, for her community.

She'd only been here a couple of weeks when she was the victim of random gun violence in downtown Seattle.

When this happened, There was lots of articles that were done, not only in Seattle Times, but multiple other outlets, news stories done, police interviewed.

Her family came from the Navajo Nation.

She was a Diné woman, and she was so loved.

And I read this one article that the Seattle Times had written, and in it, her mother talks about how, you know, she wasn't killed immediately.

They actually were able to take her to Harborview, where she was alive and there for her family to come and say goodbye before she died.

And in that article, her mother talks about how she washed and braided her hair.

And I think about that as a Native woman who understands what that means.

And in fact, one of the most amazing memories I have of my sons is braiding their hair.

Because for many of our communities, our hair holds a many different meaning.

And as mothers, we care for our children in that way.

And I know as a Pawnee woman, it is my responsibility to take care of my children.

And I remember sitting down and parting my son's hair and taking those three pieces and telling him who he is and whispering those prayers and singing those songs as I braided his hair and I told him who he was.

And I think about that mother who did this for her daughter, Nicole Westbrook.

She braided her hair.

and then she buried her daughter.

Nicole is one of the ones that we did name in the report.

We did not name very many, except for those that had received large media outlet.

We did not want to cause any harm to the family or to the cases.

And when our report came out in November of 2018, a reporter from the Seattle Times spoke to a sergeant at the Seattle Police Department and asked them to verify some of the cases.

This was one of them.

When that sergeant pulled her up in that data, and again, her family came from the Navajo Nation, articles everywhere talking about her being an indigenous person.

It talked to the Native people who stood and held her in memorial in Pioneer Square and sang those songs and recognized that she fell on indigenous land.

In the data from the Seattle Police Department, She's listed as a white woman.

And in fact, I had actually hoped after that article came out that I'd hear from SPD, because I don't know if that's been corrected.

Is she still held in the wrong story?

Is she listed as a white woman in SPD data today?

I don't know.

But I think it's likely that she is.

The Washington State Patrol for the first piece of that legislation that was supposed to happen statewide with Washington State.

The intention of that legislation was to establish what is the problem, to hold community meetings, and to conduct a data analysis on missing Native women in Washington State.

I participated in it, went to several meetings, as did many of my team, and I listened again to tribal leaders tell stories, demand justice.

This report came out on Friday.

And I managed to find a copy of it.

It's really buried in the Washington State Patrol.

It's actually difficult to find the actual report itself.

But we are seeing lots of news reports where people are, you know, applauding in a sense and patting the state on its back and saying, oh, you've pulled out the data that says there are 56 Native women missing in Washington State.

A majority of them from Yakima and from King County were the highest numbers.

What that report does not say is that there is rampant misclassification, and that number, again, is a gross undercount.

The report itself is basically meeting notes from 10 community meetings with no meaningful analysis done.

Again, as a storyteller, or as, you know, trained in both Western and Indigenous methodologies of conducting analyses and studies, this is not a study.

This is publishing meeting notes from 10 community meetings where our community did share what needs to be done.

The recommendations that are made, they are to begin collaborations with tribal governments.

Well, as, and I'm sure Councilwoman Juarez can tell you, that's already a mandate through tribal treaty law is to have meaningful government to government relationships and consultations with tribal entities.

Basically, the report tells us everything we already knew.

I'm tired of getting handed the crumbs.

This is not a checkbox.

This is not a, oh, we went and listened.

This is a time for action, and I had expected to see some kind of action to be able to be taken from that report, and there is none.

The only thing that has happened is legislation that's already passed, and that is to establish two liaisons, one in the western side of the state and one on the east.

Two liaisons is not the answer.

Two liaisons is a beginning.

Where is the accountability to actually do a report that is meaningful?

Data analysis is not saying there's 56. That is not an analysis.

I always think about my accountability to my funders, whether they be private or federal, is I am held to a certain standard.

I am going to hold the state of Washington to the same standard.

They will be accountable.

to do more than to give me some meeting minutes and to say, we'll give you two liaisons and we'll establish relationships.

We have to do more.

Now is the time for action.

We are not a checkbox.

I'm not going to be crumbs at the bottom of the table.

If we allow this to be invisible again, we are all complicit.

and the violence against indigenous women.

And we will treat the symptoms, the homelessness, the substance misuse, the opiate crisis.

But until we actually address the systems, that will not change.

