The state government’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force discussed ways to collect better data for missing Indigenous women in Wisconsin at its first ever meeting Friday.
A member of each of the state’s 11 tribal nations, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes attended the meeting.
After the state Legislature failed to pass a bill to form a similar task force earlier this year, Kaul created this task force in response to growing concerns surrounding the rising number of missing Indigenous women and underreported numbers to law enforcement. Nationally, only 116 missing cases were logged to the United States Department of Justice compared to 5,712 reported cases.
There is no data available to account for the number of murdered or missing Indigenous women in Wisconsin, according to the Green Bay Press Gazette.
“Effectively addressing the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Wisconsin will require law enforcement, tribal leaders, victim advocates and others to work collaboratively to collect data and identify solutions,” Kaul said.
In addition to updating data collection techniques, the task force aims to investigate why these crimes occur, the response from social service organizations and the role that federal, state and tribal jurisdictions play in collecting and reporting the data.
“We don’t have a great sense of exactly where the numbers are [and] exactly where it’s happening because data collected by the state isn’t really collected through that lens,” Kaul said.
Many tribal women never find justice as their predators often evade law enforcement due to conflicting laws between the state and tribal nations — mainly offenses by non-Natives on tribal land.
“The most startling part about this too is that the majority of these atrocities are being committed by non-Native people, but on Native land,” Barnes said.
Meeting participants acknowledged that crimes committed by non-natives on native people was, is and continues to be a major issue.
“It's been hundreds of years that Native women have been abused and lost and stolen and so it’s good to start this locally for Wisconsin, but also nationally,” Tribal Legislator Myrna Warrington of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin said.
Oneida Nation Councilwoman Jennifer Webster, a member of the task force, said “it’s about time” for a body like the task force to be formed.
“We’re so appreciative of the attorney general, of realizing that there really is a crisis out there, and acknowledging there is a crisis and we need to do something about it,” Webster said.
The task force ultimately strives to plan out potential solutions for these problems that could be implemented on a statewide level. Kaul has previously said he hopes the group can publish a report sometime in 2021, though he didn’t give an exact date and noted the pandemic may change the schedule.
For now, the task force will continue meetings quarterly.
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