OLYMPIA, Wash. — The Urban Indian Health Institute placed both Seattle and Tacoma on the top ten list for cities with the highest cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls.
State Representative Debra Lekanoff hopes to change that.
“This is not a crisis just for Indian country, this is a crisis that impacts all Washingtonians,” Lekanoff said.
The state legislator is proposing House Bill 1725 to the state legislature. The bill would create an early alert system to help identify and locate missing Indigenous women and people.
The system would include sending out text notifications to phones and putting alerts on signs along I-5 when an Indigenous person goes missing.
Lekanoff points to the Silver Alerts used to help find vulnerable adults as a blueprint for her proposal.
“We’ve seen the success in this. By even raising the awareness of the alert system and including all the governing bodies and agencies we are expanding this issue so we have more solution makers to address this heartfelt, detrimental impact on our tribal communities and upon our urban native communities such as Seattle and Spokane,” she said.
The Urban Indian Health Institute released a report showing that in 2018, Seattle had the highest number of missing, or murdered, Indigenous women and girl cases in the entire country.
The report also stated that due to poor data collection by many cities, the numbers could be a lot higher.
Rosalie Fish, an activist who works with Indigenous families who’re missing loved ones, has seen the trauma that comes with families having to work to find their loved ones on their own.
“I have relatives, I have peers around me where our whole job is to cry out for help to bring awareness because there are systems and jurisdictional barriers in place that make it extremely difficult to search for Indigenous women when they go missing,” Fish commented.
This is why both Fish and Lekanoff feel this legislation is crucial to getting eyes on a crisis Indigenous communities have been enduring on their own, and that Washington can be the first to address it.
“We are going to be able to show the nation that we as governing bodies, we as Washington citizens are going to address bringing our Native American women home to mothers and grandmothers and aunties,” Lekanoff said. “They’re going to protect the next generation of Native American women and people.”
Fish is also calling on Washingtonians to just keep a lookout for notifications about Indigenous people who’re missing and spread them to friends and family, because that visibility may make all the difference in getting them home.