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TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR ELECTRICITY GRID-TIED / OFF-GRID SOLAR /BATTERY BACK-UP
Redway’s Office 707-923-2001 | Eureka’s Office 707-445-7913
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By Thadeus Greenson
Build to edge of the document Margins are just a safe area
thad@northcoastjournal.com
HWMA’s EUREKA RECYCLING CENTER IS PERMANENTLY CLOSING
The Humboldt Waste Management Authority’s Eureka Recycling Center will be permanently closing on August 1, 2022. HWMA staff will be identifying suitable sites for relocation, and it is anticipated that these services will return in early 2023. We understand this closure may cause complications and hardships to our customers and only exacerbates the difficulty with disposing of certain hard to recycle items, but we encourage customers to utilize the below alternate disposal locations during this time. This closure will allow HWMA and Humboldt County Jurisdictions to work toward SB 1383 compliance by utilizing this vacated space to conduct organics collection and processing activities. For questions or concerns please email operations@hwma.net or call 707-268-8680. For more info about SB1383 and its requirements visit https://calrecycle.ca.gov/organics/slcp/education/ DROP-OFF LOCATIONS SCRAP METAL Arcata Scrap and Salvage 192 G St Arcata Ca
CONTACT 707-458-5413
Eel River Salvage 850 Riverwalk Dr Fortuna Ca
707-725-6530
FREON APPLIANCES (FOR A FEE) Recology Eel River 965 Riverwalk Dr Fortuna Ca
707-725-5156
TV’S AND E-WASTE (FOR A FEE) Recology Eel River 965 Riverwalk Dr Fortuna Ca
707-725-5156
Humboldt Sanitation 2585 Central Ave McKinleyville Ca
707-839-3285
SOURCE SEPARATED RECYCLING Recology Eel River 965 Riverwalk Dr Fortuna Ca 707-725-5156 Humboldt Sanitation 2585 Central Ave McKinleyville Ca
707-839-3285
Eureka Transfer Station will have mixed recycling bins available for use at a cost of $2 for every 40lbs.
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The Yurok Tribe Offers ‘Blueprint’ to End the MMIP Crisis
NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022 • northcoastjournal.com
B
y the time the news came in mid-October of 2021, Blythe George was already immersed in the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. A Yurok tribal member with a PHD from Harvard serving as an assistant professor of sociology at University of California at Merced, George had already spent more than two years working on the tribe’s project to quantify and examine the MMIP epidemic in California. Funded through a U.S. Department of Justice grant and known as To ‘Kee Skuy ‘Soo Ney-Wo-Chek’ (Yurok for, “I will see you again in a good way”), the project had already published two reports. The first collected data from disparate sources to show Indigenous women and girls go missing at disproportionately high rates, particularly in Northern California, and that their murders are six times less likely to be solved, often due to a “pervasive” failure of law enforcement to investigate due to a myriad of factors, from jurisdictional confusion and rural landscapes to generational trauma and mistrust. The second annual report focused on including victims of all genders and orientations, replacing the term Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls with Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, and areas for prevention and intervention. George and colleagues were researching the program’s third and final report last fall when, during a routine phone call, Program Manager Kendall Allen-Guyer broke the news: Their mutual acquaintance, Allen Guyer’s cousin and George’s friend, Emmilee Risling, a 32-year-old mother of two, a University of Oregon political science graduate and ceremonial singer and dancer, was missing. A Yurok descendent and enrolled Hoopa Valley tribal member, Risling has deep ties on both reservations, including ones that threaded throughout the MMIP project. She’d helped out with George’s first book, was a part of Allen
Guyer’s and even babysat Yurok Tribal Police Chief Gregory O’Rourke. At a July 29 event to commemorate the release of the project’s third report, George explained that Risling’s disappearance hit with devastating impact, at once underscoring the importance of the project’s work to address the MMIP crisis and making it feel somehow hollow. “It feels too little, too late,” George said. But rather than shy away from the fact that the work had suddenly became intensely personal, George and her colleagues leaned into it, deciding to make part of the third report a case study on Risling’s story. Suddenly, the team was experiencing the things they’d be studying from a difference in real time. “The work couldn’t be fast enough and we were learning in real time where it was falling short, where balls were being dropped,” George said. The result of that painstaking work is the 169-page report released July 29, which is designed to serve as a blueprint for addressing the crisis, giving tribes and communities steps to follow to better collect data on the epidemic and investigate cases, while also working to prevent them from happening altogether. It includes step-by-step guides on how to create customized community response plans that can be scaled and adapted, as well as a handful of concrete state policy proposals to remove “systemic barriers” that hamper tribes’ ability to keep their people safe. First, the report calls on the Legislature to pass a bill by Assemblymember James Ramos that would create a “Feather Alert,” similar to the Amber and Silver alert systems created to spread word about at-risk missing children and seniors but for tribal members. The report also supports Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed $15 million budget proposal for the Yurok Tribal Court to build a culturally informed wellness center, which could
