Gabriella Angotti-Jones / The New York Times File (2021)
Participants march in 2021 on the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Tribe Reservation, a 35,000-acre tract of land along the Nevada-Oregon border off U.S. 95 with a population of about 400. Tribal officials say a lack of media coverage on Indigenous women and girls going missing perpetuates a problem that has long existed on Indian lands across the United States, including in Northern Nevada.
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A Las Vegas lawmaker wants to make it easier for reports of missing Indigenous people to be widely shared among Nevada law enforcement.
Assemblywoman Shea Backus’ proposal, Assembly Bill 125, would require all law enforcement, including nontribal police, to take reports of Indigenous people who go missing from a Nevada reservation under suspicious circumstances and enter the details into existing national databases.
Sovereign Native American tribes generally have their own police forces, whether local or through the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, and that can come with tricky jurisdictional issues. Currently, if a Native person goes missing from one of Nevada’s roughly 20 reservations or colonies, a nontribal police force like the Las Vegas Metro Police or the Nevada State Police will not take a report if the reservation has its own police agency.
Under the bill proposed by Backus, D-Las Vegas, that limitation would be lifted. A.B. 125 is set for its first hearing Tuesday before the Assembly Judiciary Committee.
Backus, who spent her childhood summers on her Cherokee grandparents’ allotted acreage in northeastern Oklahoma, knows a Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent in the agency’s “missing and murdered” unit who oversees cases in three states.
“I can’t even imagine. That’s a large territory,” said Backus, a lawyer who is authorized to appear before three of Nevada’s tribal courts. “I want to be able to make a pathway for someone who wants one to be able to report it and get it in the national database.”
The bill has three key components:
• That law enforcement accepts reports on adults who go missing from reservations or colonies in Nevada and enters the information into the National Crime Information Center and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. (Backus noted that existing law allows an officer from any jurisdiction to report a missing child.) The National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, is an FBI-maintained clearinghouse of crime data for criminal justice agencies. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, is run by the U.S. Department of Justice and its free, searchable database is available online to the general public.
• That the Nevada Department of Public Safety’s tribal liaison — who connects with tribes and Indigenous-serving organizations — specifically maintains communication with these groups on missing or murdered Indigenous people.
• That all Nevada police officers receive training in taking reports and handling cases relating to missing Indigenous people.
The sooner a missing person gets into a database, the better, Backus said.
Say, for example, someone picks up a vulnerable young woman at a truck stop on a reservation. When they get to Las Vegas, an officer makes a traffic stop. If the girl can’t be reported missing by or to someone off the reservation, during that stop, the girl could just be a passenger.
“But (if) a family member’s able to report that person as missing, then it looks a lot different,” Backus said. “That (driver) gets pulled over, that kid gives the name, and then all of a sudden you’re in a situation where that person is located missing, and we see where they (were) going.”
The Department of Justice acknowledges that Indigenous people disproportionately experience violence, and, relatedly, high rates of missing persons reports. The plight of Indigenous women and girls can be especially bleak.
A 2016 study funded by the Justice Department found that murder rates for Indigenous women were second only to Black women nationwide. FBI data show that 10,123 Indigenous people were reported missing across the U.S. in 2022. More than half were women. The social movement focusing on missing and murdered Indigenous women has expanded to include Indigenous people of any gender.
More detailed information isn’t readily available for Nevadans, though. NamUs contains information on a scant 794 Native Americans in its missing persons database. Five of those Indigenous people were reported missing out of Nevada. Just one of those five has been missing for fewer than 20 years: Casey Louis White, a 64-year-old man of Shoshone heritage last seen in July in Fallon.
A representative with the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada, the governing body of the 28 tribes in Nevada, says the proposal is long overdue and would help prioritize finding missing Indigenous people. A missing person from that demographic historically doesn’t get as much attention, as when say a nontribal woman is missing.
Backus knows there are more missing persons. She describes seeing posts on social media groups for Native Americans in Las Vegas asking for information on missing people.
“We’re doing it on Facebook,” she said. “We need to do better.”
The council says awareness by Nevada lawmakers is long overdue, echoing concerns made in 2019 when they advocated a domestic violence bill.
“For many years the Native American voice and needs (have) not been prioritized,” wrote Clarice Charlie-Hubbard, the council’s director of the family violence prevention programs to lawmakers four years ago. “So I would like to thank you for hearing our needs, our concerns and including our Tribal voices in this important matter.”