And here we see a family that mourns.

A mother that braided her daughter's hair, who wanted to keep braiding her daughter's hair.

And that is all we want.

is for the lives of our community members to be valued.

And we will sing for them, we will pray for them, and we will fight for them in all of our fierceness.

Because when I think about Native women, we are generations who have survived in a time when we were supposed to be eliminated.

If that genocide had worked, I would not be here.

I am a tangible manifestation of my ancestors' resiliency.

And we all are.

Somebody asked me, well, how hard is it to see all these Native women who are victims?

And I will tell you, I am not a victim.

We are fierce warriors who, when they wouldn't let us sing our songs, we whispered them.

When they wouldn't let us stay in our land, we took handfuls of dirt and our seeds with us.

We are fierce, we are strong, and we refuse to be complicit in the violence against us.

The advocates, the grassroots, those who have marched, those who have stood memorial, those like Patsy Whitefoot of the Yakama Nation, of those other individuals who have fought for so long, we stand here on their shoulders, in their footsteps.

because they have been fighting for this for many, many years.

We did these reports not because my community needed to know.

We did this report because you needed to know.

We did this report so now nobody can ever say to us, well, you don't have the data.

This is a tool.

This is an arrow.

This is us going to battle because we will not let this violence continue.

I'm gonna share one more story and then pass it on to my incredible team here.

And it had to do with the data we received from Seattle Police Department.

So, Anita received the first initial data set, and then we got another one a couple weeks later, and we're like, what is going on?

Why did we just get two completely different data sets from the Seattle Police Department?

And that is because a representative from SPD told us that the homicide unit found that N in the data, which is how they were sorting the data to identify whether or not they were Native American, that it was being used up until the early 80s by the Seattle Police Department as both recognizing N for Negro in the data and N for Native American.

So they were effectively hiding what was happening to both African American women and to Native American women.

And in fact, from that data from the early 80s back, I can't tell you what was happening because we don't know.

We can't tell.

And also the word Negro has not been used in modern data collection since the end of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1970s.

So again, as we look at the impact of institutional and structural racism in cities like Seattle, here's one of the ways it was playing out, is that why weren't we doing what, at that time, modern data collection would have been to ensure that that word was not used and instead African American was used.

So these were some of the unique things that, this happened specifically in Seattle, I didn't hear that from any of the other cities.

We have work to do.

We have action to take.

And in fact, as the Seattle Indian Health Board, we have been doing that.

And we have been working at both the local, the county, as I talked about the King County Board of Health, the state, and also on the federal level to look at policy legislation, to ensure that we are working with our communities and getting the information that they need to ensure the safety of our women, our girls, because they are our matriarchs.

They are our future.

And so I'm going to pass this on to Aaron Sparks, who can tell you a little bit about what's been going on with the policy and legislative piece.

Thank you, Abigail.

So I do want to give a little piece of this.

I'm going to skip around on the scale piece.

I'm going to start at the state level.

And right now, Abigail mentioned 16 states.

The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Movement, the epidemic or the movement to recognize it, has manifested itself in a lot of different ways.

Unfortunately, a lot of them is not necessarily in the form of legislative teeth where anything can actually happen or money's been allocated.

A lot of those are proclamations saying that missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is a thing.

Not necessarily I'm going to do something about it.

So she mentioned 16 states, but in states that have actually drafted bills and introduced them into their legislature, there's only 10 states with 19 bills.

And at the moment, only six of those bills in five states have passed, us being one of them, two of them being in our state.

So what we're trying to do is get to the point where we're not just saying we understand that there is a missing and murdered indigenous women and girls epidemic.

We're saying there has to be something to be done about it.

And this is why we brought up the report by the Highway Patrol right now.

So at the federal level, I do want to talk about, there were three pieces of legislation, both in the House and the Senate, none of which have passed.

We have Savannah's Act.

which is looking at the data collection reporting standards that we have throughout the country, increasing tribal sovereignty and autonomy so they can reach into these data collection sets and also implement better standards to be able to report and collect this data.

Erin, if I could stop you really quickly on the Savannas Act, because I saw you guys in D.C.

lobbying as well as Judge Gemert.

So that passed the Senate but not the House?

That's right.

And that was in the last Congress.

In this Congress, it has passed neither chamber.

Are you going to address the Violence Against Women Act as well?

Absolutely.

VAWA is next.

