 What Xamun Buddhism is. Hello, hello, and good evening. Welcome to the Longmont Museum, we're a center for culture in Northern Colorado, where people of all ages explore history, experience art, and discover new ideas through dynamic programs, exhibitions, and events. My name's Justin Veach, I'm the manager of the Museum Steward Auditorium, this thing that we're seated in, where I'm standing in now, and I carry public programs for the museum. Thanks for coming out tonight. I'd like to thank the folks who make our programming possible, the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Steward Family Foundation, the Friends of the Longmont Museum, our many museum donors, and of course our museum members. Do we have any members with us? Yeah, I thought so. I thought I saw some of you members. Thank you so much, we simply can't do all that we do without you. If you're interested in finding out more about what it means to be a member of the Longmont Museum, see one of these people who raised their hand, I'm sure they'll tell you all about it. Tonight's program is being offered as part of our Thursday nights of the museum series. Every Thursday evening we offer a film, a performance, a concert, a reading, conversation, panel, lecture. Yeah, a little something for everyone. This evening's program in particular is part of our Voices of Change series. It's part six, and the series is dedicated to various social justice related issues. I think we started off with a history of race and social justice in Longmont. We did a program on the Japanese American experience in Colorado, art and activism, and we expect to just continue to do these dialogues. First long as the dialogue is required, so I think that will be forever. Before we get going I wanna share our land acknowledgement statement with you. It was adopted by the city of Longmont in the summer of 2021. We acknowledge that Longmont sits on the traditional territory of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Yut, and other indigenous peoples. We honor the history and the living and spiritual connection that the first peoples have with this land. It is our commitment to face the injustices that happened when the land was taken and to educate our communities, ourselves, and our children to ensure that they never happen again. Thank you. This evening's Voices of Change conversation is dedicated to the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous relatives. Indigenous people are at a disproportionate risk of experiencing violence, murder, or going missing, and represent a significant portion of the missing and murdered cases in our country. With us this evening are three people who will help shine a light on how this epidemic came to be and what we can do to help put an end to it. Please welcome Daniel C. Walker, Raven Payment, and Clint Carroll to the Longmont Museum. Come on out, guys. Daniel C. Walker, all the way over there, is a Hong Papa Lakota and citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota. She's an artist, writer, activist, and boy mom of two based in Denver, Colorado. Her artwork pays homage to her identity as a Lakota woman and her passion to redirect the narrative to an accurate and insightful representation of contemporary Native America, while still acknowledging historical events. Daniel recently published her first book, titled Still Here, A Past to Present, Insight of Native American People and Culture, and she's been working on a personal passion project since 2013 called the Red Road Project. Focused on documenting, through words and photographs, what it means to be Native American in the 21st century. She currently serves as co-chair for the Denver American Indian Commission. And she has a couple of just spectacular pieces in our current exhibition up in our galleries right now, duality. Raven Payment, to my right, is Anashinaabe Kanyangahaga. I almost was so close. Raven is a mother and partner, a veteran of the US Navy, and a longtime professional in the engineering and construction industry for transportation infrastructure across the nation. Raven is also a writer and outspoken advocate of indigenous specific issues. As a descendant of four generations of survivors of the government and religious-sponsored Indian boarding schools, she focuses on connecting authentic and compelling narratives to non-indigenous audiences. Raven currently serves on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Task Force of Colorado, Denver American Indian Commission, Legislative Policy Committee for the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and Advisory Board for Haseya Advocates, the only program for indigenous survivors of domestic and sexual assault in the state of Colorado. Our middle panelist is Clint Carroll, Associate Professor of Native American Indigenous Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, his longstanding work with his Cherokee community in Oklahoma aims to advance methods and strategies for indigenous land education and community-based conversation, conservation, excuse me. He writes and thinks at the intersections of critical indigenous studies anthropology and political ecology. Please re-welcome our panelist. In 2016, 5,712 cases of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and relatives were reported. Indigenous women were murdered at 10 times the rate of other ethnicities, amounting to the third leading cause of death amongst indigenous women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2018, it was estimated that approximately four out of five native women had experienced violence and were twice as likely to experience violence than white women and three times more likely to be murdered. The US Department of Justice observed, quote, that despite making up the smallest portion of the US population, the second highest number of reported missing persons, nearly 10,000 in 2018, are indigenous peoples. As such, a discussion is required for federal, state, and local laws, policies, and protocols that guide reporting and investigating missing person cases, end quote. So this is the understatement of the century or five centuries, a problem. How did we get here? Would you care to give us some historical context, maybe starting back maybe 500 years or so? I think they're looking at the historian. We're looking at you, Clint, because this is your wheelhouse. I'm reluctant because to lead off a panel on this topic, being the token cis male identified person here on this panel is kind of awkward, but thank you, I'll just do my best and I'll try to be brief. So the way that I typically approach this topic in my classes at CU Boulder is connecting what's happening today to a continual and ongoing structure of settler colonialism that has in tandem with other structures and systems of patriarchy and extractive capitalism led to the point at which we find ourselves focused on this movement, on this crisis. And the way that I would emphasize us to all rethink our understanding of colonialism is again in the sense of an ongoing structure that indigenous peoples have to confront on a daily basis. And this is one of the many manifestations of that structure that again is ongoing. A lot of people think that colonialism or what we think of as colonial times happened in the past and that after that punctuated moment in history, things have moved on since then. Well, if we tie histories of forced relocation to after that confinement to reservations, the seeding of lands as a result of treaties that are still considered the supreme law of the land, but nonetheless, a lot of the promises within them have been unfulfilled or outright broken or abrogated by the federal