The murder rate for native women and girls living on reservations in the U.S. is ten times higher than the national average for women, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal missing person database only logs a fraction of those cases. Our guest this week, who has investigated cases for indigenous girls from nine months old to women in their eighties, points out that this is part of a broader trend of data erasure. Abigail Echo-Hawk is the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, which focuses on research and decolonizing data for urban American Indian and Alaska Native communities. She also serves as executive vice president of the Seattle Indian Health Board and is an enrolled citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. She joins WITHpod to discuss recovering the true story of her people prior to and post the Columbus encounter, the importance of rethinking misconceptions, health disparities in indigenous and Alaska native communities, and the work that lies ahead to break down feelings of “invisibility.”
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey, WITHpod listeners. Before we get into today’s episode, a reminder that we are taking WITHpod on the road again. We still have tickets available for our Philadelphia event with New York Times best-selling author, Naomi Klein. We’ll talk about the ways our realities are warping all around us, in what she calls the mirror world.
Plus as part of a special double header, I’m also thrilled to be joined by my colleague and dear friend, MSNBC Anchor Joy Reid. We’ll talk all about the backlash to history and the peril of this particular political moment. You can buy tickets online at msnbc.com/withpodtour and join us in person for some fascinating conversations with amazing guests. Tickets are going fast. So buy yours today at msnbc.com/withpodtour. I hope to see you in our live audience this fall.
Just so you know, this episode contains discussions of rape, sexual assault and violence. If you are someone you know is a victim of sexual domestic violence, there’s help available by calling the national sexual assault hotline at 1-800-656-4673 and the national domestic violence hotline at 1-800-799-7233. We should also note the episode contains discussions of suicide. If you are someone you know is having suicidal thoughts or mental health related distress, dial 988 for the 24/7 988 suicide and crisis hotline. To text with a trained helper text, SAVE, S-A-V-E to 741-741
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Very often I’ll step into conversations and people will talk about American Indian, Alaska native people as being historically underserved. It’s like whose history whose history? Whose history are you attaching to me? My history did not start with Christopher Columbus. I am not historically underserved. I’m historically loved. I was historically prayed for I’m colonially underserved and oppressed, but I’m historically resilient.
And Indigenous People’s Day allows for the opportunity of the rest of the United States to not ignore our history and to recognize that there were people not only here first, but we had vibrant thriving communities that are still here and active today.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to Why This Is Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes. I thought I’d start today on a sort of confessional note. We were listening to this right after the observation of, for some people Christopher Columbus’ Day for other people, Indigenous People’s Day. And I thought I would talk a little bit about my experience of that. You know, I was raised Italian American in the Bronx. And, you know, Columbus’ Day ends up being the kind of, I don’t know, like along with St Joseph’s, which is one day after St. Patty’s, the sort of Italian American celebration day.
And I remember at some point when, you know, people, you know, it’s been a long time that people have criticized the record of Christopher Columbus. It’s not like a recent thing, but to the degree that it became more of a sort of mainstream thing, having some thought of like, well, can’t you let the Italians have their day. Thinking like knowing people who felt that way, people that I love, you know.
And then like, and this was years ago and then sort of spending more and more time looking at what Christopher Columbus’s actual record was, which was really psychotic and psychotically destructive and cruel, and also recognized as such contemporaneously, which I think is a detail that often gets lost. Like there were people who would like go down and see what he was up to and come back and be like, dude (sp?), that guy is bad news.
But also like how little we have ritualize or formal means of forcing attention on indigenous folks in the U.S. It just is the case that, you know, it’s very easy in American media to sort of sideline the stories of indigenous folks for news shows such as myself or this podcast to not center the voices of indigenous people.
And I think one of the things, I mean, you know, holidays are sort of low hanging fruit in all this, in terms of the struggle for social justice and equity, and particularly given the lived experience of folks from indigenous communities over the course of literally centuries, but it is a really important and useful mechanism even at a basic level to do that kind of forcing.
