Kansas bill ‘good first step’ to address epidemic of crimes against Indigenous people 

Rep. Ponka-We Victors said anytime she travels long distances, she checks in regularly with her family so they know she’s safe. When she’s on the road, one statistic lingers in her mind: murder is the third-leading cause of death in American Indian and Alaskan Native women.

Indigenous people go missing or are murdered at a higher rate than any other ethnicity, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute. Most of these go unreported to the U.S. Department of Justice’s missing person database.

“It seems like nobody cares or nobody’s doing anything about it,” Victors told Kansas representatives during a hearing on the bill this week.

Now, the Kansas House will consider a bill that would allow the attorney general to coordinate training for law enforcement on missing and murdered Indigenous people. Victors, who also serves as the vice chair of the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators, has worked on addressing the epidemic with other Indigenous lawmakers across the country.

The proposed law was passed by the House with support from all 125 representatives last year, but died in the Senate when the Legislature went into recess due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The measure would call for Attorney General Derek Schmidt — who supports the bill — to consult the Native American Indian tribes, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement organizations to coordinate the training.

Currently, Kansas knows of five missing Indigenous people, KBI Executive Officer Robert Jacobs told lawmakers at the hearing.

Discrepancies exist in how cases are reported, according to a study by the Urban Indian Health Institute.

The study found that 5,712 Indigenous people were reported missing or murdered in the U.S. in 2016 alone. But when the institute asked for that information in open records requests, just 506 cases were identified since 2000 across 29 states. Around 75% of those cases had no tribal affiliation listed in the report.

“Our nation’s history has a tragic story to tell about how we have valued Indigenous lives, and I think that now that we know better, know more, we can do better,” said Sarah Rust-Martin, policy director for the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.

“This bill is not going to fix the problem, but it is a good first step in getting us in the right direction to really understand the scope of the problem.”

Victors, a Democrat from Wichita, was the only Indigenous representative last year. Now, she is joined by two other Indigenous women in the Kansas House: freshman representatives Christina Haswood, D-Lawrence, and Stephanie Byers, D-Wichita. Victors co-sponsored the bill with Haswood.

Victors and Haswood also sponsored a bill to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day, a move seven other states and dozens of cities have made to officially change the designation of the day.

“I really am excited to see bills like this that have been introduced previously are showing up each and every year,” Haswood said in a previous interview with the Star. “We’re still fighting for it, as well as empowering Native peoples and Indigenous peoples to help us amplify this.”