government to then histories of assimilation, forced assimilation, followed by the extraction of resources as oftentimes went hand in hand with assimilation policies from indigenous lands leading to the changes that tribal nations experienced and within our own governance systems as a result of federal policy that encouraged tribes to, well, the only choice that many tribes had was to adopt a constitutional form of government. All of this litany, so to speak, of colonial policies that continues to the present has increased the ability for resource extraction on indigenous lands and has also led to the decreased centrality of indigenous women even from within our own communities and how we understand our governance systems as peoples. And so I say all that to kind of preface the conversation today and to really highlight these three interlocking systems of oppression of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism that have led to the current manifestation in missing and murdered indigenous relatives. And to understand these things as interlocking and as all kind of working through each other in tandem is to once again highlight that this is not a new occurrence and that it didn't just erupt out of nowhere or it's not something that we can locate in the current moment without looking at the long history of what our communities have struggled with and continue to fight for in terms of freedom and self-determination. So I'm gonna stop there. I wanna preface that I'm not a historian by training. As Justin was saying, I work with my community. I'm more of an ethnographer, an indigenous ethnographer, and I work toward land conservation and land education, which to me is related in a sense when we talk about reconnecting to the land and perpetuating our traditional knowledges. That's all a part of reclaiming and decolonizing the sense of pushing back against all this history that I just mentioned. Thanks, Clint. So it's nothing new, missing and murdered indigenous relatives. This has been ongoing for centuries. What is it about the movement? For people who are not engaged on a day-to-day basis with native American culture or who are just disconnected from it, the missing and murdered indigenous relatives movement seems like something that just kind of popped up and got hot all of a sudden. What do you attribute that to? So, oh, no, go ahead. It's definitely not a new movement if this has been going on since time immemorial. And one thing I like to always say because everybody in this room is familiar with the story of Pocahontas, right? She in fact was one of the earliest known MMIR cases. She was forcefully married to a British man at age 15, raped and kidnapped and brought to Europe. So the story that we're all painted with in Disney and our subcultures and all of the pop culture about her, it's totally false and that sort of sets the tone of what mass America is taught about native people. We have a different perspective. We're taught a different perspective. We know the truths. And that's just sort of one small example. But the fact that a lot of people are saying, oh, this movement is new. Just like I've heard about these boarding schools. Like that's recently popping up. No, this has been going on for a long time. It's just that we're lucky enough to be a generation sitting here today that are able to use our voices in a public way that's legal. My grandmother was not even considered an American citizen when she was born. My dad, his generation, native people weren't legally allowed to vote. So I'm like the first generation able to legally vote. And so I'm also the first generation that's able to freely speak on behalf of our people and our community without reprimand, without being framed or whatever and tossed in jail or being criticized. So I think the fact that we come from this generation today that we're able to use our voice, this is why you're hearing a lot more about these topics in a very public way. Yeah, kind of capping onto what Danielle just said. Anecdotally in our lifetimes, and even how we're taught specifically as indigenous women and when we were girls, how to protect ourselves when we were out in society because our moms and our aunties and our grandmothers faced these disproportionate amounts of violence and then nothing was ever done about it. So in 2017, the Urban Indian Health Institute released a report that finally gave what we anecdotally knew was happening to our community a name. And that's when you saw the hashtag MMIW, which was for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Since that time, we have come to recognize that men face just as much violence as women do. And similarly, that women was not capturing or being inclusive to our non-binary, our transgender and our two-spirit community members. So the term relatives was adopted to just be inclusive of all indigenous community members across the spectrum and be respectful of that. So that's why you're seeing such an influx now of branding and the red handprint and hashtags. And like Danielle was saying, that's the most powerful part of this is that we can finally speak about it. Can you talk a little bit about how art has played a role in kind of advancing awareness? The red handprint, when did that, how did that come about, do you know? So the red handprint came about the same time as that hashtag came out with MMIW. One of the most powerful stories about the red handprint and specifically why the color red was chosen was that some of our tribal nations believe that the color red is the only color that other spirits can see. So for our stolen relatives that have been taken away, kind of symbolized by that hand over your mouth silencing you, that that color red can call your relatives home and call them back to you as we are advocating for their justice. Then I would toss it to the talented artist in the room to talk about art. Yeah, I think for me as an artist, one way I love to try to bring awareness to these heavy topics in a multitude of different ways. And I do it the way that I know how best and that's through art. So a lot of my artwork personally reflects stories of my people, my community, things that have happened, including these tough topics. In 2020, actually I did a, I curated an MMIR exhibit at the Dairy Art Center in Boulder, which I don't know, maybe some of you saw. And it was an earring exhibit with over 5,000 different one-sided earrings. And each of those earrings were sent in by native people all across Turtle Island. And when I say Turtle Island, that means all of North America into Mexico, which is North America. And all these indigenous people that felt like they either had a connection to it, had a missing relative, a murdered relative, or wanted to have some type of advocacy, be part of this advocacy and awareness sent in these earrings. And we hung them up on this burlap all around a room. And it's to symbolize, well, number one, we as native women love earrings. We love our bougie earrings. So that's sort of a big symbol of who we are in our culture. But also, I think any woman or even maybe some men can relate to it. When you lose one of your earrings, you sort of cling and hold on to this other side, hoping that one day you'll find that other earring one day and you just put it in a drawer in a little bin. And it just never appears. But it's kind of very symbolic of also our relatives. We cling on to that hope that one day they'll come back and we'll be whole again with our family. And so, I'm long-winded, but that's one example of how I sort of put art out there to bring awareness and tap into a different audience than maybe sitting in front of a room full of legislators is