NATION/WORLD
East Oregonian
A6
Thursday, February 14, 2019
States weigh bills addressing Native deaths
Legislation in response
to increased focus on
indigenous women
By MARY HUDETZ
Associated Press
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —
Lawmakers in at least seven
states have introduced legislation
to address the unsolved deaths
and disappearances of numerous
Native American women and girls.
The legislation calls for state-
funded task forces and other
actions amid deepening concerns
that law enforcement agencies lack
the data and resources to under-
stand the scope of the crisis.
On some reservations, federal
studies have shown Native Ameri-
can women are killed at more than
10 times the national average.
“This is not about a trend that is
popular this year,” said state Rep.
Derrick Lente, a Democrat who is
co-sponsoring a measure in New
Mexico.
“It’s really to bring to light the
number of indigenous people who
are going missing.”
An Associated Press review of
the bills found that mostly Native
American lawmakers in Minne-
sota, the Dakotas, Montana, Wash-
ington, New Mexico and Arizona
Star Tribune/Anthony Souffle, File
In this Jan. 19, 2019, file photo, Rene Ann Goodrich, of Superior with Miss-
ing and Murdered Indigenous Women, leads the procession though the
streets of St. Paul during the Women’s March at the Minnesota Capitol in
St. Paul, Minn.
have sponsored measures on the
issue.
In AP interviews last year, fam-
ilies described feeling dismissed
after initially reporting cases of
missing female relatives to police.
An examination of records found
there was no single government
database tracking all known
cases of missing Native American
women.
In Montana, a bill named for
Hanna Harris — a 21-year-old
found slain on the Northern Chey-
enne Reservation in July 2013 —
proposes that state authorities hire
a specialist responsible for enter-
ing cases into databases.
Under Hanna’s Act, the state
Department of Justice employee
would also serve as a liaison for
tribal, federal and state authorities
and families after a Native Ameri-
can is reported missing.
“To us we’ve seen study bill
after study bill,” said Rep. Rae
Peppers, a Democrat. “Why waste
money on a study bill when the
issue was right in front of us?”
Peppers, whose district spans
the Northern Cheyenne and Crow
reservations, lives in Lame Deer,
a small community where Harris’
body was found days after she was
first reported missing.
Peppers said she and other law-
makers decided to name the mea-
sure for Harris in part because her
mother had led an early push for
more awareness of the cases.
Other cases in Peppers’ rural
district include the death of
14-year-old Henny Scott. Her body
was found by a search party two
weeks after she went missing in
December.
Harris and Scott’s families
complained authorities were slow
to search for the victims after they
were reported missing.
“It’s always been this way.
We’ve always had missing women
and children,” Peppers said. “The
voices are just louder now.”
In New Mexico, Lente said his
measure would call for the New
Mexico Indian Affairs Depart-
ment to lead a task force joined by
authorities across jurisdictions.
The legislation was welcomed
by Meskee Yatsayte, an advocate
in New Mexico for families with
missing loved ones on the Navajo
Nation. She said she hoped law-
makers and officials would include
victims’ families and advocates in
their discussions.
“It’s a good step forward,” Yat-
sayte said. “But it can’t be some-
thing where they meet and then
nothing is done about it.”
Bills in South Dakota and North
Dakota include mandates for law
enforcement training programs on
conducting investigations.
Rep. Tamara St. John, a South
Dakota Republican and member of
the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, said
she’s co-sponsoring the measure to
put a spotlight on the cases.
Rep. Gina Mosbrucker, a
Washington state Republican,
introduced a bill signed into law
last year that requires the Wash-
ington State Patrol to provide an
estimate by June of how many
Native women are missing in
the state. That measure paved
the way for similar legislation in
other states.
This year she proposed another
measure that would require the
state patrol to have two liaisons on
staff to serve tribes seeking infor-
mation about cases.
“I truly believe this is an intense
emergency and we have to put this
on the front burner,” Mosbrucker
said Tuesday. “What we learned is
we didn’t want to wait.”
Strangers’ suspicions and police reports
rankle parents of mixed-race children
that McCain, who adopted
a daughter from Bangla-
desh, would make the
same something’s-not-right
assumption that mixed-race
families grapple with con-
stantly. It’s not always sum-
moning the police. Other,
more common ways of call-
ing out the differences sting
too.
For Rafferty, the ques-
tions are frustrating and
offensive: “Whose baby is
that?” from a woman in the
grocery store. “Where’s her
beautiful golden skin and
curly hair?” from a client
at the office, who had a dis-
tinct idea of how a biracial
child should look.
And if she pushes a
stroller on Manhattan’s
Upper West Side, everyone
assumes she’s the nanny. At
the park, neither the moth-
ers nor the caregivers know
whether to embrace her in
their camp.
DeCory, a 38-year-old
police officer outside Min-
neapolis who has Afri-
can-American and Native
American ancestry, said the
anxiety between mom and
baby is a constant challenge
for mixed-race families that
isn’t talked about enough.
Until her daughter could
speak, DeCory carried her
birth certificate and even a
photo of her giving birth,
just in case she had to prove
that her light-haired, blue-
eyed child was truly her
own. As Mila has gotten
older, her hair has dark-
ened. She’s now 11.