And so I was thinking about that in the run up to Indigenous People’s Day this year, and wanting to make sure that we both observed the holiday and also looking for folks to talk to about indigenous issues. And we were in conversation with a lot of people. And at some point came across a few talks by a woman named Abigail Echo-Hawk. And was just really kind of blown away by her presentation and the sort of storytelling and facility she had and thought like, oh, I got to have a conversation with her on the podcast.
And Abigail is the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, which focuses on research in decolonizing data for urban American Indian and Alaska native community. She’s the executive vice president of the Seattle Indian Health Board. And she’s enrolled citizen (sp?) of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. And Abigail, it’s great to have you in the podcast.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Thanks for having me excited to be here.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I’ve watched a bunch of your sort of talks and stuff on YouTube. Maybe just tell me a little bit about yourself and where you’re from.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: I’m a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, which was a tribe that was originally in Nebraska and then removed by the United States government to the Oklahoma territories. But I was actually born and raised in the heart of Alaska. My mother was one of the adopted children of Katie John of Mentasta Lake, Alaska. So I was born and raised in rural Alaska and the strength, vibrancy and brilliance of Alaska native people.
And it was just an incredible way to grow up with my seven siblings. I now live in Seattle, Washington, an urban Indian community, which is, you know, 76 percent of American Indians, Alaska natives currently live in large cities across the United States where we have these thriving tribal communities. And I’m really blessed to live and serve in Seattle Washington.
Chris Hayes: Can you tell me a little bit about your Alaska upbringing, because I’ve heard a little bit, you talk about it, but for me it’s just something I have no subjective access to. And frankly, I haven’t really encountered people or known people throughout my life who grew up in rural Alaska.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Rural Alaska is like nowhere else in the country. I was so blessed to be.
Chris Hayes: I think that’s fair.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Right. Even today the village that my family is from in Mentasta village, about 50 percent of the food comes from subsistence hunting and fishing. So we are reliant on the land and also —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: — on laws and policies that protect our ability to subsistence hunt and fish. So I remember stories of my sister, Liz, always remembers this story of when she was first taught to butcher a moose. She was six years old. My uncle Fred John taught her to butcher a moose and he’s teaching her how to take the tongue out of a moose, which sounds kind of gross, but it’s actually a really like incredible source of protein.
And so she’s harvesting this with my uncle and he asked her, he said, Liz, who are you going to give this moose tongue to? And it was one of our cultural teachings is everything we did in our communities was a gift to others that we were always going to provide for each other. And so she takes this moose and she takes it to my grandma, Katie, and she remembers gifting it to my grandma.
My grandma like grasping her by the face and saying, thank you, Liz, thank you. And so that’s one of our cultural values that I was taught in rural Alaska is this gifting giving and always taking care of each other. And even in the beauty of that cultural, deep connection to the land and to the people, I also grew up in deep trauma. And so we were experiencing all of the things native people do that is, you know, the attack on our cultural ways, whether it be our subsistence hunting and fishing, which my grandma, Katie fought for all the way up to the Supreme court.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: To the fact that I was, you know, as a very young person, as a child, about six years old, experienced sexual assault and rape. And as a direct result of that, had a really hard time as a teenager and was all of the statistics that we see put on young native youth, I was experienced suicidality. I was acting out and had unhealthy behaviors and I had no access to resources as a directive result of being in rural Alaska.
And at that time, no resources for a young person like me, including the fact that at the time and even continuing today, there was no prosecution of the person that had assaulted me as a result of the laws and policies that continued to harm native people who experience violence on tribal land.
Chris Hayes: This has been a forefront legal issue. And I think also went all the way up to the Supreme Court about the question about how prosecution functions, particularly around sexual assault, but more broadly around prosecution functions on tribal land, right?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah, absolutely. It’s what we call a maze of jurisdiction. It’s whose jurisdiction is where? And as a direct result of that, we see many things, cases like mine. I’m actually working on some murder cases and missing person cases where it took up to four months for somebody to decide whose jurisdiction it was and how they were going to investigate a missing person’s case.