tapping into that one audience. So it's just another way to sort of bring awareness. So this is a really personal endeavor that you've taken on with the missing and murdered indigenous relative task force. It's you weren't just looking for a cause to get behind. This, I mean, you've actually lost relatives and people you've known. Can you tell us a little bit about how the task force came together? Did you guys know each other before the, before you came together on this? Yeah, we did know each other before the task force. I wanna say socially, but I feel like social circumstances and native circles tend to revolve around justice and those type of causes. The movement came about, there are other individuals on the task force that are obviously not here right now. We're spread throughout the state. We have three individuals that sit in the southwest corner of the state with the Southern U and the Ute Mountain Ute Nations. Danielle and I are more located towards the Denver metro area. And then we have another member who lives in Colorado Springs. We all come from various backgrounds. Some are advocates for domestic violence and sexual assaults. Others work in the non-profit sector. And we just all kind of came together with a common mission that we were frankly frustrated and fed up and heartbroken that we see this pain and trauma in our communities and we see these stories happening over and over and over again. And we're legitimately screaming at law enforcement and legislators and the general public to pay attention and help us and nothing gets done. So I feel that we have another relative as well that's not necessarily active on the task force who is a two-spirit individual. And he uses he-him pronouns just for everyone's general knowledge. But he just kind of tossed out an idea one day, like, well, why don't we have a task force? And I feel like there's always that meeting where someone throws an idea at the wall and it just sticks. And that's what happened in this circumstance. It kind of lit a fire and people were like, you know what, you're right, let's do something. And Colorado is one of 15 states that currently has legislation addressing this crisis. And there are other states that are following suit right now. So that's essentially where the task force was initially born. And you guys started that in, what, 2000? That was about 2020 in, like, legitimacy with looking at cases. And then tell us about the Senate bill 2020-2150 and how that came about and your work. Tell us, what does the bill cover? Or what were you hoping to accomplish there? And do you feel like you've accomplished it? Yeah, I think it came about after we passed a bill to abolish derogatory mascots in the state of Colorado. Some of us on the task force were also part of that bill that was passed and- And that's a state thing. Yes, yes. And so when I was simultaneously, when it was around the same time I was curating this big exhibit, that earring exhibit at the Dairy Art Center. I invited the senator that helped us pass the mascot bill to the show. I wanted her to be aware of this other huge crisis and issue not only in the state, but also nationwide, even globally, indigenous people face these issues. And she's like, oh wow, I haven't even heard of this. This is insane. And then I know she was being approached from other angles, potentially from Raven and some other folks on the task force about the issue. So she was sort of being hit from all angles and we, she didn't even question it. We just immediately started planning this bill, SB 22-150 and it was to create the office of missing and murdered indigenous relatives, which is housed under the Department of Safety. And I'll let you speak to this, the specifics of the bill. Yeah, so the initial 22150 it establishes an office that is dedicated to cases of missing and murdered indigenous relatives. Part of that office is that there is an executive director and their sole focus is to work on these type of cases and that work kind of varies. There needs to be a knowledge of jurisdictional issues, both of like local law enforcement agencies, counties, municipalities, but then specifically when you get onto sovereign land, you're working with the FBI, the BIA, that particular tribal nation and kind of navigating and also working as a liaison to take those agencies into the same realm and make them coordinate and work together, which is part of some of the complexities with trying to solve cases or kind of administrate justice. It's just kind of a jurisdictional nightmare and no one, when they're not invested in those communities, typically they just don't care to address it. So that is this executive director's focus. Similarly, there is training that is required now for law enforcement across the state to be sensitive to cultural awareness with native communities and kind of understand to the historical context like what has happened and how we got here and why it's important that they do better. And one of the most important parts that I think I've been most proud of is that part of this legislation established in alert that is solely focused on missing indigenous people. If you're familiar with a silver alert, which is when an elderly person goes missing, it functions like that. It will send out an email blast to the media. There is a subscriber list, so you'll receive emails. If it's like an abduction type deal, you'll see information on the VMS boards on the highway. And since we launched that alert on December 30th, we have had seven and then as of today, we have another person that went missing. So we have eight people that have gone missing in roughly 49 days. That's an average of one native person going missing a week in the state of Colorado. Terrible, terrible. I'm just so caught up in that. So tell us a little bit more about the challenges. You know, someone goes missing. A native person lives on a reservation. They go missing, take us through what those challenges are. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Sure. I'm gonna kick it to you in a second, Danielle, and talk about our recent experience in Denver. One thing I do wanna emphasize too is that 76% of native people do not live on reservations. We live in urban centers, rural populations. And in Colorado in the 2020 census, we have a quarter of a million native people living in Colorado. So we are 3% of Colorado's population. Most of us are not concentrated on the reservation. So what happens theoretically when a person goes missing is your family member calls whatever your local law enforcement agency. And they usually issue a unit out to your house to take the report. What we've been finding specifically with the Denver Police Department recently is that they take hours, if not days, to even respond to the call. You call, you leave a voicemail, and they'll eventually get back to you. By the letter of the legislation, if it's a missing Indigenous person, if it is a child, they have two hours to contact CBI and issue the missing person's alert. If it is an adult, they have eight hours. In the recent case in Denver that Danielle and I were involved in, and it happened over a holiday which was extremely heartbreaking, but essentially there was 72 hours before the alert issued. And law enforcement never even responded to the family in person to take the report, and they waited a full 24 hours to call them back. So these are kind of the complexities that we're facing. And Danielle, you can probably elaborate on that a little more with your experience in that case as well. Yeah, I mean, we, as part of the task force, we jumped right on it because we couldn't just sit back and watch the police and FBI and the CBI