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Advocates call for new task force for missing and murdered Indigenous people to do more

Indigenous families with loved ones who have gone missing or been murdered protest outside Albuquerque City Hall on July 21, 2023.
Bella Davis
/
New Mexico in Depth
Indigenous families with loved ones who have gone missing or been murdered protest outside Albuquerque City Hall on July 21, 2023.

A new task force to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people held its first meeting today in Albuquerque. Attorney General Raúl Torrez convened the group in the wake of complaints by advocates after the governor dissolved a previous task force.

The effort is the latest in a series of somewhat similar groups created to study and combat the high numbers of people in Native communities who go missing or are murdered.

In New Mexico, where more than 12% of people are Indigenous, the problem is particularly acute. A 2018 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute found more cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in New Mexico than in any other state.

Back in 2019, the legislature created the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force, under the state Indian Affairs Department. The body decided not just to study women, and produced a report in December 2020 which outlined the scale of the problem, noting that often it is unclear whether federal, tribe or state law enforcement should investigate cases and that the families of the missing suffer in what it called, "this jurisdictional maze".

Following that report, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed an Executive Order in 2021 creating another, similar task force also under the Indian Affairs Department, which in 2022 issued a state response plan to the crisis. It included six objectives, like developing community outreach and prevention and 50 strategies for achieving those goals, like upgrading training for tribal police.

But in 2023, the news outlet New Mexico in Depth reported that the governor had ended the task force. Her spokesperson said the task force had achieved its objectives, but the legislature seemed to disagree, and passed a memorial this year asking the Attorney General to convene a new task force to continue the work, updating the state response plan and providing ongoing recommendations to lawmakers.

It is that body that had its first meeting Friday, with a plan to approve bylaws and establish meeting guidelines. The meeting itself was closed to press but public comment after the event was streamed live, and several relatives of missing and murdered people expressed deep frustration.

"This is like a pinwheel that's just going in circles and circles and circles. You started out with a task force, and where has it gone," asked Evangeline Randall-Shorty whose son Zachariah Juwaun Shorty was found shot dead on the Navajo Nation in 2020 at the age of 23.

"We want answers," she said. "We want justice for our loved ones. And how are you all going to help us? You know, we come here and we relive our trauma by telling our stories over and over again. And you sit there and you listen, it's always different people sitting here."

Other speakers included Zunneh-bah Jim who works with a group called the Missing and Murdered Diné Relatives Coalition.

"I just want to request that we give full support to not only the families that are impacted and advocates, but also to the grassroots organizations," she said, saying that it is difficult to support affected families without adequate resources.

And Sonlatsa Jim, also Navajo, called for more training for investigators

"Our district attorneys, our victim advocates and law enforcement are not Indigenous and do not know how our Indigenous people handle many things," she said.

There was also an opportunity for public comment held by the Indian Affairs Department on Thursday evening.

The department says that it is working to implement the state response plan it published two years ago, and plans an online guide to the work that has been done. But several speakers at the event at the University of New Mexico Law School spoke of years or decades of searching for loved ones, or for justice, without discernible help from the state agency.

Alice Fordham joined the news team in 2022 after a career as an international correspondent, reporting for NPR from the Middle East and later Latin America and Europe. She also worked as a podcast producer for The Economist among other outlets, and tries to meld a love of sound and storytelling with solid reporting on the community. She grew up in the U.K. and has a small jar of Marmite in her kitchen for emergencies.
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