And so VAWA is also there.

It has not passed.

It's actually expired at the moment.

So all funds are expired funds.

We don't know when that's going to expire.

The funds are still being released, but we have no idea what the end date is on that yet.

And I should add that we had some interesting congressional disagreements that had nothing to do with violence against women and women in Indian country where the main defendant was a white man, but it came down to jurisdictional issues in the Oliphant case.

basically that people who are not a member of the tribe felt that they should not be in the criminal justice system of a sovereign nation, even though they were a defendant and had perpetrated a crime against a Native woman within the boundaries of the reservation.

So it actually came down to a political argument, not how are we not addressing that Native women are being raped and murdered and killed And when we have a defendant that is a white male, even though we could kick it over to the feds, the feds don't, sometimes they decline it.

So that's what it came down to, and I was so, so disheartened to see when we were in February that.

They just declined to prosecute?

Some of them, yes.

because there was no actual area of jurisdiction for them to work with.

Because if they were a Caucasian perpetrator on Indian lands, they could say that you cannot hold me here.

I have nothing to do with Indian country.

And that was upheld in a lot of areas because it was just so fuzzy all around the place.

And VAWA, one of the reasons why it was held up is because you could be prosecuted as extending tribal powers in order to prosecute on Indian lands non-Indian people.

There's also other pieces like the boyfriend loop.

A lot of this has to do with a toxic masculinity piece where they're saying we're going to protect the male in this aspect And that's why it's been held up.

We're not seeing it introduced.

We see it introduced in both chambers at the federal level, but I don't think it's going to pass.

If anything, it will pass the House, but not necessarily the Senate.

If I could just add one more fact, because I think it's important in context, particularly for the, not just for the non-lawyers, but for the lawyers here, is that when we, another, which isn't a proud moment in this state's history, is what's holding that up in the discussion is the Oliphant case that came out in the 70s in this state that set the standard that tribes could not prosecute non-Indians or non-members.

Now there's a Durango that came after that, but the main issue there was, besides what Oliphant was about, The main issue was tribes wanted the ability to prosecute non-members for perpetuating or basically harming our women.

That's right.

And we are still, that is still good law today.

We cannot do that.

That's right.

And it's completely unfortunate and us being able to address these things at the federal level has fallen on deaf ears, unfortunately.

Yes.

I do want to point out when we're talking about those three pieces of federal legislation, there's a third one just studying Indian Crisis Act.

So it's reviewing law enforcement at the federal level on why we got here.

And where we can go, that's literally the name of the act in the Senate.

So, but when we're looking at these things, one of the things that we've noticed is that the urban community is completely left out.

71% of us, based on the 2010 census, live in urban areas.

If you look at different forms of analysis, that's up to 74% of us here in the state of Washington who are living in urban areas.

That's almost three out of every four of us.

Yet, when you're looking at these pieces of legislation which does strengthen tribal sovereignty and autonomy, which we fully support, we endorse the reintroduction of the Savannas Act, they're not paying attention to and they're not being respectful towards the urban community at this point.

So that's what we're here to talk about as far as legislation.

The City of Seattle has an extremely unique opportunity right now.

to learn from the failure of the rest of the country to actually address this in good legislation to say that we're going to put some teeth behind this.

We're going to look at our justice system.

We're going to look at law enforcement, and we're going to hold transparency and accountability at the highest possible level.

So when we say that, we mean including our entire Native community, our tribal partners, as well as our urban community.

So we do that in four different ways.

The first one is referencing urban Indian communities and data and legislative findings.

And the first place when we were talking about these things, it always falls on tribal peoples.

And that's true.

We are tribal peoples.

We come from sovereign authorities as far as the tribes go, but we're living in urban areas.

And there is no Indian land in the city of Seattle, although we are on Indian land.

But the way that it works as far as the federal government goes, the city of Seattle goes, the state of Washington goes, this is not Indian land.

So what we're trying to say is this is Indian land.

Make sure you pay attention to our entire community.

The other piece of that is adding the urban confer policy to this.

So no matter where we are, a lot of the times we talk about the federal trust responsibility and the fact that you have a tribal consultation.

And that is an extremely important thing.

But the fact is we have a health authority as urban organizations through the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act for an urban confer.

And that's what we're asking for.

We ask for that, we advocate for that at the federal level.

We're also asking for that at the local level.

And we are in an urban area.

