By Bella Davis, New Mexico In Depth
“No more stolen sisters. No more stolen brothers,” advocates and families chanted during a march in Albuquerque on Monday for Indigenous people who have gone missing or died of homicide.
May 5 is recognized as a day of awareness for a crisis of disproportionate violence against Indigenous people in both the U.S. and Canada. At the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, affected families, community organizers and tribal leaders gathered to honor the victims and call for action.
New Mexico has the highest number of cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a 2018 study by the Urban Indian Health Institute found. (That data is limited, though, in part because some law enforcement agencies didn’t respond to the organization’s requests for information.) More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native people have experienced violence in their lifetime, according to a 2016 study funded by the National Institute of Justice.
Many families at Monday’s event have been waiting years for answers.
That includes Lynette Pino (Tesuque Pueblo), whose son Darian Nevayaktewa went missing from the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona in 2008.
New Mexico In Depth first met Pino during a similar event in December 2023. There haven’t been any developments in her son’s case since then, Pino said, but she and her relatives continue to push for updates from investigators and attend rallies.
“I told my niece, because she’s trying to write a letter to the investigators, ‘Don’t let it stress you out. Don’t let it overwhelm you, because it will get to you.’ Just one day at a time,” Pino said. “We’re still just in the same spot.”
Multiple investigators have worked on her son’s case, Pino said, and it feels to her that they’re constantly starting from scratch, making it hard to see any progress.
“We need law enforcement to show up with no assumptions, but with trained officers and dedicated units that can follow up with families,” said Tiffany Jiron (Isleta Pueblo), the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, during a speech. “Families are tired of repeating their stories to new investigators.”
There’s also a need for more resources for families, including mental health support for the children of victims and the relatives raising them, and greater Native representation in government, Jiron said. She pointed to the New Mexico Legislature’s passage earlier this year of a bill creating a Turquoise Alert system for missing Native Americans. The bill was crafted by the state Indian Affairs Department and sponsored by two Indigenous, freshman lawmakers.
David Adams (Sault St. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), an attorney and former federal prosecutor, said tribal nations could do more to address the crisis.
“I’m not counting on the federal government for anything right now,” Adams told the crowd.
The Trump administration has since February announced two efforts to address the crisis. One aims to identify unknown human remains found on or close to reservations, and the other will send more FBI agents to 10 field offices, including Albuquerque, to tackle violent crime on reservations, according to agency press releases.
But the administration has also taken down a report issued by the Not Invisible Act Commission in 2023, which contained recommendations to the federal government.
“I expect the feds to want to eradicate our sovereignty to the highest degree possible through cutting every grant you could possibly imagine, cut every funding you could possibly imagine, with the hope that sovereign nations just disappear, which won’t happen,” Adams continued. “In order for that not to happen, we have to take that sovereignty and actually exercise it by self governing.”
Half of tribes in New Mexico, for example, don’t have laws protecting victims’ rights, Adams said.