just not respond to this family who's desperately fleeing for their missing relative. So literally Raven and I, being in Denver area, the closest, we just put it, within 24 hours, we were out on the ground searching for this relative that the police didn't respond to, the person that sits in the missing and murdered Indigenous office, the office that we created through the bill. He didn't even respond to any of our calls. He didn't respond to the family. Actually, his very first call was to Raven, and he's like, hey, what's going on? Can you give me some details of this case? We're just mothers, community members that volunteer our time because we're passionate about this, and this is his job. Ultimately, what had happened was that his body was found a few blocks away from the home. We probably walked by it at some point. Raven for sure did. I know that she was walking up and down the street at where he was found, and a community member had to find his body, and the police left a voicemail for the family and just said, hey, we have an update for you, and she immediately, she was in a ceremony, they were praying and having a ceremony, and so she called as soon as she got her voicemail, and they didn't even, they didn't return her call for several hours, and it was the news to let them know that their relative was found. We had to call in a favor to get the detective to call her back. We called a friend who's an FBI agent who managed to utilize their phone tree to contact leadership, to call this woman back and let them know that they had indeed found her deceased nephew, and it was not a personal show up to your door like you see in movies as it turns out that's not usually how that works out. So there's this kind of institutional racism, obviously. What are some other, there are other challenges, right? I mean, in terms of, I'm completely ignorant, very ignorant as to how a native, what is the native person's relationship to their tribe or their nation? Does it involve, do they get involved somehow? I mean. Native people are very, we're very transient, so I know personally in my family, we have a sort of a personal train back and forth between Standing Rock and Denver. I have family members that go back and forth, and so we sort of float around and travel, and when so, if a person goes missing, let's say in Denver, but they are a citizen of a tribe, they could very well be en route to or from anywhere in between, and so it's very important to also keep that transparency of that tribe informed and to have those jurisdiction and those agencies communicate with one another to share, because that's really could be key in helping to solve the missing, you know, the case. I don't know if you guys wanna add anything to that. We do have some cases where the nation that the person is a citizen of is outside of the state of Colorado, and one of the individuals on our list, the investigating agency, he was an individual that went missing in 1977, maybe it was nine, in any case, his tribal nation is actually the investigating agency that initiated the missing person's response, because the city in which he went missing from was not responsive, so like they are the lead investigative agency in that case. I would add that this is also wrapped up in the kind of broad brush strokes history that I talked about earlier, and that, you know, we think about this kind of long duration of colonialism and how that has led to our current moment to the point that Raven made about 76% of native people live in urban centers. That's a product of yet another assimilatory policy called the termination policy and urban relocation went hand in hand with that in the 19 late 40s and throughout the 50s. That actually, that policy era wasn't officially overturned until self-determination, which was 1975, 1974. So termination and urban relocation, what urban relocation was aimed at doing was taking native people away from their reservation communities by offering them jobs, you know, a leg up in urban society, oftentimes those promises fell completely flat. And so yet again, another example of unfulfilled promises. However, that also led to some amazing activism kind of came back and bit the federal government in the butt when native people started recognizing that they're all inhabiting these urban spaces and can band together and resist and, you know, march on the streets in regard to rights and issues that they were experiencing collectively, even though they're coming from very different reservation communities, very different cultural linguistic backgrounds. It was a way to kind of open up what eventually became the American Indian Movement. And so I wanted to just kind of mention that and maybe we can talk a little bit about native women's activism kind of spurring in that moment as a result of AIM or the American Indian Movement being very much a male focused movement, but a lot of women's activist roles were definitely a part of that, but also creating the women of all red nations, the kind of very specific form of indigenous women's activism as a result of that. But what I wanted to go back to in terms of jurisdiction was the creation of reservations was intended to be permanent homes for native nations, native communities. Well, during the allotment policy which coincided with an earlier form of assimilation, those lands were broken up. And the rationale for that was that native people weren't using them right or weren't using them correctly. In other words, they didn't have, most native nations didn't have a system of private property. And so for my nation, we went from 4.42 million acres to about 100,000 acres and it's about 98% loss of lands that once were Cherokee owned by the people. And what that means and what it means for a lot of other reservations is that we're now left with what we call checkerboarded tribal land ownership and jurisdiction. And that's the key word when we talk about jurisdiction, that's when it kind of comes into the complexities of who has jurisdiction in specific cases on reservations when tribal land is literally looks like a checkerboard sometimes with interspersed non-Indian land, other private parcels and whatnot. And so that leads to a lot of complications when it comes to reservation communities and the ability to enforce tribal law and all the things that lead to effectively and expediently finding, identifying and addressing this crisis of missing and murdered indigenous relatives. So I hope that kind of provided a little bit of context for this issue of process and jurisdiction, but specifically within reservation communities where you do have a sense of sovereignty even though it's very limited. You have a, maybe you have a tribal marshals or police department that as Danielle was saying can sometimes be cross-deputized with state police officers, et cetera. But it still, it winds up leaving quite a bramble or a tangled mess when it comes to effectively dealing with some of these issues legally and criminally as far as that's concerned. Yeah, like for example, back on my reservation, my cousin was found deceased in a very suspicious way. And because even though we are sovereign, we have our own government, we have our own police on the reservation because it was a murder, the type of crime makes a big difference on who can investigate it. The tribal police were not able to investigate this. They had to wait for the FBI to come in. And the FBI coming into small town North Dakota isn't like a quick thing. So, and we all know the first 48 hours of a crime is crucial to really getting ahead of it. And that just wasn't the case until this day. We still have no idea what happened to my cousin and my