A body was found inside an abandoned refrigerator just off a secluded highway near a forest swath of Northern California.
The remains were badly burned, and there wasn’t much to collect for evidence except for a lone charm bracelet with an engraved “WWJ” – What would Jesus do?
The remains remained anonymous for two years until relatives came forward with concerns and an official missing persons report in 2015. The DNA sample finally matched with 23-year-old Rachel Sloan, an indigenous woman of the Cahto Tribe of the Laytonville Rancheria. A police report confirmed the cause of her death was a headshot wound.
Actions for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Case
Sloan is not the only missing and murdered indigenous woman in America. California is the fifth state with the most missing and murdered Indigenous women. A tally by Sovereign Bodies has logged that more than 190 Indigenous women or girls have gone missing or killed since 1900 across the state. The Sovereign Bodies’ data also includes “two-spirit” people, an Indigenous term for those who identify as having both a feminine and masculine spirit.
According to National Crime Information Center, as cited by Native Hope, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls as of 2016. However, the US Department of Justice’s federal missing person database only logged 116 cases. The real rate of missing Indigenous women is likely higher as the total number of missing cases is deemed an undercount due to a lack of comprehensive federal data.
Roxanne White from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Washington leads the Women’s March in Seattle on January 20. (Photo Matthew S. Browning)
Brief History of Indigenous American
California is one of the many states that play a role in the long and dark legacy of the subjugation of Indigenous people in the United States.
According to MSN, Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from their lands and allowed to indenture Native children and adults to white citizens in the 1850s. Up until the 1970s, thousand of Indigenous women were sterilized by the Indian Health Service, an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, without their knowledge or full consent. And throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Indigenous children were taken to government boarding schools, where the goal was to assimilate them into English-speaking culture.
In 1953, Public Law 280, PL-280, was enacted in California and several other states, wherein the state has shared authority with tribes to prosecute most crimes on the reservation. The legislation essentially expands the state criminal jurisdiction while limiting federal powers.
California Assemblymember James Ramos said the centuries of brutal history and those laws and policies that sometimes hurt Indigenous people have resulted in a lack of coordination between the state and tribal governments. He added that those entities had no strong relationship regarding public safety.
See: South Dakota: Oglala Sioux Tribe Calls for Justice After a Child’s Death, Sues Federal Government
Addressing the Problem
President Joe Biden describes the growing case of missing and murdered indigenous women as an “epidemic.” He asked the Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland for more federal action.
Haaland is the first Native American to oversee the Interior Department, including the Bureau of Indian affairs. She announced the creation of a new unit to investigate the growing cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, which now has its acronym: MMIW.
In 2019, the Biden administration passed the Not Invisible Act and Savanna’s Act in 2022, which aim to address the growing cases of MMIW in the country, as Indianz.com reports.
