Indigenous Women Keep Going Missing JANE CROW: The Story of Pauli Murray

nadia hargett Staff Writer

There is an ongoing epidemic of Indigenous women going missing and being murdered in the United States and Canada. Indigenous women have been the consistent targets of violence and hatred, with their proximity to poverty and homelessness further emphasizing this issue. Indigenous women experience domestic violence at an estimated rate of 10 times higher than the national average for all races. The rates are higher the more impoverished the community is. Unfortunately, loopholes in tribal law only serve to further fester this violence.

There is inconsistency in the relationship between tribal, local and federal law enforcement, primarily due to the ruling of Oliphant v. Suquamish in 1978, which made it so that Native American courts have no criminal jurisdiction over non-native offenders. Therefore, if a non-native person enters the authority of a Native reservation and commits a crime, the Native courts cannot legally charge them. This has created a serious issue amongst Native women and has subsequently made them major targets for crimes such as rape, assault, kidnapping and sex trafficking at the hands of nonnative criminals.

Data related to missing and murdered Indigenous women is difficult to gather in the U.S. The race and ethnicity of Indigenous people are often mismarked in law enforcement records, and forensics are often not accurately collected from unidentified victims. This causes a myriad of cases to go cold due to the lack of “crucial” evidence or because local law enforcement does not forward said evidence to the federal justice system for further investigation. Violent crimes committed within reservations must be tried by the federal government due to The Major Crimes Act of 1885, which limits the jurisdictions of tribal law enforcement.

According to the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI), so far at least 506 Indigenous women and girls have gone missing in 71 American cities. 95 percent of these cases were never covered by the media, and the circumstances surrounding their disappearances are largely unknown. 506 is very likely to be a gross underestimate of the Indigenous women that have gone missing due to underreporting, and many law enforcement agencies lack information about the trends of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The UIHI reported that in 2016, 5,712 cases of missing women in the U.S. were reported to the National Crime Information Center, but only 116 were logged into the U.S. Department of Justice’s missing persons database. This truly displays the American legal system’s consistent disregard for minority groups and the crimes committed against them and shows that little has been done to truly mitigate these distressing problems.

In Canada, a similar theme is happening.

In 2019, a 1,200-page report was leaked to CBC that highlighted the disproportionate deaths of Indigenous women and blamed it on colonialism and government inaction.

An inquiry was performed in response to the report, concluding that 1,200 Indigenous women had been murdered or abducted since 1980. Many activists believe the number is much higher due to underreporting, much like in the U.S. Activists believe these cases lack proper investigation due to police bias, especially cases such as Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton.

Pickton confessed to killing 49 women spanning from 1983 to 2002, eventually charged with 24 of his murders in 2007. Most of his victims were prostitutes and uproar of more community action within tribal regions. Some groups within tribal regions and reservations, such as the Navajo Nation, have taken the initiative of looking for missing Indigenous women themselves. They’re also working towards pushing the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Oliphant v. Suquamish so that non-natives who commit crimes against Native peoples will be able to be prosecuted within tribal law, likely bringing the rate of crime committed by them down. Organizations have been formed to combat these problems as well.

She wore many faces — an unabashed feminist, legal scholar, civil rights activist, prolific writer, Episcopal priest and more. Pauli Murray was a multifaceted, multihyphenate revolutionary in American history, and yet, few say nor remember her name — let's change that.

Indigenous women, and the families of the victims strongly believe that he went so long without being caught because of this. There have been attempts to draw these issues to lawmakers and government officials. In the US, states such as Washington, Wisconsin, Arizona and Minnesota have taken action to pass legislation that would increase awareness surrounding disproportionate crimes against Indigenous women and keep track of missing and murdered Indigenous women through databases. In 2020, Congress passed two bipartisan laws in 2020 to improve the federal response to crimes against Indigenous women. Former president Donald Trump started a task force called Operation Lady Justice that focused on missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. However, the federal law making it so that non-native offenders of crimes in tribal jurisdictions can’t be tried and charged by tribal law makes it difficult for states to work to truly resolve the issue.

Activists have been working the most to raise awareness. Indigenous activists have held protests and vigils to honor Indigenous women who’ve been murdered or have gone missing for years. They also have been using social media to raise awareness as well, especially among victims and their families, which has created an

The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) is a nonprofit organization that's main focus is to end gender-based violence toward Native American women through grassroots advocacy, and to provide health resources to Native women as well. The Sisters in Spirit initiative, created by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, was a one-year campaign created to more effectively research and document statistics of violence against Indigenous women in Canada and bring awareness to how Indigenous women are treated to bring change to public policy.

Mending the Sacred Hoop is another nonprofit organization that addresses issues concerning violence and sexual victimization of Indigenous women. These are just a few examples among many others.