family has no answers. And it's all kind of trickles back to this jurisdictional issue. So, what are we doing? So, how can we help to kind of change this dynamic or help change these dynamics? What can an individual do? Dang, I wish I had the answer to that. I was like, I'm gonna be sitting here. I was like, I'm gonna be burning down the house. I mean, awareness, I guess, is a huge one, right? In general. So, it's awareness. It's also a large component of this and a lot of the issue we face is education. So, we had a huge struggle trying to pass the initial legislation with legislators, with politicians who consider themselves very progressive, very left-leaning individuals. And we would confront this just awful racism and patriarchal attitudes that we were unintelligent, women that we were dirty savages and they knew what was best for us. All the while they would be patting themselves on the back for what a great job they've done as law enforcement agencies, despite the amount of data that we had to show them to the contrary. And part of that was a lack of education and understanding that Native American history, indigenous history is actually American history and it began before 1492. So, Clint has a rather robust job as a professor with tying in these indigenous issues because most people are woefully unprepared to enter in this conversation. So, to even sit on a stage sometimes and try to talk about this to an audience, I'm not quite sure where their education level is. So, we're trying to condense 500 years of history into a tweet to make sure that everyone understands what we're saying. Yeah, no offense, you guys are wonderful. Thank you. But also to piggyback off that, right now we could use everybody in this room's help to get the word about SB 23-54. There's like too many bills that we're working on all the time. And this is really a piggyback off the bill we passed last year because what had happened was at the very, we, when I say we, the community members in the task force drafted the bill, very specifically in many parts of the bill mirrored what other states are currently doing and we were very specific about data and funding and being able to really create something that we thought would be a successful well-oiled machine in terms of this office creation. And at the very last minute, there were people in, should I just say it, I don't know. Yeah, burn this house down, let's air this laundry. Who wants to hear the tea? Okay, so the governor of this state, I won't say any names, went behind our backs, literally like 24 hours, 48 hours before he almost wanted to veto the bill, which he would have been the first governor in the history of the United States to veto an MMIR bill. Because his reelection and all that was coming up, he probably didn't want that stain on him. But him and a couple other representatives, in fact, some that were sponsoring our bill went behind our backs and took a bunch of language out and then passed it. And so we are back at the drawing board, reintroducing this language back into the bill. And so we went in front of the Senate Judiciary just a week or so ago to do testimony and really plead why we need this back in the bill. And they laid over the vote, we didn't get it, we don't know yet where it stands. We hope to know next week, but if any, you know, right to your local representatives, right to the governor's office, right to your senators and tell them why, how important this is that we need these pieces back into the bill. And I'll say names. Senate Judiciary Committee right now is who holds the power over this bill. That is Senator Julie Gonzalez. It's specifically Senator Roberts, who is the one who is postponing his vote and kind of issued us demands for amendments to that bill. There is Senator Van Winkle, Senator Gardner, and Senator Robert Rodriguez. So that's where we're sitting right now. Those individuals kind of hold the next steps to making this particular piece of legislation function. Similarly, utilizing social media when we have people go missing, we saw some pretty derogatory remarks when a young native boy went missing with people posting gifts of white people in headdresses, war whooping and stuff. So confronting your family members when they're being racist and derogatory actually goes a long way to changing minds in a long-term perspective, even if it gives you heartburn at the time. Yeah. So what were they trying to remove from the bill, or how was the bill being compromised? So we had several iterations where the Polis Administration and the Department of Public Safety specifically, they opposed the alert at first, and their commentary was that it would water down the effectiveness of their resources. We pushed back and asked them to define effective for whom, because it wasn't effective for native people. And he didn't say the quiet part out loud, but it was kind of inferred that we knew who he was talking about, and it wasn't native people. They had a real big issue with data. They did not want the MMIR office to have access to criminal justice records. There's a number of reasons for that. There is an issue with you never wanna compromise an act of investigation. And that's not what we're going after though. We do have a large number of native individuals who have been murdered by law enforcement. And so I suspect there's some pushback to protect those systems as well. There was another component, well, they initially too, they wanted to bury the office in the cold case unit. So from like an org chart level where this office sits is you have the Department of Public Safety and then the next line down reporting to them, you have law enforcement agencies, you have the CBI and you have Homeland Security. Our office is on that same level with all those agencies. So there is a level of autonomy and power, and that's kind of how we designed that. So they wouldn't be beholden, buried down all these other agencies and kind of get drowned in the bureaucracy or just leveled by the systems of oppression that have put us here in the first place. I don't know where I was going with that, so I'm just gonna end there. I lost my thoughts, sorry. And funding, we're adding language back into the bill to have funding so that this office can help support families in time of need as they are out searching for their loved ones or if they need assistance with getting copies of court records or helping with burial costs. And there's some general issues with missing person databases in general. Like there isn't one main missing persons database that's sort of international database. It's kind of disconnected and disjointed. And that's another part of the issue right there, right? Yeah, and kind of to that note, one of the other issues that we've had that we're still kind of fighting with these agencies about is a lack of accurate identification. So oftentimes when we have been murdered or we go missing, law enforcement will just make a snap judgment about who we are, so they will call us white or they'll call us other race or sometimes we'll get put under Hispanic or Latinx culture. And that kind of has repercussions for even being able to do an effective investigation of the communities that we come from and the communities that we may know. So we have a list right now of 77 MMIR cases in Colorado. And that list was culminated from 13 people that started on a CBI list. And it's people like me and Danielle and our other task force members combing all these databases that you mentioned and looking for someone who might look native, looking for a surname that we know might be tied to a native community and then finding their family and verifying that they're native. So