So if anything does happen in Seattle, and especially knowing that you're there, Chair Juarez, that we're going to get to that place.

But again, we can be that blueprint for the rest of the country to do this right and include our entire community.

Erin, let me ask you a quick question.

You know there's been all this fanfare.

I heard it on NPR and everywhere else that AG Ferguson is now saying, well, when I decide to do something, I'll check with the tribes.

I wanted to say, excuse me, that's been the law in consultation for well before President Clinton and the executive orders on government-to-government consultation.

I don't know why there was such a big fanfare and a big pat on the back because the tribes have successfully sued and made it clear in our resources, in our people, that this is Indian country and we are not restricted to the four corners of a reservation and neither are our rights.

So I want to get your opinion about that.

Is that, I don't know if that's a, if it's a rah-rah moment or?

That's how I interpret it.

I'm glad that people are saying this in a very, I would say this was a very national thing that he was trying to push out there.

But the fact is the state of Washington has a centennial accord.

It's already written into that the executive of the state of Washington holds consultation and upholds the federal trust with the tribal people in the state.

So that already exists.

You're right.

And why that had to be announced, again, I'm not quite sure.

We have the centennial accord meeting every year.

So I'm not going to comment too much further on that one.

But again, it already exists.

And we already thank the state of Washington.

for upholding that.

And yes, we do enjoy meeting with the governor and all the secretaries when we go to Centennial Court.

I think I would just like to add something here.

So we, I'm just going to reiterate what Aaron said, is we always support and strengthen tribal sovereignty.

We never want to touch resources that go into tribal communities.

And I think that a lot of the work around the Tribal Law and Order Act and even some of the VAWA allocations, all of those things are fantastic because we do need that work in Indian country, right, and in our tribal communities.

And what we are trying to call attention to is that we have needs in urban environments as well.

And we have an opportunity here with the city of Seattle to do this differently, right, to not just generate another proclamation, but to actually generate legislation that has resources and teeth to it so that we can create true change.

I think that's what we're getting at.

So we can stay on the jurisdictional challenges or we can stay on sovereignty and all of that.

We are trying to expand this to meet the needs of all American Indian and Alaska Native people regardless of where you live.

So right now we have an urban confer but it only lives within the IHS system.

And so what Erin is sharing today is that we're asking government systems like yours to take a stand.

And when it comes to issues that affect our health and our well-being and our lives, in this situation, our lives, that you give us an opportunity to have a voice.

And that's what an urban confer would allow us to do.

Is that like a new term of art that came out of the federal stuff?

It's in IHS.

So, yeah.

So, IHS created tribal consultation, right?

And tribal consultation lives in all government systems.

And then IHS created an urban confer so that they're, that urban could be included in the conversation.

We're one of the few areas in the federal trust where the authority to advocate for native people outside of tribal lands exists.

So, in the area of health, we have that under the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act.

where we can.

We are a health authority for Native people and we're allowed at that table through the confer mechanism.

Right.

And we're also lucky that we have Liz Tale here and some other members from the Cowlitz Nation who have an opportunity to not only have the brick and mortar in a building, but be able to provide all those services for Native folks and their spouses and children, even though they're not per se on the tribal trust land of the Cowlitz people.

You can thank yours truly for that, that lawsuit.

You're welcome.

We do thank you for that.

Calis thanks you for that.

Every tribe that can put their facility into trust through the IHS thanks you for that.

It's a very big deal because we're actually spreading to those places.

But the urban Indian health programs like us, we exist because not everybody can do that.

That is still an overhead cost.

Try to get some IHS facilities money.

You're probably going to pass away before anything like that ever happens.

It's just not something that happens.

So then when we're talking about the funding piece, I do want to go into this a little more.

Again, an opportunity for the city of Seattle as we're looking at this.

We need a carve-out when we're talking about the urban pieces.

And again, when we're talking about those federal pieces, we're asking for carve-outs whenever money is going to the state or the county or the city.

And waiting for the Fed to do that is something that's going to take forever.

And again, there's this blueprint aspect.

We can be the beacon for the rest of the country where the City of Seattle can just say, we're going to do this.

We're going to recognize our urban community.

We're going to make sure that they're included in this, and we're going to show you how it's done right.

Do you want to know why?

So VAWA dollars trickle in to the state and then into the county systems.

And then they are tasked with serving our people.

And what do they do?

