Abigail Echo-Hawk’s voice held a drumlike cadence as she testified before lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday about the government failures driving the ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) crisis.
“I experienced my first rape at the age of 6, and at the age of 10,” Echo-Hawk, executive vice president of the Seattle Indian Health Board and director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, said. “When it was reported to law enforcement at the home where I was in Alaska, law enforcement made the decision not to prosecute as a result of what they said was a lack of resources. And I wish my story was unique, but I know it’s not.”
The hearing was convened Tuesday by the Subcommittees on Oversight and Investigations and Indian and Insular Affairs. Echo-Hawk’s testimony was joined by others spanning tribal leadership, law enforcement and genetics, as well as a family member of a victim of the crisis.
At the center of the hearing was how technology can be better used to solve MMIP cases, according to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
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; jurisdictional confusion among tribal, local and state police and the Bureau of Indian Affairs; exclusion of Indigenous people in data; and inadequate media coverage.
The FBI receives more than 5,000 reports of missing or murdered Native people each year.
The hearing opened with Charles Addington, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and principal director of the Office of Justice Services for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, facing questions from lawmakers about inadequate law enforcement resources, slow response times and inconsistent reporting — all factors that underpin the crisis.
Addington spoke of refocusing the Missing and Murdered Unit, launched by the Interior Department in 2021 to solve MMIP cases, toward responding to missing persons reports and cold cases. The refocus came via Secretarial Order 3450, signed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. As part of the order, the unit will add 26 full-time support positions.
“There were times where maybe some of our agents were working other types of cases, and we want to make sure that they’re working those core functions,” he said.
Rep. Jeff Hurd, R-Colo., shifted the questioning from investigation to prevention.
“What objective metrics would persuade members of Congress that we’ve actually reduced the MMIP crisis rather than simply improved our ability to investigate it?” Hurd asked Addington.
The director responded by emphasizing that law enforcement is just one piece of the problem.
“We’ve got to do more to make sure that it’s not just a law enforcement problem,” Addington said. “It’s a social problem as well. We have a lot of people that go missing, a lot of young people, where we have things that are going on in the communities that we need to address through other means as well. So law enforcement has to team up with our social services partners and different things to help address some of those issues with some of our young people in the communities.”
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., pressed Addington on the Trump administration’s proposed cuts amid the crisis, including a proposed 27% cut to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“Last year, there were almost 10,000 people reported to the FBI as missing in Indigenous communities, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know who was not reported, and there is no credible evidence that it is getting any better,” Stansbury said. “I have to ask you: Do you think it’s working? Do you think that this administration’s approach to this is working?”
OJ Semans Sr., a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and executive director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, opened the second witness panel by reading aloud the names of MMIP victims Ali Mae Begay (Navajo), Thomas Rock Road Jr. (Northern Cheyenne), Tylen Valandra (Sioux), Savannah Standing Bear (Sioux), and Stephen Lopez (Sioux), a ten year old boy who was shot in the head last Father’s Day on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Semans emphasized the need for a system of communication among tribes, states and federal agencies, with each MMIP case assigned a federal point of contact, an escalation protocol, after-action reviews, transparent metrics and a formal mechanism for tribes and families to evaluate stalled MMIP homicide and violent crime cases.
“Tribal governments need to be part of this moving forward,” he said. “They know their people, they know their area, and they need to be part of the system.”
Echo-Hawk took the stand with moving testimony about her experience being sexually assaulted as a child, tying the absence of an investigation into her assault to gaps in data through which countless Native women fall.
“You often don’t know about [victims] because the data is missing, and I recognize that because I am part of that missing data,” Echo-Hawk said.
In 2018, Echo-Hawk co-authored the first data report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
“We found that the data did not exist on this crisis, and simple things were happening across law enforcement, such as not even having a box to mark American Indian, Alaska Native,” she said. “Law enforcement wasn’t even being given the ability to recognize and put into the data that these people were Native.”
She underscored that data drives policymaking and funding. Absent policy reform around consistent data collection among law enforcement agencies, Echo-Hawk said the Urban Indian Health Institute has worked with tech companies to train law enforcement on data input, without any federal dollars.
“This data is allowing us to go missing,” Echo-Hawk said. “… I hope that every single one of you recognizes that my rape was not partisan, and you all now have a responsibility to stand with us. This is in your hands to uphold treaty and trust obligations, and to recognize that your voices together will make the change that my community needs.”
Grace Bulltail, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a citizen of the Crow Tribe, closed the hearing. Her niece, Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, was murdered Aug. 29, 2019, just days after her 18th birthday. Bulltail served on the Not Invisible Act Committee, a federal commission created in 2020 to represent tribal leaders, service providers, law enforcement and survivors, and to hear testimony from those affected by the MMIP crisis. In 2023, the committee submitted a report with more than 300 recommendations to Congress. The report was removed from the Justice Department’s website last year.
Bulltail spoke of her own experience, which echoed what she heard while gathering testimony for the committee.
“Too commonly, we are leading our own investigations and pressuring the justice system to make what little progress we have in our loved ones’ cases,” she said.
Bulltail said her family spent years pleading with law enforcement to investigate Kaysera’s homicide. What progress was made has been hampered by inconsistent MMIP policies. She pointed to the Missing and Murdered Unit agent working on her niece’s case being reassigned to other duties. For nearly a year, Bulltail has been asking the unit for updates on the investigation, only to be met with silence.
“Many more teenage girls have gone missing in the region since Kaysera’s disappearance, and several were also found deceased,” Bulltail said. “… Our governments are too indifferent unless it impacts them personally. … The erratic and chaotic state of MMIP policy implementation delays our hard-fought efforts in realizing justice for our relatives, and as we know, many of these cases are solvable.”