once we have that information, we've been contacting CBI has a database, Namus has a database, families of homicide victims and missing persons have databases, and trying to get them to correct this information. CBI actually has given us pushback and said that we have to get the investigating agency to contact them and change the report, in which case I try to push that back and remind them that none of us are getting paid to do this. So if they could just make the phone call, that'd be super great. But it's been since, when did we start this process? Like a year ago we started having these conversations and nothing has been corrected to date. Can you tell us a little bit about what's happening on the federal level? Is there an office on the federal level? Is anybody working on this at the federal level? I don't know us directly. I mean there's work being done on a national level. MMIWUSA is an organization that we collaborate with often. They're a little more in touch on the federal level. There is, I wanna say it's under the Department of Interior. Deb Holland put together a task force I think recently. Yeah, so there is a task force. I am not currently up to date on what's going on with that though. Yeah, neither am I. Sorry. We're focused so much locally. Well I just wanna acknowledge the incredible work you're putting into this. It sounds exhausting and it's such personal work. It's such emotionally draining work. I just wanna honor and respect what you're doing and keep up the good work and I hope we can all do something to help raise awareness for these issues so that we don't rely upon moms to take care of everything. Just a quick note if anyone feels like they wanna make a financial contribution. Our task force we're in the process of getting our non-profit status set up so that's not where I'm going with this. One of our members that I mentioned who is in Colorado Springs, she runs a program called Hasea Advocate Program and it is the only program in the state of Colorado that is focused solely on native victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. They are an incredible non-profit. She does great work with this task force but also just doing work that directly impacts the community so in terms of impacting and helping this movement that is an option for you as well. I think we have some time to open it up to some questions. We don't have a mic floating about so holler. Yes. Yeah, so there's something called Colorado Post and I think it stands for peace officer standards and training that just came from the very back recesses of my brain. But essentially they are responsible for training law enforcement and creating those standards. Some of us on the task force worked with the state office to establish that training for those law enforcement agencies and it was rolled out in the beginning of January. That said, some of the challenges that we've faced is that a lot of these law enforcement agencies don't even know that like this missing persons alert exists and so that's been an uphill battle. I always encourage people to call your local law enforcement agencies and give them the what for and ask them questions as well because we typically don't interface directly with law enforcement for the training. That theoretically is a function of the state office. Coming from a state that has enormous fracking in North Dakota at one point there was a huge boom and lots of man camps. This was definitely a very, very big problem. It still is a big problem and that whole area which leads into Montana and even into Canada is a huge human trafficking roadway and crossroads. And so that is absolutely and I think Clint had alluded to that, that the extraction of resources is a huge cause to that. Do you wanna expand on that a little bit? Yeah, well, I mean the most recent iteration of this and kind of the tensions that it created were in your home community, the no dapple movement isn't that long ago that it was happening at Standing Rock and it was directly related to oil and gas extraction which ironically was being in part. It was happening at another reservation, the Mandan-Hinatsa, three affiliated tribes who, I say that not to say that that wasn't in awareness during the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline and that there weren't relatives that were from that community visiting Standing Rock in solidarity with the movement against the pipeline being built. But to highlight again the roots of extractive industry and being able to infiltrate tribal homelands and reservation communities, it goes back centuries to assimilation policies that were geared at not only eliminating native people as we know ourselves to be culturally native, politically native, affiliated with our various nations and peoples, but altering the way that we understood our relationship to the earth and to the land. And so you get a number of tribes whose economic base is dependent upon extractive industry as well even within our own communities and so the irony that led to what became the No Dappel movement as being transporting oil and crude oil from by and large the Bakken oil fields in which the three affiliated tribes have extractive practices happening there was not lost on us, but again it was not a, and I don't mean to speak for your community, Daniel, but it was also if you were there and if you were able to participate in that resistance, it was palpable in the way that oftentimes, the tribe and what the governments do don't necessarily mean that us as citizens are behind those activities. In fact, we're often the ones that give our governments the most hell for the way they're operating. So I say that again, it's not to say that extractive industry is solely at the hands of our native governments and but to say that it's complex and I think that a lot of people don't think about that when you think about the choices that we're left with in terms of economic development and how those choices are structurally limited by what we have available to take care of our people and sometimes they're at odds with the traditional ways that we regard our relationship to the earth. And so again, I'm getting along winded here, but it's wrapped up and forgive me for being a broken record but the history and the ongoing structure of colonialism and how we experience that today. And not only the man camps and all of that is our perpetrators in this issue but also domestic partners and intimate partners are a huge percentage of who's committing these crimes and specifically my experience on the reservation there's non-native people that come onto the reservation that commit these crimes knowing that they could probably get away with it. Thanks for bringing me back to or bringing us back to the question at hand but absolutely, yeah. That is all wrapped up in extractive industry is the prevalence of man camps and was definitely a big issue during the height of that movement and continues today in terms of who is doing this, who are the perpetrators? And the data suggests that 96% of perpetrators of violence and assault against native people, 96% of them are non-natives. So that's a pretty hefty statistic when you're looking at who is actually doing these crimes. I had a broader point that also left my brain so I'm gonna leave it at that. Well, I'll just add one more thing, sorry. Again, thinking about things structurally is really important for how I talk about these issues with students. And if you think about a lot of the things that get perpetuated that I think you were talking about, Raven, regarding who native people are and what they do by the dominant society, by mainstream, they're often these kind