Mysti Babineau’s mother went missing when she was 2 years old.
The police never found her. Babineau, a member of the Red Lake Nation in Minnesota, was thrust into the foster care system. She was raped when she was 9, and when she was a middle schooler she was attacked with a knife, giving her a scar she still bears on her shoulder today.
When she was 20, Babineau went missing herself. She was kidnapped in Isanti and brought to St. Paul, where she was raped and beaten. She believes she would have stayed missing or been found murdered if she hadn’t managed to escape from her assailants.
Babineau recalled those episodes between tears Wednesday morning in front of the Minnesota House Public Safety Policy and Finance Committee, concluding with what might have been the most remarkable part of her experience: “My story is not rare,” she said. “Many of my sisters and many of my relations go through this … and oftentimes when we do speak up and when we do speak out we are not heard.”
Babineau and others were there to tell their stories as part of an effort to pass a bill that would create a task force on missing and murdered Native American women in Minnesota. Despite making up less than 1 percent of the Minnesota population — there are around 28,000 Native American women and girls in Minnesota, according to the American Community Survey — Native women in the state are murdered at far higher rates than the national average, said Mary Kunesh-Podein, DFL-New Brighton, a member of the Standing Rock Lakota tribe and the author of the bill. Between 1990 and 2016, the homicide rate for Native women in Minnesota was seven times that of white women, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.
“It’s a devastating reality that our Native American women are going missing and murdered in some of the most violent ways,” Kunesh-Podein said.
It’s the first time the idea for such a task force has been brought to the Legislature, and so far it’s garnered bipartisan support. The bill is moving through committees in the House, though it doesn’t have a companion proposal in the Senate, and is being considered for possible inclusion in a broader House public safety proposal this year. The task force would cost less than $200,000 for the first two years and report annually to the Legislature, according to the House DFL Caucus.
If passed, the task force would take a big-picture look at the issue of missing and murdered Native women, including investigation and prosecution patterns, child welfare policies and coroners’ findings.
Willamette Morrison, part of the Red Lake Nation, said that when her daughter went missing in 1996, Morrison was told she couldn’t file a missing persons report because her daughter was an adult. She ended up reaching out to a criminal investigator from the reservation who found her daughter listed in a missing persons database in Chicago.
When her daughter’s body was found — she had been shot in the chest — she still had her Minnesota ID on her, with Morrison’s Minneapolis address listed. Still, she never got a call from the medical examiner — or anyone — before her daughter was buried in “pauper’s grave” in Illinois, she said. “We were able to bring her home and give her a proper burial December 28, 2008,” Morrison said. “She went missing August 6, 1996.”
The task force would also look at the systemic causes and underlying factors that explain why higher levels of violence occur against Native women and girls. A 2016 National Institute of Justice report found that more than 84 percent of Native women experience violence at some point in their life.
The proposal would also look at options for collecting data on missing and murdered Native women, which isn’t currently tracked in any comprehensive way, Kunesh-Podein said. Other states are looking into the issue too, including Washington, where Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee recently signed a law directing the state patrol to study how to increase reporting and investigations in cases of missing Native women.
This is by no means a new problem, Rep. Jamie Becker-Finn, DFL-Roseville, said Wednesday. Becker-Finn, who grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation, said her great grandmother went missing in 1931. Her body was eventually found, but to this day her family has no idea what happened to her. “It dates back to first contact with Native communities and colonizers,” she said.
Becker-Finn brought up a comparison for her colleagues to consider. Most people who lived in Minnesota in 2003 remember the disappearance of Dru Sjodin, a Minnesota student who was abducted from a mall parking lot in North Dakota, where she was going to college. Quickly after learning she was missing, law enforcement officials across two states teamed up to try to find her. Sjodin’s face appeared on nightly newscasts, with the media dubbing her “everyone’s daughter, everyone’s sister.” Sjodin’s body was eventually found in a ravine outside Crookston. She had been sexually assaulted.
“When she went missing the activation of the community, by the media, by law enforcement, everyone was looking for her,” Becker-Finn said.
That wasn’t necessarily the case for Savannah LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old pregnant Native woman who went missing from her apartment in Fargo, North Dakota last August. Her disappearance “wasn’t on the news right away,” Becker-Finn said.
Eight days later, her body was found floating in the river near Moorhead, Minnesota, wrapped in plastic and duct tape. Later, police would find her child alive inside the apartment building she vanished from. Eventually, Brooke Lynn Crews, a neighbor from the third floor in the apartment building, pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder Greywind and kidnap her unborn child. Only then did the story become national news.
“It’s painful to think about what might have gone differently,” Becker-Finn said, “if the community was activated in the same way to find her.”
This is so sad.
The film, “Wind River”, a fictitious story and movie written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, but based upon the all too real truths about the numbers of missing Native American women, starring among others, Jeremy Renner, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Olsen, addressed this most distressing number of statistics. How sad, that for many Native American people: their mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, etc., are simply that: statistics.
Something truly needs to be done. This is the just the latest in the number of atrocities inflicted upon Native American citizens, and it needs to be addressed, and addressed SOON! This should not be allowed to continue, and all American citizens need to add our voices to bills that will become laws for the protection of all of these women.
Lots of unanswered questions
Do we know who the assailants are? Males? Females? Indians? Non-Indians? If Indians, do they live in the same community (i.e., if the abducted women are living on the reservation, do their assailants live there, too – assuming the assailants are found? Same thing for off-reservation crimes.) What proportion of those who “go missing” are found alive? How commonly or frequently is this happening?
The mention of media treatment for Indian disappearances vs. non-Indian ones seems especially relevant to me, and yet another example of cultural bias that paints minorities as “others” who don’t merit the same level of attention as majority whites. That, too, is worth shining a spotlight on. Grisly crime stories are usually the meat-and-potatoes of local TV news, yet these are cases that only rarely appear on a network station at 5 or 6 or 10 o’clock.
A few answers here
Hello Ray, most physical and sexual assault against Native women is done by non-Natives, in part, perhaps, because tribal police and legal authorities cannot arrest or prosecute non-Natives–except in very limited circumstances–and the federal authorities who can, for whatever reason, don’t. The task force would, I hope, work to address this and change things. Anyway, some of the startling and dismaying facts and stats can be found here: http://indianlaw.org/issue/ending-violence-against-native-women Further discussion of some of the legalities can be found here: http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/title_ix.htm
Greywind
Actually it was on the News right away. And on Social Media. The police were on the case right away.
Canada Has Undertaken such an Inquiry
In September 2016 the government of Canada authorised an independent Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. I understand that this process is largely being run by women from the communities directly affected (First Nations and Métis). Is it possible that in North America these human beings do not really matter to society? Perhaps Canada and the United States should re-examine their attitudes to the original peoples of this continent, re-discover the great wisdom and contributions native cultures have made to our civilisation, and actually value human beings from all cultural backgrounds equally…Our very own survival might well depend upon this, as the original peoples of this land have developed sustainable ways of living here that we of European settler backgrounds have not. I believe that we have a lot to learn…