It is of the utmost importance that we, whether Indigenous or not, bring awareness to these issues. For hundreds of years, Indigenous people have been discriminated against and mistreated by the U.S. government and the Canadian government, and it left them vulnerable to things such as kidnapping, rape, assault and murder. There is no reason that non-native people should be allowed to go to their tribal lands and commit heinous crimes against them, but face no punishment because of federal jurisdiction laws. Repost the accounts bringing awareness to these issues, engage with their organizations and protest with them. Although it may seem like we can’t do much, if we stand together hand and hand with our Indigenous sisters and brothers and use our voices to amplify theirs, perhaps we can make a difference that can change their lives for the better.

Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray was born Nov. 20, 1910, in Baltimore but was raised in Durham by her aunts and grandparents. The granddaughter of a slave and great-granddaughter of a slave owner, Murray was a fair-skinned Black girl living in the deep South. She witnessed Jim Crow laws — segregated streetcars, lunch counters, movie theaters and schools. Once Murray learned the system, she began actively resisting it by walking to school and boycotting theaters.

In 1926, Murray graduated at the top of her class from Hillside High School and set her sights on Columbia University. But, to her dismay and frustration, Murray soon learned that Columbia did not accept women. Murray persisted in her goal to move north and looked to Hunter College, a women's college in New York. However, Black high schools in North Carolina, such as Hillside, only went to 11th grade and did not offer the credits Murray needed to attend Hunter. Determined, she moved to Queens, New York, with her cousin and attended Richmond Hill High School where she was the only Black student out of 4,000.

As a child, Murray experimented with names like Paul, Pete and Dude. While at Hunter, she settled upon “Pauli” to better reflect her gender identity. Perceived as a woman, Murray endured a lifelong struggle with her gender and attraction to women in a heteronormative society. Non-binary, transgender and other umbrella terms for people with non-conforming gender identities did not enter American vocabulary until the 1960s. Thus, in the words of her aunt, Pauli was a “little boy-girl.”

Rocking a short haircut and pants, Pauli traversed New York in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way, she encountered fellow revolutionaries such as

Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and A. Phillip Randolph.

In 1933, she graduated from Hunter College with a degree in English literature during another significant period in U.S. history — the Great Depression. In and out of jobs, Murray briefly worked with the National Urban League and the Workers Progress Administration where she learned about the labor movement which she would later be a part of.

In 1938, Pauli Murray applied to UNC-Chapel Hill to study sociology knowing that the university, like many other institutions, did not accept students of color. Six days later, she received a letter from Chapel Hill that read “members of your race are not admitted to the University.”

In response to the letter of rejection and racism, she started a media campaign to enter the all-white graduate school. Murray petitioned the NAACP to sue the university and mailed a letter of frustration to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Although the NAACP was unable to assist her, the first lady wrote back with words of encouragement for Pauli to keep fighting the system.

Pauli termed the dual plight of Black women “Jane Crow.” During her time at Howard, she led student protests including a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Howard at the top of her class in 1944, Murray was denied post-graduate education at Harvard University because of her gender. She went to the University of California at Berkeley instead and earned her master's.

Constantly constrained by labels of gender and race, Murray realized her passions lay in challenging the patriarchy and fighting the brutal systems of Black oppression.

“I’ve lived to see my lost causes found,” Murray said.

In 1940, Murray and her friend refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in Richmond, Virginia. She was arrested, jailed and swore she would never return.

Yet, in 1941, Murray was back in Richmond on behalf of the Workers Defense League to raise money for a Black sharecropper, Odell Waller. Sentenced to death for shooting a white man he worked for, Waller’s claim of self-defense fell on the neglectful ears of an all-white jury. Murray fervently fought for Waller and gave an emotional speech to a crowd that included Thurgood Marshall and a Howard law professor. Encouraged by the two, she enrolled at Howard University’s law school in 1941 determined to destroy Jim Crow.

In 1946, Murray became the Deputy Attorney General of California, making her the first African American in the state attorney general's office. Soon after, she wrote “States’ Laws on Color and Race,” which Marshall referred to as the “bible” for lawyers working on civil rights cases such as Brown v. Board of Education. Frustrated with the stagnant state of the civil rights movement, Murray briefly moved to Ghana in 1960 to teach law before returning to the U.S. to attend Yale Law School. While writing her thesis, Murray wrote an influential memorandum demanding that “sex” be included in the Title XII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1965, she became the first African American woman to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale. After graduating, Murray co-authored “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII.” The acclaimed essay was cited by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her Supreme Court case, Reed v. Reed, which successfully challenged sex-based discrimination. Murray went on to co-found the National Organization for Women, serve on the national board of the ACLU and taught on tenure at Brandeis University. After decades of activism, Murray knew that Jane Crow discrimination still existed both in the civil rights and women’s movements.

In 1973, following the death of her longtime partner Irene Burlow, Murray left Brandeis to become the first Black woman to serve as an Episcopal priest. On July 1, 1985, Murray died of cancer and her autobiography, “Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage,” was published posthumously in 1987.