of, well, stereotypes, assumptions, preconceived notions and that can span and can run the gamut from being biologically somehow susceptible to diabetes or being lazy, those type of things that get perpetuated. But again, you look at the roots of these problems. Diabetes, for example, being one of the, native communities have one of the highest rates, if not the highest rate of diabetes in the country. And you look at that long history of relocation, removal, confinement to reservations, reliance upon government rations on and on and on and the inability to practice your own food ways, the inability to move like you once did as a people, all these things that created a pendency upon the federal government and lead to these social and cultural ills, if you will. They're all connected in this kind of larger system or structure that I've been mentioning. And if you look as well to the dependency on sources of income that native women, native relatives are relying upon, I'm drawing from the work of an indigenous scholar named Rona Kuokinen, who used to teach at University of Toronto in Canada. And she highlights the fact that these structurally limited choices for employment for many native women at the height of and continuing on throughout this movement has been to enter into the sex industry. And so that, again, to kind of be able to provide a context for the choices that native women have or do not have in this case, and then the susceptibility that they have to violence to being kidnapped, to being murdered, all play into that same kind of structural analysis. And that kind of ties into what you'll see mainstream. We still have a football team named the Chiefs that just won the Super Bowl. And when you see the behavior of those fans, that also paints us in a derogatory stereotype. Similarly, Danielle alluded to Pocahontas. And at Halloween, you'll see the Pocahotti costumes that sexualized native women and paint them as lesser than and also leads to the stereotype that we were overtly promiscuous savages when colonization happened. The current one or the older one? So it's gonna be SB 23-054 and it is Office of MMIR. And the sponsor is Senator Jesse Danielson. That might be another way to find it too. Yes. Yes, absolutely. I've been surprised and impressed continually by the students, the interest in the courses that we offer. I teach in the Department of Ethnic Studies, I teach Native and Indigenous Studies like Justin was saying. The problem is the demand outweighs the amount of us in the institution. And I'll stop there because I don't wanna get on that soapbox. But there's very few of us. And so we talk about land acknowledgment specifically for CU Boulder. I've been in those conversations most recently. What is it that you're acknowledging and how are you going to give back? I mean, of course there's actual land but in the absence of the ability to do that, which is debatable but still what resources can CU Boulder provide for our native students who are now more than ever coming to CU Boulder for their education because of the in-state tuition bill and who have no resources or very limited resources to go to aside from a very small handful of Indigenous faculty and staff that I think I'm only seven years into my position there but has been winnowed away over time. So that would be another thing. I think education is huge and the more Indigenous faculty that we can have teaching classes like this, the more students who are interested in them can go on and make a change in whatever path they end up on in life. The interest is definitely there though, sorry. I'm done. Yeah, I'm actually glad you asked. I feel like we left a whole conversation point out about the new bill. Part of the pieces that were taken off as well was a community-led oversight and part of that. Yay, she's coming. But there is a board established in the legislation. The old one had a board established and then in this newer legislation there is a more robust description of specifically native-led community members putting oversight in this board and then making recommendations both to the Department of Public Safety and then also the House and Senate Judiciary Committees so that if action needs to be taken, that can be facilitated from people that have authority and power. I think our hope was that we were gonna pass this legislation and have this fancy office and we were gonna go back to being moms and making awesome art for museums and whatever our passions may lie and somehow these institutions that have historically oppressed us have still managed to undermine and not do right by us. And so it's funny you mentioned Aaron calling me and he very much did call me while we were in the middle of a search party in snow up to our thighs looking for this young man asking me what the details are and I am not a cop. So I technically shouldn't have the details. Two more, okay. That's very kind. Maybe you meant for the model of Clint? Yeah, I mean Clint mentioned the women of all red nations. I come from relatives that were part of that. My auntie was sort of the backbone of AIM. If anybody remembers AIM, American Indian Movement of the 70s, the men were always the face of it. The men were in the media, they were the face of it but the women were the backbone of it. In fact, my auntie was one of the key figures that helped to terminate forced sterilization of native women, which was still happening into the 1970s. And if anybody lives in the Arvada area, I actually did a mural that pays homage to the women of AIM and the women of the red of women of all red nations to acknowledge them because they don't get acknowledged. We do come from a very matriarchal society. It's because of the systems and how we had to adopt this patriarchal governance when the USA was forming and we were asked to become sovereign and adopt these laws. So now we have these tribal people wanna say, oh, who's the chief of your nation? Well, I don't really have a chief of my nation. We have the president or the councilman and then you have people that sort of help and assist. So it's very much mirrored like our government of the US but that wasn't historically how we operated. Women were definitely just as vocal as men. Women made the decisions. Women were the keepers of our teepees. In fact, in my tribe, they were the ones that owned the teepee and made the choices and the decisions. And so today we're sort of circling back to that. Women are taking back that matriarchal stance. And I would like to see and I get frustrated often when Raven and I and several other women are fighting and on the front lines and I don't look around and I see no men. It's frustrating to me because we have men in our societies that claim warrior status and this and that but then when it really comes down to it, where are they? And it's frustrating but my dad once told me, Danielle, if you don't speak up, nobody's gonna do it for you. And so that's why we are here and doing what we're doing. Absolutely. I could give you an entire list of incredible native women, both that we interface with on a regular basis and then from our home communities. You mentioned the American Indian movement and there's one person I think we should talk about and pay homage to was Anna May Aquash who was abducted from Denver in 1974 and then a few months later her body was found. She was part of those women that were doing the work for the American Indian movement and directly affects our work that what we're doing here in Colorado and all those women that she worked alongside there's the meme was that they walked so we could run so that we're able to carry on this work in a good way. I think we, this gentleman here, yeah. I