They knock on my office door and they say, hey, Esther, how can we serve your people better?

After the money's been spent.

And my answer is, you don't have to.

We're doing it just fine.

Why are those resources going to you when they should be going to us?

Do you see what I'm saying?

This is something that given our situation in Seattle where we have city and county working very closely with one another, that from an administrative perspective, you can make changes.

Okay.

I think one of the incredible things that came out of the Canadian National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is that the commission very specifically called it a genocide.

I know they did.

Very specifically.

And in fact, they haven't gotten their prime minister to say it.

He's avoiding it.

Several members of parliament have also said it's not true.

So it's one of those issues, again, where people don't want to use the word that recognizes that they have responsibility.

and that it is ongoing.

I think that for the commission to do that, and again, I've been talking to a lot of people and I always say it's a genocide.

I think I've seen it printed twice because again, people are even afraid to print it in their newspapers.

What would it look like to do more than than for the city of Seattle to say something like that, that we recognize that there is an ongoing genocide against missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in the city of Seattle.

And as such, we are going to take these actions.

We're going to work with the Urban Indian Health Institute to correct the racial misclassification on all SP, I'm just, you know, I'm throwing everything I can at you.

on all SPD data to properly represent what has been going on in the city of Seattle, and to also correct those African-American women who deserve to be recognized in that data also.

How are we going to partner to ensure that officers are trained correctly on capturing race and ethnicity?

That when an article comes out in the Seattle Times that says you've been racially misclassifying, that you reach out to the organization who brought that up.

You know, how do we build those partnerships and relationships?

And how do we do something that has teeth?

Because like Esther said, a proclamation is great, but is it just paper?

Because if it is, I don't have time for it anymore.

My people are dying.

I get emails and I talk to people every single day who have lost their loved ones, who are experiencing trauma they should never experience.

And our responsibility to them is to take action now.

And again, I am appreciative of what the King County Board of Health is doing because nobody else is doing that in the country.

Addressing sexual violence and missing and murdered indigenous women by looking at the institutional and structural racism that allows for this violence to continue.

But what else can we do?

That's just a beginning.

Now is our time.

And I think we want to avoid the situation that came out with the state's report from the highway patrol because that happened without meaningful consultation.

They came to us.

Abigail and I were actually at the meeting together and they didn't get anything that we said.

We told them exactly what was going to happen if they didn't work with us from a community-led standpoint.

That's what actually has to happen.

Abigail created the methodologies that are going to make this successful and they ignored all of those.

In this report, they're the only missing person.

So we're asking for that meaningful consultation when this thing happens.

Something has to come of this.

And then those carve-outs to make sure that our tribal epidemiology centers that created this methodology are the people who are leading this.

Because when it comes to Indian country and trying to fix issues that are in there, it's not going to happen with somebody who's from outside of Indian country who has to do this.

Governance has to happen with us.

That's where you find success.

When it happens to us, that's when you find failure.

And that's what we want to point out.

And the very last thing that we want to say is no matter what you're doing, we're talking about policy when it comes to urban American Indians and Alaska Natives.

that we do have definitions at the federal level.

So no matter where you write them, if we are going to take federal dollars and we're going to divest them off through the state system, you can put in the U.S. codes to make sure that we're there.

Urban Indian organizations and tribal epidemiology centers exist.

All of this is on our website at the Seattle Indian Health Board on our government affairs page.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I would like to turn over to my colleagues if they have any questions or concerns or anything they want to follow up with the presenters before I make any comments.

Yes, go ahead.

Thank you.

I don't have any questions, but I just wanted to express my sincere gratitude to all of you for the work that you've been doing in this space.

And there are multiple times when you all were speaking, and particularly when you're sharing some of the stories of some of the women and the families impacted that really were created quite an emotion for me.

And I just want to, again, echo my gratitude to you all for this hard, hard, hard work that is re-traumatizing just by virtue of having to do it.

And so I really appreciate your willingness to to take this so seriously, because I know that it's something that has existed for a long time in your community.

And I think it's really important for us to create spaces in a space like this that is incredibly colonized, to have this kind of conversation that is real and raw and sincere.

And I want to express my gratitude to Chair Juarez for making space and dedicating the entire meeting time to have a conversation about this.

It's been getting a lot of attention from mainstream media, but of course, we all know that this has been on the front of indigenous folks' minds for a very, very long time.

