eNewMexican

Violence against Native women deserves our attention

Phill Casaus is editor of The New Mexican.

Everybody thinks their issue is underreported by media, and the truth is, they’re often right.

But Angel Charley’s cause — stopping violence against Native women, and more broadly, shortening the long list of Native women who’ve been killed or are missing — is truly a story that’s been hidden in plain sight for all too long.

That may be changing, Charley says, though she acknowledges this is a tenuous inflection point for those pushing local, state and federal governments to solidify systems — and secure funding to back those plans — that can rectify the problem.

Key to making progress is ensuring non-Natives understand just how important the problem really is.

If you’re not Native, the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women in cities and towns across the state was always a nightmare that happened somewhere else, to someone else.

Charley, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women and recently added to the state’s Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women Task Force, says putting the problem on the front burner for non-Natives is critical.

“Is it hard to get that message out there, outside of our community?” Charley said, repeating the question. “The answer is yes. We’re always talking about it, trying to get lawmakers and stakeholders and system workers in the government to pay attention to it and to keep it centered when they’re going about … in their policy decisions. In their funding initiatives.”

Charley, who is from Laguna Pueblo, said that while a variety of agencies now have acknowledged there is a problem, there needs to be more support, including financial support, for families who are trying to locate a female family member who has gone missing.

It happens a lot in the U.S. — so often that a 2018 Associated Press investigation found no one can quantify how many missing and murdered Natives there are, often because some cases are unreported and others aren’t documented.

When a family member goes missing, Charley says, the monetary hit of a search often falls solely on loved ones.

“A lot of families foot the bills themselves,” she says. “Let’s imagine a family from rural Navajo [Nation] has a lead that their loved one might be in Albuquerque. Well, it costs money to get to Albuquerque, it costs money to stay in Albuquerque. You can spend a significant amount of time there. There are no services right now that support a family to do that.

“And a lot of times [those] looking for their loved ones are the family members,” she adds. “They can go to tribal police, municipal police, BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] to advocate and ask so that it stays on their radar, but who’s doing the searching are the direct loved ones of the person who’s missing or disappeared.”

The issues of distance and a lack of basic services — a daily reality for many in New Mexico’s Native communities — are pervasive. Charley says that as advocates worked to have a family from deep in the Four Corners area testify on Operation Lady Justice, a presidential task force on the problem, they faced transportation and internet connectivity issues that even now, deep into the 21st century, put many parts of Indian Country in a world barely recognizable to the rest of America.

Let’s face it: To get to some places in rural and Native New Mexico, you drive to 1955 and take a left. No internet. No roads.

Charley’s interest in the violence against Native women is personal: She says the first time she walked into a domestic violence shelter with her mother, she was 6. “I know what interventions can do for a family,” she says. She’s carried those experiences with her, examining the

problem both from the ground and at the 30,000-foot level. Each perspective, she says, is vital for people to understand — and act upon.

From the policy side, she says the best way to improve the problem of violence and missing/ murdered Natives is to find a new construct that isn’t dependent on one-off programs or short-term initiatives.

“We’d like to see a sustained initiative through the state,” she says. “So we’re talking about the task force and what it’s able to accomplish — we’d like to see something sustainable that lives on beyond this administration. We applaud Gov. [Michelle] Lujan Grisham and [state Department of Indian Affairs] Secretary [Lynn] Trujillo for keeping the momentum going at the state level, especially through COVID, but we want to make sure that whatever is created in terms of a response plan continues well beyond any of the time we are there.”

What will happen next, of course, is unknown. And we’ll see if it gets the attention it deserves — from media people like me, from politicians, from bureaucrats. Most people in those three categories are not Native and remain a long way from understanding the problem.

Charley knows all this but remains determined.

“I am hopeful,” she says. “I have to be.”

OPINION

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2021-07-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://enewmexican.com/article/281694027808239

Santa Fe New Mexican