NORTH DAKOTA ( KXNET ) — For centuries, a crisis has been weaving its way through the continent affecting the lives of America’s most vulnerable.

And yet the cries of the hundreds of thousands are met with a deafening silence, leaving the issue underestimated, unrecognized, and hidden.

That is, until today when KX News dives into the sorrow and resiliency of Native American communities touched by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons, or MMIP, crisis to show that the issue is not a cultural problem.

As KX News’s Paige Gilmar shows us in our first Native American Heritage series, it’s a human problem for all of us.

Throughout the estimated 326 tribal lands in the United States, a resounding sentiment has shaken the foundations of tribes to their bones, and that — simply put — is: enough is enough.

“It’s time. It’s way past due for us to really start working on these issues. And we need leaders to care enough to take care of these issues. It’s not normal. It’s not okay. It is not the status quo. It’s not the culture. We need to do better, and we want better,” said the CEO and Founder of Native Inc., Lorraine Davis.

Since the earliest examples of colonization in America, Native American communities have experienced disproportionately high numbers of assault, abduction, and murder of their tribal members and this “old world problem” has continued to grip our modern society with frightening statistics and details, and yet, what has been done about it?

“Still today, we’re suffering, and nothing is being done. This impacts us in our hearts. We as Indigenous women, we as Indigenous mothers and fathers, we need to make a difference. We need our voices to be heard,” said Amber Warman, the domestic violence advocate and coordinator at Native Inc. “My cousin was murdered in Akron, Ohio a few years ago by his girlfriend. So he was Native; she was non-Native. There was no real investigation. They were using drugs and alcohol, and due to that fact, there was no investigation.”

According to the Office of Justice, Native women face murder at rates more than 10 times than the national average.

The CDC reports that Native men also had the second highest rate of homicide compared to other races.

Similarly, four out of five Native women, or nearly 80%, of Native women will experience violence in their lifetime.

However, research is still missing on how high violence and murder rates impact Native women living in urban areas, though recent data shows that 71% of all Native people live in cities, not tribal lands.

“What we’re talking about here deeply impacts me because my father almost killed me multiple times. I was strangled as a child, so when I think about what women have gone through, I personally have been through this stuff, and it is not easy,” Warman explained.

But Native communities are as much bottlenecked by murder as they are by the missing.

According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there are about 1,500 missing Native people entered into the National Crime Information Center’s database.

However, 4,200 cases of missing and murdered Native people have yet to be solved.

Still, reports show that there is no reliable count on how many Native people are missing or murdered, as law enforcement often misclassifies bodies as another racial identity other than Native American.

Yet despite this shockwave of data, Native communities say that this crisis receives scant media coverage and that cases are often mishandled by law enforcement, especially when other missing persons cases receive greater attention.

“Sometimes I think it’s skin color. I hate to say it, but with some of these cases, they’re a little bit lighter skin color than us,” explained Scott Davis, the former North Dakota Indian Affairs commissioner.

As more and more Indigenous people are lending a voice to a silent crisis, non-Natives wonder why this problem continues to linger with ferocious force. But for Native people the answer is easy: it starts with trauma.

“We’ve always heard that hurt people hurt people. And so, in that case, we need to address the trauma, so that this vicious cycle stops,” said Lorraine.

Built upon centuries of historical wrongs like massacres, oppression, boarding schools, and more, a collective trauma exists within Native American communities creating a vicious cycle of substance abuse, violence, and mental illness that then feeds into the MMIP pipeline.

As Scott Davis notes, tribal lands are ill-equipped to handle this, often due to unrealistic state legislation that puts mandates on such things as how many hospital beds are allowed in inpatient care.

Issues of substance abuse are made worse by the fact that drug cartels and dealers often set up shop on tribal lands to get around state law enforcement since these lands operate under tribal law.

In direct relation to MMIP, there is simply not enough tribal law enforcement to handle the amount of missing and murdered cases they get, even when working with federal law enforcement when these cases are under its jurisdiction.

“I strongly believe that we need more law enforcement. Law enforcement is under-staffed and under-funded, and it makes it hard to receive the accurate training that they need when they’re living in survival mode themselves. They’re getting up every day, 6 a.m., working a 12-hour shift. Not knowing if they have backup, not knowing if their resources are going to be met,” explained Warman.

But a problem as old as time comes with a simple solution and it all starts with togetherness and collaboration.

“I was scratching my head for years of how can we curb this. How can we prevent without impeding upon tribal sovereignty, you know? Well, the tribes have to decide, leaders have to decide to allow the state to come in, allow the resources to come in and to patrol, to investigate in unison with tribal law enforcement. That’s all we’re saying. That’s all we’ve ever said,” said Scott.

And in this way, Native people will move the monolith forward to a better and brighter future.

Lorraine Davis’ nonprofits, Native Inc. and the Native Development Center, provide Native Americans help when it comes to dealing with unemployment, domestic violence and sexual assault, homelessness, health problems, and more.

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