So I'm really grateful for an opportunity to share I know we are in good hands with chair Juarez.

And I'm originally from Yakima County.

And so I've grown up around indigenous folks all my life.

And I just, I really appreciate the amount of commonality that as a Latinx woman, I share with a lot of indigenous communities.

And it's personal, right?

You can feel the heaviness of the conversation and the realities of the circumstances of repeated trauma and just not being seen.

And there are deep, disturbing reasons for that.

And so I really appreciate you calling them out and giving us an opportunity to do something about it.

So thank you.

If I may add before I let Councilmember Bagshaw go that it's wonderful to have Councilmember Gonzalez on this committee because she also chairs the Public Safety and you've seen the great work that she's done.

While you were doing your presentation, she did lean into me and she said something that is, and I know she understood it immediately.

This goes beyond just missing murdered indigenous women.

This is about genocide that's been going on for 500 years.

So there was a policy to kill our people, our women and our children first.

And so not only do we have the inside of somebody and the heart of somebody who believes in justice, but Councilmember Gonzalez and Councilmember Bagshaw is the co-chair of Board of Health along with myself, but she's a co-chair of Board of Health for your subcommittee.

Council Member Gonzalez also was on that committee.

Now Council Member Mosqueda is now on the Board of Health with us.

But you have the right people at the table that what you said, and I'll stop in a moment, because I want other people to talk before I wrap up, that when we put our minds to actually doing something, we will do it.

Because that's the kind of badass women we are.

Okay, I'll leave it at that.

Council Member Bagshaw, it's all yours.

I gave her a bumper sticker recently that said she is badass.

You know, it didn't, it didn't, All right, let me start over.

This is really not easy for me.

And it was pretty obvious sitting here with Juarez and Gonzalez and Swant and Mosqueda and Pacheco that I'm the only white woman.

But that said, the hurt that you just described just kills me.

And I have to acknowledge that the separation of the children from family, what you experienced over the last 150 years, and again, what our country is doing, we have an opportunity to raise what you're talking about, and to raise it here, but to take the action that you're asking us for, the solutions.

Would you please not take my picture while I'm sitting here weeping?

I really want to acknowledge, and with the deepest respect, what you have raised.

And I know that you know, Abigail, how much I care for your sister, Colleen, and everything that we can do for the Chief Seattle Club to be able to take the land that you have lost, respect that it was the land that you've lived on for so many, so many generations, and then turn that into respectful action that is meaningful to you, meaningful to all of us.

I also want to acknowledge and say thank you that our police are here, our representatives, our city attorney is here, and their representatives, and the fact that all of you have stayed means a great deal to me.

Is the mayor's office here too?

I'm sorry, if whoever's here, I don't see them, but I just really want to say thank you that we're all in this together.

So your study is remarkable.

And like you said, it was unfunded.

Goodness knows the work that you put in on this.

So I really want to appreciate that.

We're never going to see money from the federal government, particularly with this POTUS 45. So we've got to do it ourselves.

And I do want to acknowledge and appreciate the fact that the governor has a lot more to do, but they're at least saying the words.

So I'm going to be marching right next with my sister, Ms. Mores.

I have such respect for you, my dear.

And the fact that this very committee is named with indigenous people and Native Americans and that we care about this.

So I just, I just am very respectful.

So thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Bagshaw.

Is there anything you want to add, Council Member Pacheco?

I just want to thank Council Member Juarez for putting this committee meeting together.

Turn your mic on.

Your mic's not on.

I just want to thank Councilmember Juarez for convening this meeting together.

And just thank you for your bravery, for speaking your truth and sharing the stories of the individuals that have been impacted.

It's not easy and I know just bringing this to light and the work that's been put in was not easy.

And so I just want to recognize that and say thank you.

Thank you.

And so I'm going to wrap up briefly.

And I think there's been a lot of, I knew this was going to be a tough day.

Um, I, to be really honest with you, I was kind of dreading it this morning and I did my prayers.

And then of course I got texts from Colleen and you and pictures and making me feel better because, um, as a victim of sexual assault and violence, I too know what that's like to be on a reservation and to not be heard.

So I started this with a little bit of historical context about colonialism and historical trauma and what that has done to our people.

And I wasn't trying to be provocative or simplistic when I said our first president referred to our people as wild beasts and beasts of prey.

There are still people today that refer to us as that.