And in those instances, most of the clues are gone. Most of the ability to solve those cases are gone. And so this maze of jurisdiction is actually a maze that inhibits not only ability to prosecute, but what happens is our people die and go missing and nobody’s even looking for them except for their families and their communities.
Chris Hayes: When you talk about growing up in deep trauma and also in the embedded in this is sort of remarkable community, just talk a little bit about how you see those two related in terms of the experience of the trauma that you experienced and your status and your community as an indigenous community, indigenous person and how you kind of grew from that or found resources you needed to be able to heal from that.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: The trauma that I experienced as a young child and having no resources, as I said earlier, I experienced suicidality. I remember the very first time I attempted suicide, I was nine years old. I always think it’s a gift from the creator that I’m even alive today.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: And I had no access to resources and services. However, I had followed my sisters who had moved to Seattle, Washington. I had followed one of my sisters here where not codependent as we just really like each other. But I followed her here to Seattle, Washington and soon met somebody and was pregnant. And I knew at that point in time that I either was going to survive for this child or I wasn’t going to be there to be the mother that he deserved.
And it was because of the cultural value systems instilled by my grandmother, by my aunties, by my mom, by the people that I was around, that I knew my responsibility to the next generations. And that is a key cultural value that we have is that we have a responsibility, not only to our children, but to our children’s children, seven generations in the future. And because I knew that responsibility, I knew that I had to heal in order for this young child, my baby boy, to be able to grow up in a healthier way than I did.
And so I searched out on a journey of trying to find those resources and healing modalities. However, it was really hard. There are very few counselors who know how to work with somebody who’s experienced the kind of trauma, state trauma, colonial violence, along with physical violence that I’ve experienced. In fact, my very first counselor, I remember afterwards she was crying and I gave her a hug and paid her $75.
So it’s been one of the goals and things that I’ve worked on over the course of my career is, how do we ensure that we have culturally attuned care? How do we ensure that we’re getting the access to the resources and services so that folks who want to reach healing like I was trying to do have that opportunity. And that includes our traditional medicine. Our traditional ways of healing were just as important because without those, I wouldn’t have done the healing I needed to do to be the good mom for my son and to be the person that he needed me to be.
Chris Hayes: You said a step before that, I think I’d love to spend a little time on about the percentage of native folks that live in metropolitan communities, right? And I think that like, that population’s often not thought about or overlooked and particularly because of the almost diasporic nature of what’s been done to indigenous people in this country for so long, right? I mean like forcibly ethnically cleanse from the lands that they had been on sent to Oklahoma. And then, you know, the U.S. when it got out there said, we’re basically ripping up the deal that we had made that brought you out here. We’re taking that land as well.
And so people end up in metropolitan communities. Can you talk a little bit about like that particular experience of indigenous life, you know, in a place like New York City or Chicago or Seattle where you have the background that you have and the communities you have, but it’s not life on the res?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. Life on the reservation and in the villages is often seen, when people think about native people, they never think about us as sitting on the bus next to them or working in the same office.
Chris Hayes: Right. Exactly.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: And we’re always —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right. In the car wash. Yeah. Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. Somebody asked me, how often do you wear regalia? I was like, well, like four times a year.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: I look great in it, but I don’t wear it very often.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right. Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: I’m just the modern person sitting next to you. And so, it’s that same idea. When people think about native people living in large cities, they’re like, well, I’ve never met a native person. You have.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: You just didn’t know it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: And you know, we got to recognize a lot of these urban areas that there were native people on those lands already. And they’re still there.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: In addition to those of us who came for economic reasons, the reservations continue to be economically suppressed and oppressed. And so we’ll leave for economic reasons. I left for educational reasons. And additional to that, the United States government had a program starting in the 1950s that took native people off reservations and villages and put them originally in 16 cities across the United States with the intention of assimilation.
