As the communities around the United States marked Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Monday, Oct. 12, Nevada lawmakers revealed a plan to prioritize legislation that would establish a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) alert system.
At a gathering hosted by the Native Voters Alliance Nevada on the Las Vegas Strip, Assemblymember Shea Backus (D-Las Vegas), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, announced she is sponsoring a bill draft request to establish the statewide alert system that would rapidly share information with law enforcement, Tribal Nations, media, and the public when an Indigenous person goes missing under qualifying circumstances.
If passed, Nevada would be the seventh state with an MMIP alert, following California, Washington, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, and Arizona.
Native people are murdered at a rate 10 times the national average. Homicide is one of the leading causes of death for Native women ages 10-34. Advocates and lawmakers have identified multiple drivers of the MMIP crisis: underfunded tribal law enforcement; confusion among tribal, local, and state police and the Bureau of Indian Affairs; exclusion of Indigenous people in data; and inadequate media coverage.
Native families report getting lost in jurisdictional webs, not knowing who to contact or which agency is responsible for investigating the cases of their missing or murdered loved one. Many wage their own searches and investigations in lieu of official resources.
“There has been progress made to address the MMIP crisis, and that progress matters,” Barbara Hartzell  (Chemehuevi Paiute), Executive Director of Native Voters Alliance Nevada, said at Monday’s event. “But there is so much more left to do. When someone you love disappears, every minute is a minute without answers. Families should get to spend those minutes searching for their loved one, not searching for the right person to call or wondering how loud they have to become before enough people start looking with them.”