DeCory didn’t face the
same anxieties with her
other two children, who
have darker skin closer to
her own.
“I would get anxiety
going out with her in pub-
lic,” DeCory said. “I was
very reluctant to breastfeed
her in public or do anything
that would draw attention
to me.”
By JONATHAN J.
COOPER
Associated Press
PHOENIX — Amber-
katherine DeCory car-
ried photos of her daugh-
ter’s birth certificate in
her diaper bag in case she
had to prove that the light-
er-skinned girl was really
hers. Cydnee Rafferty
gives her husband a let-
ter explaining that he has
permission to travel with
their 5-year-old biracial
daughter.
Families like theirs
were not surprised when
they heard that Cindy
McCain had reported a
woman to police for pos-
sible human trafficking
because the widow of Sen.
John McCain saw her at the
airport with a toddler of a
different ethnicity. Officers
investigated and found no
evidence of wrongdoing.
Parents whose children
have a different complexion
say they regularly face sus-
picion and the assumption
that they must be watching
someone else’s kids.
“This is a problem that,
to be frank, well-mean-
ing white people get them-
selves into,” said Rafferty,
who is African-Ameri-
can and whose husband is
white. “They think, ‘If it
doesn’t make sense to me it
must not be right.”
After McCain’s report,
Rafferty posted to Twit-
ter a selfie of her with her
two children, ages 5 and 5
months.
“I know they don’t look
like me, but I assure you,
I grew them in my belly,”
Rafferty wrote to McCain.
Earlier this month,
McCain claimed on Phoe-
nix radio station KTAR
that the woman was wait-
ing for a man who bought
the child to get off a plane
and that her Jan. 30 report
Cydnee Rafferty via AP
This January 2019 photo released by Cydnee Rafferty
shows herself and her two children, Devin, 5, and Leo, 5
months old, in New York. Rafferty, who is black and whose
husband is white, sends a letter with her husband explain-
ing that he has permission to travel with their 5-year-old
biracial daughter.
to police had stopped the
trafficking. She urged peo-
ple to speak up if they see
anything odd.
“I came in from a trip I’d
been on,” McCain said. “I
spotted — it looked odd —
it was a woman of a differ-
ent ethnicity than the child,
this little toddler she had.
Something didn’t click with
me.’”
She said she spoke about
her suspicions with police
“and they went over and
questioned her. And, by
God, she was trafficking
that kid.”
Phoenix Police Sgt.
Armando Carbajal con-
firmed
that
McCain
requested a welfare check
on a child at the airport, but
said officers found “no evi-
dence of criminal conduct
or child endangerment.”
McCain has declined
interview requests and
has not said if anything
besides the difference in
ethnicity led her to suspect
trafficking.
A spokesman for the
McCain Institute for Inter-
national Leadership at Ari-
zona State University said
McCain was “only thinking
about the possible ramifica-
tions of a criminal act, not
the ethnicity of the possible
trafficker.”
After police debunked
her claim, McCain reit-
erated the importance of
speaking up when some-
thing looks wrong.
“I apologize if any-
thing else I have said on
this matter distracts from
‘if you see something, say
something,’” she wrote on
Twitter.
Rafferty, a 38-year-old
New Yorker, was surprised
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CAPE CANAVERAL,
Fla. — NASA’s Opportu-
nity, the Mars rover that
was built to operate for just
three months but kept going
and going, rolling across
the rocky red soil, was pro-
nounced dead Wednesday,
15 years after it landed on
the planet.
The six-wheeled vehicle
that helped gather critical
evidence that ancient Mars
might have been hospitable
to life was remarkably spry
up until eight months ago,
when it was finally doomed
by a ferocious dust storm.
Flight controllers tried
numerous times to make
contact, and sent one final
series of recovery com-
mands Tuesday night, along
with one last wake-up song,
Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be See-
ing You,” in a somber exer-
cise that brought tears to
team members’ eyes. There
was no response from space,
only silence.
Thomas Zurbuchen, head
of NASA’s science missions,
broke the news at what
amounted to a funeral at
the space agency’s Jet Pro-
pulsion Laboratory in Pas-
adena, California, announc-
ing the demise of “our
beloved Opportunity.”
“This is a hard day,”
project manager John Cal-
las said. “Even though it’s
a machine and we’re saying
goodbye, it’s still very hard
and very poignant, but we
had to do that. We came to
that point.”
The two slow-moving,
golf cart-size rovers landed
on opposite sides of the
planet in 2004 for a mis-
sion meant to last 90 sols,
or Mars days, which are 39
minutes longer than Earth
days.
In the end, Opportunity
outlived its twin by eight
years and set endurance and
distance records that could
stand for decades. Trundling
along until communication
ceased last June, Oppor-
tunity roamed a record 28
miles and worked longer
than any other lander in the
history of space exploration.
Opportunity
was
a
robotic geologist, equipped
with cameras and instru-
ments at the end of a
mechanical arm for analyz-
ing rocks and soil. Its great-
est achievement was dis-
covering, along with Spirit,
evidence that ancient Mars
had water flowing on its sur-
face and might have been
capable of sustaining micro-
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