Well, it didn’t work. We’re still here. We have thriving intertribal communities like the Seattle Indian Health Board, like the Denver Community Center. There are cities across the nation where we came together and we looked at our central values, not pan-Indian ideas, but we have central values of taking care of our youth, our elders, those future generations.
And we came together to support each other and to ensure that we got the services and resources we needed in these large cities. And so despite most people not knowing we’re there, not only are we there, but we’re thriving and our thriving is part of the thriving of those cities overall. So if you don’t know any native people yet, you will soon.
Chris Hayes: Can you tell me a little bit about the Pawnee people? I know that that’s different than the folks that you were with up in Alaska, in your upbringing. But you a remember the Pawnee Nation and they had been moved to Oklahoma. Tell me about the Pawnee.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. So I come from the Kitkehahki band of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma on my father’s side. And they were removed from our traditional lands in the Nebraska Kansas area, into the Oklahoma territories, where we were put on a two square mile reservation. And like many native people, we were incarcerated in a sense in those reservations. You often hear the phrase —
Chris Hayes: Two square miles?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Two square miles. You’ll often hear the phrase, don’t go off the reservation. Hillary Clinton said it during her presidential campaign. And what that meant is if we left the reservation, we could be shot and killed. And we were incarcerated in those reservations in the beginning of the reservation systems. And what we lost —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: — was the ability to hunt and gather our seeds that grew in Nebraska and Kansas didn’t grow in the Oklahoma territories. And we saw a lot of death, a lot of trauma. And despite all of that, we saw our tribal leaders, including my ancestors I’m descended from the old man, Echo-Hawk, at the census of 1910, there was less than 600 Pawnee people left on the Pawnee reservation. Less than a 100 years prior, there was more than 10,000.
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: So more than 92 percent of our people died in less than a 100 years.
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: And I am directly descended from him and his resiliency in strength in survival. They created the opportunity for us as their descendants to not only continue to fight for the rights of our people, but to thrive in these environments. And so that is what we’re doing today. And the Pawnee Nation is thriving. Now we are actively fighting for our resources. We are taking care of our youth and our elders and our tribal leadership is dedicated to ensuring not only this generation, but the seven generations in the future have a better future than what our ancestors had when they were placed on that reservation.
Chris Hayes: What became of the Pawnee as a sort of nation post the reservation system, obviously it’s a self-governing nation. It is then forcibly removed, you know, at essentially at the point of a gun, it is, you know, then forcibly incarcerated in a two square mile reservation. What is the sort of governing structure of that nation? And then what that nation means in a kind of almost like constitutional sense mean now?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. The United States government forces, federally recognized tribes who have that government to government responsibility with each other that we have business councils like tribal business councils. So we have a tribal council that is elected officials and those elections happen and we elect our tribal leaders. But that’s different than what we used to do traditionally.
Traditionally, we had the chiefs of the four bands of the Pawnee Nation would come together in a governance structure. So the Pawnee Nation is unique in that we have maintained that cultural structure that we still have, that cultural value system of those chiefs that come together. Although we still function as the United States government forces us to do in these business councils. And we continue to both navigate and negotiate with the United States government.
Chris Hayes: Wait. So there’s an imposed governing structure by the government on the Pawnee government and all federally recognized tribes for these government to government relations that the U.S. government imposes.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yes. It is one that they force us to be a part of. So all tribes had their own traditional ways of governance. It’s not going to be the same as the Pawnee Nation. In the village of Mentasta, the women are the chiefs, it’s a matriarchal village. And so that’s a different structure than what was in the Pawnee nation. And those systems definitely did change. But even in that changing, we found that we were able to hold onto our cultural value systems, although it’s not easy. They’re always pushing us to adapt to what Western structures are, but we know that’s not who we are culturally.
