Maine tribal leaders highlight crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women

Indigenous women in the U.S. are murdered at 10 times the national average, and they also disappear at a disproportionate rate — often without a missing person report even being filed, leaving Indigenous families searching for answers.

There is a growing consensus, both nationally and in Maine, that this is the result of a legacy of institutionalized disregard for Indigenous lives that must be addressed.

On Tuesday, a coalition of Indigenous leaders and local groups devoted to ending violence against women met under the dome of the State House to commemorate Maine’s first National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), which followed the annual national day of observance on May 5.

“If there’s a need for us to come together. We most certainly come together. Solidarity, it comes naturally to us as a community,” said Rep. Rena Newell, the Passamaquoddy Nation’s tribal representative in Augusta. Newell, along with members or Wabanaki Women’s Coalition, the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, the Tribal Domestic and Sexual Violence Advocacy Centers and the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault, organized Maine’s inaugural day of awareness.

This year, Maine joined Arizona, Minnesota, and Washington in recognizing the issue.

“This is an issue that is rooted in the earliest days of colonialism,” said Donna Brown of the Wabanaki Women’s Coalition. “And it also continues through the stereotyping of native women as sexual objects.”

Government’s failure to coordinate

The violence that Indigenous women and girls face is alarming: Murder is their third leading cause of death. One in two have experienced sexual violence, and more than four in five have been physically, sexually or psychologically abused.

On top of this, the Urban Indian Health Institute found that the federal government is largely failing to track missing Indigenous women. Of the 5,712 Indigenous women and girls who were reported missing as of 2016, only 116 cases were filed into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

Tribal lands in Maine are sovereign and run their own public safety departments. Those law enforcement agencies are often understaffed and underfunded, Brown explained, and tribal governments’ access to federal programs is often not the same as states and local governments. As a result, when Indigenous women go missing, there is often a lack of coordination with federal agencies.

Brown is concerned about the protocols in place to protect women in her community, the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation.

“I don’t know what my community could do,” she said, adding that the persistent stigmatization of Indigenous women by law enforcement further contributes to the mishandling of their cases. “It’s this idea that Native women live these high-risk lifestyles.”

One family’s legacy of trauma

One woman who travelled to Augusta on Tuesday, Pat Graffam of the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation, said that her cousin, 37-year-old Melissa Altvater, was found by police in southern Maine having succumbed to a drug overdose. But the family had many questions, and they said the police had very little information to share.

“We just took it for that,” she said, but then an autopsy raised even more questions. It revealed that she was found in a bathtub and that her cause of death was drowning, contradicting an earlier account they heard that she was found in a car. The mysterious details surrounding her cousin’s final days have not given her family closure, Graffam said. “We’re still waiting for the truth.”

“We just want our suspicious deaths investigated,” said Jennifer Galipeau, a Penobscot Nation tribal council member who organized a MMIWG walk on the Indian Island reservation on Sunday.

Graffam’s family has experience with the trauma left behind by violence. Her mother, Judy Altvater, was targeted as a teenager in an infamous incident in 1965, retold by the Portland Press Herald in 2014, when her home on the Pleasant Point reservation was entered by five young white hunters from Massachusetts looking for Indigenous women.

“They were there to buy women,” Graffam explained.

The ordeal escalated over the course of several hours and ended when the men fled after severely beating Graffam’s grandfather and murdering his friend. None of the hunters were punished. An all-white jury in Washington County said the murder was in self-defense. Graffam’s grandfather and uncle both committed suicide in the decade that followed.

Calling for action

Indigenous leaders in Maine and other local advocates used the occasion of the state’s first MMIWG day to highlight efforts at the national level to address violence against Indigenous women and girls.

Savanna’s Act, named for 22-year-old Savanna Marie Greywind of North Dakota who went missing and was found murdered in 2017, has been introduced in Congress. The act would improve coordination between law enforcement agencies, and require the federal government to account for the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland (D-New Mexico), who along with U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kansas) are the first Native American women to serve in Congress, has also introduced legislation that would include Indigenous women in the Violence Against Women Act.

(Top photo: Passamaquoddy Nation Rep. Rena Newell and advocates at the State House. | Dan Neumann)