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Home > Desert Oracle Radio > Local chapter of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People members speak out about the complications between tribal and federal law
Podcast: Desert Oracle Radio
Episode:

Local chapter of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People members speak out about the complications between tribal and federal law
Category: Society & Culture
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-07-24 16:26:34
Description:

After last weekend’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People painting and storytelling event at Wind Walkers Medicine Wheel in Joshua Tree, President and Co-Founder of MMIP Raising Awareness Hester Van Hooven Ward and the organization’s “support vessel” Conan Allen sat down with reporter Gabriel Hart to shed further light on the organization and the nation’s epidemic of disproportionate violence toward our indigenous population and its underreporting from the media.

Hester says their local chapter of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People formed this year in February and became non-profit in April, in time for their march in Palm Springs on May 5, part of a national march occurring in various regions in the country. The goal of the MMIP is to raise awareness on the underreported crisis of missing and murdered indigenous people; with women, children, and two-spirit (or non-binary) people being more targeted than men.

In the U.S., more than 5700 indigenous women were reported missing in 2016, yet only 116 were officially recorded in federal databases. Since 2016, the number of murdered and missing has drastically increased while the official reports per Federal databases remain. Homicide is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women, and Native American women face murder rates at ten times higher than the national average. Due to inconsistency between tribal law and federal law, tribal law is prohibited from trying and persecuting non-native offenders on tribal land, explained in further detail by Hester and Conan:

“Tribal law and federal law have serious complications. Basically, what’s happening now is that if somebody goes on to the reservation and, say, murders a girlfriend or somebody, then they can leave, and they cannot be prosecuted because they’re not of the reservation. That’s happening a lot and people are just looking the other way,” said Hester.

“So different laws apply because they’re sovereign nations?”

“Yes, but they’re only like “sovereign” because they can’t try the perpetrator, so essentially it’s like a free for all,” she said.

Conan added, “When you think about the resources available to the sovereign nation or to the reservations it’s nowhere near the same that you would find even in a small town local police department and so just like how even local police departments can get easily overwhelmed when you’re dealing with limited resources and limited access to cutting-edge technologies that help solve these crimes. And then also, the inner connectivity of relationships, you know, the kind of the hierarchy that is faced where tribal police only have but so much at their disposal. They only have such limited resources to operate within and then when there is that disconnect from the federal level or from outside the reservation local departments, things just sort of fall by the wayside.”

Beyond raising awareness on a local level, Hester and Conan say the goal is to coordinate with other MMIP groups in California to organize next year’s May 5 march, with the focus on eventually bringing the march to Washington. 

For more information on the MMIP, please visit mmipraisingawareness.org
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