And so we see our tribal leaders continuing to fight back against those systems while in the middle of working within them.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You know, I was recently reading a book called “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. And one of the really interesting arguments they make is that they basically argue that a huge amount of what we think of as European enlightenment thought, particularly the development, the political theory of liberalism is in response to, and in dialogue with the encounter in the Western hemisphere with indigenous peoples, that the encounter forces a kind of intellectual development back in Europe to sort of figure out a sort of theory around governance because they are encountering people that governed completely differently that had totally different philosophical and very developed political theories.
And there’s this sort of really interesting, like, dialogue exchange that’s happening. Other people have sort of criticized the argument and its historical efficacy. But what has forced me to think about is how little I know about the very gated governing structures and like political theory and like way of thinking about governing of the various indigenous peoples that inhabited this continent and how much it sort of reduced to, I think our imagination, the way we’re taught like chiefs, we’re tribes as he sort of shorthands to categorize a huge and diverse array of different political structures.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. And, you know, even looking at the founding of the United States, we find the Declaration of Independence was built on what the Iroquois had been doing. We know that a lot of the founding of the United States, they looked at the governance structures that were working and they adapted and utilized those.
And again, as we look across the nation at the different structures that exist within tribal communities, we still see those built in innately back to the village of Mentasta Lake. My grandma, Katie John, when she passed away at the age of 97, she was a leader, not only within the tribe. She led everything in the tribe. She was the force behind making all of the decisions and fighting for and ensuring our well-being. But she was also a leader across the state of Alaska.
And so her voice was heard not only in our tribe, but across different tribes as we upheld those strong tribal leaders who had knowledge and wisdom of how we would move forward. And so these kinds of structures that exist are ones that reckon back to hundreds of years ago and are part of the founding of this country. And in the fact that we know that there are so many different things, whether it be, for example, I don’t know if you know, but like the original enzyme of aspirin comes from a Birch Tree.
Well, I grew up in a, a place in Alaska where I was taught to peel back the bark of a Birch Tree and chew on that bark. And it would take away the little bit of a headache. I had that ancestral knowledge that came from our indigenous ways and ways of knowledge and knowing. We’ve always had these and it has been utilized and very often monetize by Western structures and systems. And then they forgot who they got it from.
Well, we’re still practicing them. And I think we’re practicing them in a way that would benefit this entire country, if not only they knew more about it, but they implemented it in the way that it was originally meant to be done.
Chris Hayes: It’s interesting about Alaska, which is a place that has a ton of different indigenous folks and also a high level of like political leverage. I mean, one of the things about political representatives from the state of Alaska, Don Young, who is the longest serving member of the House and Mary Peltola, who herself is indigenous, is like Don Young was a very responsive, had very, very strong and deep relationships with indigenous folks in Alaska.
And in some ways Alaska, and I think Hawaii can be this way too, but in Alaska, there’s like, there’s a level of indigenous representation and an indigenous sort of political connection to political leadership that does seem sort of distinct almost from almost any other state in the nation.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. Absolutely. I have spent a lot of time working with the office of Senator Lisa Murkowski, for example, who is non-indigenous, but is in office because the indigenous people of Alaska not only vote, but expect her to hold her promises to them.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: And so I’m not a resident of Alaska anymore. I live in Washington state. I vote in Washington state. But when I go into Senator Murkowski’s office to help educate and inform her very specifically on the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and people, is that she works with me as a person who is connected to Alaska. And she knows that my connections are deep there and that will work together to ensure the safety and well-being.
And so it’s one thing that is, I think one of the best things about the Alaska delegations is that they are there to represent the people of Alaska and they are going to ensure that they do so because their people are going to hold them accountable. And the indigenous vote in Alaska, when our folks get out the vote, they can swing elections. And so it is very important for not only for them to vote, but for our politicians to know, and to ensure that they are answering the needs of these people. And so we need to see more of that.
