The smell of white sage wafted through the air Friday as Lone Wolf, an indigenous man also known as George Thomas, began a ceremony to honor “the spirits”of thousands of murdered and missing women in Indian Country, including within New England. The ceremony outside the North American Indian Center in Jamaica Plain brought together Native and non-Native supporters to focus on an issue that has been cited by the Biden Administration as a priority.
Reliable data is hard to come by, but the National Crime Information Center classify 1,500 American Indian and Alaska Native persons as missing, and the Federal Government's Uniform Crime Reporting Program estimates that in recent years 2,700 indigenous people –disproportionately women – have been victims of homicide.
Rachel Halsey, executive director of Boston’s North American Indian Center says her office has received numerous anecdotal reports about missing indigenous girls, women, boys and trans individuals. She said the scarcity of data is a problem.
“Massachusetts in particular has a data issue,“ Halsey said. Native Americans "don't exist in much of the statewide data, so if we don't exist there, then there's no possible way that [officials] would know to contact the tribes or the tribal organizations," if someone goes missing or is murdered.
Halsey said, for example, that it is only because of strong family networks among Mashpee Wampanoag that Jalajhia Finklea, an 18-year-old tribal citizen murdered last year in Florida, was properly identified.
Finklea went missing last October and her body was found in an empty field near a Fellsmere, Fla. She was pregnant at the time.
The prime suspect, 37-year-old Luis Zaragoza, died in a confrontation with police. Tribal members said they flooded social media with posters and sightings and pointed detectives in the direction of Zaragoa. Afterwards, Mass. State Police combed his cell phone for digital records, which led them to Finklea’s body.
Native activists say this case received more attention from law enforcement than many others in which Native women go missing or are murdered or both.
The U.S. Justice Department determined that Native girls and women are murdered well above the national average, and disappearances are “under-investigated.”
Mahtowin Munroe, co-director of the United American Indians of New England, said that has been the experience regionally. “Very often, police departments and authorities don’t pay attention to us. They don’t investigate properly. Very often they will even refuse to put out a bulletin saying someone is missing.”
Jane Oleson, the mother of a young woman — Nannette Oleson — who died under mysterious circumstances in South Boston in 2018, said that was her experience too. Through tears she told the gathered activists she felt treated unfairly by a detective as she insisted that he find the cause of her daughter’s death.
Later Oleson told GBH News: “When I called to get the detective’s name, nobody would talk to me. I told them she was Native American. A member of the Mik'Maq Wagmatcook Native American community, but a lot of them don’t recognize us.”
One study by the Urban Indian Health Institute reports that many police departments categorize Native peoples inaccurately or not at all. Indigenous leaders in Boston say that is why they feel obligated to rely on Native family networks to keep track of missing, murdered and trafficked indigenous women.
Yet, some at the ceremony in Jamaica Plain said with the recent confirmation of former U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, as Interior Secretary — the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary — they are feeling hopeful that progress will be made. One of Haaland’s first initiatives was to launch a new Bureau of Indian Affairs unit to investigate unsolved cases of missing and murdered Native Americans.