So I want to make this commitment to you, and that's why I'm glad that I have these strong women at this table, and of course, you too, Abel, to keep you out.

We've had an opportunity, and particularly Nagin read through, and I attempted to read as much as I could the summary of the Canadian report of a And just the executive summary is 117 pages, but it is phenomenal.

And when I kind of, I handed you guys the green sheet, when they call the call for justice, those are actionable things that they're actually physically going to do.

So we, us, or we'll be teeing up legislation to work with you on what does this ordinance or legislation look like as we work with Pete Holmes, the shop at City Attorney, I've also had a really wonderful conversation, more than one, including this morning with Chief Best, with SPD.

Everyone understands what you say now when you say decolonizing the data.

And of course, it's important to us in our city, we don't want to have the reputation as the number one city that has the most missing murdered indigenous women and girls.

And certainly not be number two in the nation with that same title.

So I just want to end on this note because I plan to have a few more follow-ups meetings of where we're going on the legislation and to get things done before we leave on recess.

And we would have had, what I was trying to do is, and I know I'm just going to put Abigail on blast here.

Abigail has been traveling everywhere and taking this show on the road and has been in states.

I've run into her in Washington, D.C.

along with Judge Demmer and Esther.

And we were running in and out of Senator Patty Murray's office and Senator Cantwell's office.

I saw your guys' Seattle Indian Board drum there and I took a picture of it.

We're like, you know, all of us were in the hallway in February lobbying for Savannah's Act and for the reauthorization of VAWA and the money.

So I want to share with you that we hope to tee up that legislation and having these labouring orders and who understand it that but having the Canadian report come out I think is was a blessing because now I can physically look at it and say there's a lot of stuff here that we can do too.

I think the state law is important.

I think it's a good step forward but I need more than two liaisons.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, we I.

I was thankful, because as we all know, when we are moving these kind of civil rights movements forward, you don't get it all the first swoop.

You know what I mean?

When people chant, what do we want?

We want it now.

Sometimes I'm like, you know, the world doesn't work like that.

Sometimes we've got to roll up our sleeves and just keep marching.

And that is what we have done as Native people.

If we had bought into this historical trauma, As you've heard me say many times when I do speeches, the other side of trauma is resiliency.

And we have that.

That's why we're still here.

Despite everything that we know that was done to our people, we're still physically here.

So with that, I want to thank you.

I know it wasn't easy.

I want to thank my colleagues for showing up and being here.

I know it was a little bit more emotionally charged than, you know, normally we're not sitting here arguing about a-do's and da-do's.

about bark in the committee.

Bark, people mad about bark, off-leash dogs and pea patches, but not to say you're, I'm glad that I have my community, our community, everyone's community, Native communities in this committee because we are going to get this done.

And so with that, if there's anything else you want to say before we adjourn, is there anything else you'd like to add?

I just want to say one thing, and I'm a storyteller, so I'm going to tell you a story.

I was actually, when I ran into you in D.C., I had just, at that time, a Native woman I had presented at something, and she came up to me and she told me this story about how in her family, all of the women that she had died in the past 20 years, they buried them all with bruises because they all had been victims of violence.

And she told me, you know, she'd gotten used to doing that, that it was just normal.

And she said, we cannot let this be normal anymore.

And she leaned into me and I remember it because her hair was down and, you know, basically she like covered my own face in her hair and is like breathing this story and this strength to me at the same time.

She said, we have to keep going.

We have to keep talking.

And what will happen is supposed to happen when it happens.

And so when I think about this meeting, because I will say the Councilwoman has been asking for us to do this for a while, and I've been traveling and my team has been traveling too, is that this happened at the right time because that report just came out from Canada.

And the one was just released from Washington State Patrol.

And we now have other things for us to be able to use to push forward.

So thank you for having this committee and for doing things in the right way in the right time and for us to allow to not only breathe this story, but to tell our truth and to recognize that this land not only remembers who we are, but it knows our names.

And it is holding our women, our men, and all of our LGBTQ non-binary folks together for the strength and resiliency of our community.

And that is our action, and that is our resiliency.

So thank you for this opportunity, and I know that there will be action, because I feel it.

And I know it's the right thing and the right time moving forward.

So thank you again for this place and this space.

Thank you.

Anything else?

OK.

Did you have something?

Are you done?

No.

OK.

All right.

So with that, again, thank everybody.

And we stand adjourned.

Thank you, guys.

you