We’ve seen some actions. When we looked at Nevada and Arizona during the last presidential election, we saw the ability of indigenous people when they got out the vote to actually have huge impact on those elections. And very often people ignore us during election time. They don’t see us as having the ability to do that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Well, they should stand up and pay attention, because not only will we swing the votes, but we’ll ensure that it’s for folks who are going to be for the benefit of Indian country.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, in Alaska, it’s striking how much that is just woven into the politics of state and the politics of representation in that state, again, across sort of ideology and politics and across party, right? Like if you’re going to represent Alaska, no matter what ideological tradition you’re coming from, this is going to be front and center for you. And you just talked about the work you’ve been doing on missing indigenous women and girls. And I wanted you just talk a little bit about this work. I’ve read some of this stuff you’ve written about it. And I’ve read, reporting on this as a phenomenon. And how did you start working on this? And what is the problem itself?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. As a result of my own experiences, as a person who had been experienced sexual violence, I’ve worked for years and working to ensure that the experiences I had nobody else had. And so I’ve sat in rooms with native women where we talk about what’s going to happen after their daughters are raped, because it often is seen as inevitable. Those are conversations I never want to have again. And so we are working actively to ensure that not only is the maze of jurisdiction address, but also resources given to those who are impacted by violence.
In this work, I have set for many years in rooms with tribal leaders and members of the community who have been talking to folks in the federal government saying, hey, my grandma is missing. Hey, my sister went missing and we heard that this person is the one who took her. And we know that she’s dead. Or we heard stories of folks who had been murdered and that their cases had never been investigated or prosecuted.
And when I sat in those rooms, what I heard from the members of the federal government was, well, you have all these stories, but there’s no data. The data isn’t showing that what you’re saying is an actuality. And so in 2018, I partnered with an incredible woman by the name of Anita Lou Casey. And we put forward the very first report on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in 71 cities across the United States. It was the very first data report of its kind, looking at the crisis.
And we focused on the cities because that is where I’m currently working and serving with my community. And we found that not only where there’re numerous hundreds of women and girls missing or murdered, the youngest in our report was nine months old. And the oldest was in her 80s. And we found that not only were they missing or had been murdered, but we also found that the data on race and ethnicity of American Indian, Alaska native women was not being collected by law enforcement across the country.
So the reason we weren’t in the data was because they simply weren’t collecting it. And as a direct result of that, I was seeing my relatives die around me.
Chris Hayes: So getting the data first to sort of establish this to the federal government, is there a reason specific to the indigenous status of these women and girls that is driving the phenomenon? Is it just a subset of violence against women in this country, of course, which is unfortunately ubiquitous and can be found across all lines of, you know, race and ethnicity obviously, is there something specific in the way the jurisdiction is working and the way the police deal with this that is making it particularly perilous for indigenous women and girls?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Well, we have to start with the fact that native women specifically have been oversexualized in this country. We could look towards Halloween where you can go and buy a Pocahonti costume from any Halloween store. When in fact, Pocahontas is one of our first documented kidnapped, trafficked, raped, and then killed in captivity woman. And so we see native women, again, consistently seen as sexual objects versus real human beings. And this goes back all the way to the beginning of colonization when our women were kidnapped, murdered, raped and trafficked.
And so we see this continuously. And we see it embedded in the systems that are supposed to protect us. So when we look at the reservations, it is very hard for non-Indian people to be prosecuted on the reservations for crimes of this kind. And when they are prosecuted, the prosecutions are very often done by the Department of Justice. And the Department of Justice will very often decline to prosecute these cases if they show up at all, because they say there’s a lack of resources.
Well, the resources for public safety are in our treaties. It is part of the land that people are sitting on is the treaties we signed. It’s the responsibility of the federal government. As a result of this, we have perpetrators who have found out that they can move from reservation to reservation. It’s what we call res hopping, they’ll go assault women, rape, abuse, and then the moment the authorities become aware of them, they’ll move to another reservation. And then do the same.
