Nationwide, an alarming number of Indigenous people are murdered every year; many simply disappear, their whereabouts unknown. The issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people has its own acronym (MMIP) and its own day of awareness (May 5), but it’s a crisis that has received little public attention — and little attention from philanthropy.
MMIP is a particularly urgent problem in rural Northern California, not all that far from some of the nation’s wealthiest foundations. The state has the fifth-highest number of such cases in the country, and two-thirds of those cases occur in California’s Pacific Redwoods region. The Humboldt Area Foundation and the Wild Rivers Community Foundation recently launched the Pacific Redwoods Missing & Murdered Indigenous People Crisis Action Fund to raise awareness of the issue, with the goal of ending it altogether.
The Humboldt Area Foundation (HAF), a community foundation established in 1972, supports a range of local projects, including environmental, health and equity initiatives. The Wild Rivers Community Foundation, which serves Del Norte and Curry counties, is an HAF affiliate: The two organizations share staff, leadership and a strategic vision, as well as a website. HAF works closely with the many tribal nations in its region; its Native Cultures Fund (NCF), for example, was established in 2002 to support Native cultural practices, sacred sites and language revitalization, and has granted over $3 million to Native-led programs. The fund has received support from the James Irvine and the William and Flora Hewlett foundations, as well as the California Endowment.
The new Pacific Redwoods MMIP Crisis Action Fund was seeded with about $50,000 in donations from local donors, an anonymous family fund and HAF’s discretionary funds. It’s the first fund, or philanthropic initiative for that matter, that we’ve come across addressing this particular problem. It’s also a rare example of a place-based community foundation that’s making Native American causes a major priority. A report on the issue in 2018 found that, although national funders often think of Indigenous issues as falling under the purview of local community foundations, an extremely small portion of community foundation support is heading toward such causes.
When the fund was announced, Bryna Lipper, CEO of the Humboldt Area and Wild Rivers Community Foundation, challenged philanthropy to do more to protect Native communities. “The national tragedy of MMIP has been all but ignored by philanthropy,” she said. “These are our girls, our friends, our community. Their absence is devastating to us all. Today, and every day until it is no more, we are called to face the crisis that is missing and murdered Indigenous persons. We can do something to end this now.”
Perfect storm
No one knows exactly how many Indigenous people disappear or are murdered every year because data collection is spotty at best, as a 2018 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute found: “Though awareness of the crisis is growing, data on the realities of this violence is scarce.” The report cites information from the National Crime Information Center showing that while 5,712 American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls were reported missing in 2016, only 116 were logged in the Department of Justice database.
We do know that Native Americans, particularly Native women, are at high risk for violence: 4 out of 5 Native American and Alaskan Native women will experience violence in their lifetimes, and homicide is the third-leading cause of death.
Many factors contribute to the crisis. In California, as in many parts of the country, Native communities are located in remote areas, which complicates law enforcement efforts. Katherine Katcher, a policy advisor for the Yurok Tribe, the largest Native American tribe in the state, points out that it isn’t a new phenomenon, but an ongoing part of the American story. “Ever since Europeans set foot in North America, Native people have been kidnapped, murdered, and enslaved,” she said. “In Native communities, there is a lack of resources for public health, mental health, substance abuse treatment, and these issues in turn go back to the history of trauma and neglect, and make people vulnerable to violence.”
Katcher points to another contributing factor: a large number of Native American children and youth are in foster care, which puts them at high risk for violence and sex trafficking. This vulnerability, as well as the isolation of the tribes and distance from law enforcement, makes Native women easy targets. “It is taking advantage of a community that is already so isolated and marginalized and receives so little support,” Katcher said. “So many different factors come together in a perfect storm to create an environment in which Native women and girls experience the highest rates of violence of any community.”
The Humboldt Area Foundation works closely with the Yurok Tribe on a number of issues, and Native American leaders, including Yurok Tribal Court Chief Justice Abby Abinanti were advisors in the creation of the MMIP Crisis Action Fund. Meanwhile, the Yurok Tribe is working at the tribal level and pushing for statewide and national reforms to tackle the issue. “We’re looking at how we can address this crisis from a systemic standpoint: how to help tribes on the ground protect their people and create access to justice and access to services,” she said. “So it’s a framework that will involve violence prevention and social services, as well as beefing up our law enforcement and actually looking into the hundreds of cold cases that we have in our region.”
Both Katcher and Bryna Lipper identify Public Law 280 (PL 280) as a major obstacle to investigating MMIP incidents—and preventing them altogether. The law, passed in 1953, gave state governments criminal jurisdiction on reservations in certain states. The National Institute of Justice, an agency of the Department of Justice, has itself criticized the law, pointing out that it violates tribal sovereignty, and is often used as a reason to deny tribes funding for law enforcement. In practical terms, PL 280 undermines the ability of tribal officials to protect their own communities.
The Pacific Redwoods MMIP Crisis Action Fund will be used to address the many issues contributing to the crisis by supporting research, policy advocacy, and crisis response and recovery; it will also work to close technical assistance gaps. Individual grants will be given on an as-needed basis through HAF’s community response team, an internal grantmaking body, and will be available to any tribe or Indigenous community in HAF’s service area that needs MMIP support.
A lot to answer for
Katherine Katcher and Bryna Lipper are heartened that the MMIP issue is receiving increasing attention, including from the U.S. government. The Biden administration has made it a priority, and it’s an issue that Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, focused on when she served in Congress. After becoming secretary, Haaland created a Missing and Murdered Persons Unit at the BIA, and has vowed to deploy an “all-of-government” approach to address the crisis.
Bryna Lipper thinks it’s past time for philanthropy to step up, too. “As you well know, less than 1% of philanthropic funding supports Native communities,” she said. “I think we’ve got a lot to answer for in this country, because a great deal of wealth, particularly more modern wealth in the West, has come from the genocide of Native people and the taking of their land. So I think that if philanthropy considers itself an institution of justice, we need to look much more carefully at ourselves.”
Lipper has advice for funders who want to do more. They could, for example, work together to reverse PL 280. “Philanthropy is always interested in systems change,” she said. “We could band together as funders in Western states and work with state and federal legislatures to change this blatant injustice. This is something that we could set a goal toward and achieve within our lifetimes — probably even within our strategic goals.”
And funders should also simply give more, Lipper says. “I would say to my philanthropic peers, particularly in the West: Set a goal around working with your Native American tribes and Indigenous populations,” she said. “Set a goal to substantially increase your giving. And if you need advice or guidance about how to do that, reach out to Native Americans in Philanthropy. Reach out and know who your local tribes are. They’re there and they will invite collaboration and ideas and investment. Just get started.”
Of course, she also hopes that funders will support the new Missing & Murdered Indigenous People Crisis Action Fund as long as the problem persists. “While we have missing and murdered people that have not been found, or their cases have not been brought to justice, we are hoping to grow this fund to support the needs of the families to find that justice,” she said. “In the long term, though, we are hoping there will no longer be a need for this fund.”