will say yes but from a more a backseat perspective, I would emphasize that what our two house sponsors did to us in the last session was heartbreaking. They were also women of color that sided with a system of oppression to undermine the work that we had done. So I think that we've been a little more leery to bring in other legislators until they've kind of shown with their actions, not their words that they are not just allies but accomplices in this movement. So it's funny you mentioned that. So with our missing indigenous persons alert, we did want to model it more after the Amber Alert in which you would get the notification on your cell phone. That's not in reality what we got. We got more of the silver alert and we're still pushing to make it like the Amber Alert but if anyone has ever dealt with politics, there is a give and take and a compromise in every move you make and that is not what I wanna do for my full time job. Yes. Yeah, so it's Hasea Advocate Program and Hasea is spelled H-A-S-E-Y-A. Okay, yes. Yeah, we actually did, we did. Yeah, we call her Auntie Deb but there are limitations to her role and what she can like directly support and testify to. One of our other coalition members, her name is Lynette Grable, actually works close with Deb Holland and Lynette has actually run for Congress twice in Wyoming and just recently moved to Colorado so she kind of helped forge that relationship with Deb just to kind of get that support from the back room so to speak but she is knowledgeable about it and has been supportive as much as she can be in her role. And the fact that Deb Holland is in taking up that space is incredible to me. I feel like if my grandma were still here, she'd be like in disbelief that there's a native woman sitting in that position of power in the government so I mean it was a huge, huge, huge victory for native people. I think we have time for maybe one last question. Yes. Yeah, so we, you know, what we call ourselves is a controversy in itself, what people refer to us and what we call ourselves American Indian, Native American, indigenous, you know, Indian, you know, just Indian in the US Constitution and all the documents government-wise were referred to as American Indian. Everybody has their preference. I would say our relatives of the South are often referred to as indigenous and our relatives of the North meaning Canada, our first nations and what we refer to ourselves here in the US is very, I know, back home, we call each other Indians. I've had a lot of even non-native people say, you can't say that, like that's not right, but that's what I grew up with and what I still go back home and we call each other Indians and so that in itself is a very, we could have a whole symposium on that. And we did define it in the bill. So there are tribal nations that sit on those borders because those borders didn't exist before colonization. So kind of when we're talking about specifically MMIR, we're referring to North American Native people who were affected by the treaty policies by the American government. And that's not meant to exclude our indigenous relatives to the South, fully recognizing that the intersectionality with what we're facing here in North America is an intersection but it's also a different struggle. Like, for example, there's an issue with Femmicide with some of the cartels and stuff on the border. So I would say probably not Native American in terms of this conversation for MMIR right now, but also acknowledging that there is an intersectionality with migrant routes and the fact that where there was no border 500 years ago, even 200 years ago, but anyways. And increasingly too, the border politics and what you see with forced migration as a result of, again, these structural conditions in which indigenous peoples in Mexico are forced to move and leave their homelands that could become more and more of an intersected reality with what we're talking about. It's just politically, legally different in terms of what we know as sovereignty. And but also sovereignty in the case of, as Danielle and Raven were saying, the political relationship between sovereign tribes, sovereign nations here and the US colonial government. But yeah, there are numerous indigenous peoples, pueblos in what is known as Mexico and there's also, we can talk about settler colonialism having a presence there as well in terms of the very similar, but in terms of historical timeline and also the way that they manifested different but very similar policies of dispossession, land grabbing, assimilation via what we, what the Mexican state calls mestizaje or mestiz of being mixed, but there are still very much a huge presence of indigenous communities or indigenous pueblos in Mexico. That was a great question. She wants to, can we let her do one too? Oh, okay, yes. Greg Deal curated our current exhibition, by the way. I wish Greg Deal was on the front lines more with us, women, but just saying. Yeah, so I, you know, art is how, and this is just my own personal experience. It's how I express myself. Sometimes I'm not always good with my words and it's just been that way since I was a little kid and I've recently got into doing murals. So I do a lot of public art and I've realized the power that public art has. My very first mural was in Westminster and I remember I had my headphones on and I was crouched down painting some detail and this girl like threw a stick at me and I could get my attention and I was kind of like, what? And she's like, hey, I just want to let you know I walk through this neighborhood every day and it's a sketchy neighborhood but I have to walk to the train but the fact that you all, and when I say you all, we had a bunch of women painting murals in this neighborhood, she said the fact that there's this art on the walls makes me feel safer and the fact that was like a pivotal moment for me that, wow, I want to do more of this work because I realized how powerful and impactful and how it is not discriminatory of who sees this art. Anybody walking down the street that maybe never has stepped foot in a museum can see and experience this art form and can take something away from it and the fact that she felt safer because of art was like, I can't even explain in words. I'll never forget that moment. And since then I've done several, many more murals and a lot of them have some type of undertone or acknowledgement or topic or something I'm trying to convey through it to tap into those different audiences because I think it is really important. And your work is gorgeous, by the way. She's so talented. It's very beautiful, yeah. Who's seen our current exhibition? I said, oh, there's some people who have yet to have the pleasure. Anyway, we're about ready to wrap up. You know, the museum is open for another half hour so if you haven't seen the exhibition you could probably go catch some of it. We do have a few more programs coming up that are tied to the exhibition. Danielle will be back for a panel with Greg Deal and a couple other artists from the exhibition, Chelsea Kaya and JC Beall. That's on March 9th and it's on this kind of, it's on the subject of the exhibition, duality, kind of living this double life of contemporary artists operating in American culture and being Native American at the same time. That's gonna be fantastic. And then we have the Sacred Art of the Pow Wow, an evening of Native American music and storytelling on March 30th. Anyway, I wanna thank you all for joining us. Danielle C. Walker, Clint Carroll, Raven Payment. Thank you all for being here. Thank you all for joining us. It's really exciting to see this many people show up for this program. Thank you.