APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Community members gathered in Appleton’s Houdini Plaza for a vigil to remember and honor missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls Friday evening.
There was a call for action for state legislators to move Assembly Bill 548 and Senate Bill 493 out of committee.
The state bills would create a task force to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG). No one knows how many Indigenous females are missing or have been murdered because federal and state data is inaccurate.
“The bill is asking to find out what is the real data, how come the data is so difficult to get, and make recommendations on how to fix that. The other half, then, is to address the continued level of violence that Indigenous women face in their life. Eighty-four percent of Indigenous women will be involved in domestic violence. It’s an astounding figure,” Renee Gralewicz, an Indigenous woman and Brothertown Indian Nation Peacemaker, said.
The bill would provide $30,000 for the task force.
In the United States, homicide is the third-leading cause of death for young Indigenous women and girls. On some reservations, federal studies have shown women are killed at more than 10 times the national average.
Right now the state bills are being held in committee with no public hearing in sight.
“If they don’t have hearings this week, we won’t get a chance to vote on it this week and it will die this week and won’t be able to be brought forward again until next year,” State Rep. Amanda Stuck, D-Appleton, said.
Stuck introduced the bill after Gralewicz and Lisa Hurst, an Oneida woman, contacted her.
Stuck says other bills are getting hearings, but not these.
“It’s all about politics. Simply because I’m a Democrat and there’s Republican majority, they don’t want to let us have a hearing on this bill,” Stuck said.
FOX 11 reached out to the Republican chairmen and vice chairmen on both bills.
State Rep. Swearingen, State Rep. Tauchen, State Sen. Stroebel and State Sen. Kapenga did not return those calls.
There is a federal task force in the works to address the MMIWG crisis. Stuck thinks the committee chairs will say the federal action makes the state bills unnecessary.
“Attorney General Barr selected 11 states to access the pilot program to investigate the databases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. We are not one of those 11 states,” Gralewicz said. “Our legislators are going to let the federal government try to solve Wisconsin’s problem. They’re going to wait on Attorney General Barr’s task force to solve a Wisconsin problem.”
Indigenous people and supporters want action.
“I choose to interpret that as we’re not important enough,” Gralewicz said about the committees holding the bills.
Gralewicz has a backup plan if the bills don’t go through this week.
“There is a special committee on tribal relations that will become active in the summer session this year. We will work with that committee in hopes that they will pick up this issue for us,” Gralewicz said.
Wisconsin is home to 12 tribal nations.
In October, FOX 11 obtained data on murdered Indigenous people in Wisconsin from the state Department of Justice with a Freedom of Information Act request.
We requested “copies of data on all cases of missing persons, homicides, suspicious deaths and deaths in custody” involving Native Americans of all ages. We also requested to know if each case remains open or closed.
The DOJ denied the majority of the request, saying it does not track missing people, cannot limit results by “solved” or “unsolved,” does not collect location or victim name information and does not track data before 1997.
The data we received was a list of homicides from 1997 to 2018.
There were 69 homicides listed. After some fact checking, we found at least seven cases were inaccurate.
Some cases were not homicides and the victims were still alive. In other cases, homicides were reported more than once.
The Wisconsin DOJ said it is not responsible for inaccuracies in data. It is up to the reporting agency to input the correct information. The DOJ said it would follow up on the inaccuracies we found.
Advocates say they have found several murdered women who are not accounted for in the state’s DOJ database.