I worked with one tribal community who had had an individual who had moved within that state to several different reservations. And in that final reservation, he killed that woman. And so we have folks who have taken advantage of this maze of injustice that allows them to move across these reservations and do this kind of harm. But our report initially focused on the 71 cities across the United States.
And what we found is that they weren’t collecting the data. And so what does that mean? I call it data genocide. When you don’t collect the data on American Indians, Alaska natives, we don’t get the resources we’re supposed to get in our treaties. And my people die as a direct result. It is actively contributing to the deaths of my community. And so when it comes to those who have been assaulted, for example, let’s say here in the city of Seattle, if somebody is gone missing or been murdered or been sexually assaulted, the county gets money from the federal government through the Violence Against Women Act and other resources.
And those say, according to the data that you have, your resources should be allocated —
Chris Hayes: Oh, wow.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: — to those communities most impacted by this kind of harm. If you don’t have the data —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: — you don’t have to allocate the resources. And so by not collecting race and ethnicity, our families are not getting those resources. In fact, I’m working on a murder case right now here in Seattle, Washington, where the woman died on April 29th.
And as of one week ago, her mother still has not received any victim services from the county. They haven’t even offered them. And I know that native women are more likely to be missing, murdered or experienced violence that causes their deaths and they should be the one getting the resources. And this mom to this day, the only resources she’s gotten has been from my organization.
Chris Hayes: So, I mean, it’s like a kind of literal erasure, right, in that there’s like this incredibly important question of resources and money and support that hangs on whether or not you’re identifying folks who are indigenous for how federal dollars get spent down at the local level.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Absolutely. And one of the things that’s always interesting about people are like, well, are just natives out there asking for more welfare? Like, no, we are not asking for welfare. We are in a different system. We have a prepaid benefit for healthcare, education, law enforcement. Those are prepaid benefits as a direct result of our treaties. It is not welfare. It is money that is owed to us and is upheld by federal law that we should be getting those resources.
And so we’re actually seeing a failure of the federal government to pay in a way that, let’s say, they aren’t going to pay another country.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Or they’re paying China or they’re paying Germany.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: You know, whatever it is, they’re not paying the resources that we are supposed to have as tribal people.
Chris Hayes: I mean, your point there is such an important one just to spend a little time on, right, which is that like, there is this like both conceptual and legal difference in the sort of vast quilt of American citizens, right, who are come from all different places across the world and have all sorts of different faces and backgrounds and speaks all kind of languages. All of which is what we celebrate in the American ideal, which is that indigenous peoples are just in a different category both historically they were here first.
I would say morally, they were dispossessed of their land often through violence and state violence. And legally in so much as there were actual treaties signed that are still controlling law that create a different set of legal obligations by the United States than the Senate has in other cases.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Absolutely. And so COVID-19 is a perfect example of how that played out.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. That was what I was going to talk about next. So I’d love to hear your take on that. Yeah.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. During COVID-19, I was actually part of a study that was done by the National Academies of Sciences, where we created the framework for the equitable allocation of the COVID-19 vaccine. And so that study by consensus, I was part of it. I also was the only native person on this scientific study committee that was going to shape how the COVID-19 vaccine was going to be distributed across the United States.
And in that, we recognized that American Indians and Alaska natives, that we did not have to fall under the allocation criteria that were being set by the states. And that is because as sovereign nations, the tribes had the right to distribute that COVID-19 vaccine, any way they saw fit. And they needed to do that. So here at the Seattle Indian Health Board, as an extension of the Indian healthcare system, we gave our vaccine to our elders first, of course, as many people did. But our age for elders was age 50.
And that is because native people don’t live as long as the rest of the population. So our elders are starting at 50 years old, whereas across the state of Washington and most other states, they did that at 65. Well at 65 that’s, you know, people who only lived to the age of 67, we’ve missed most of the elders. And we saw that across the country where the tribes themselves determined who was going to get the vaccine.
And not only did they take care of their own people, they took care of the communities around them. We saw in Oklahoma where certain tribes were vaccinating people within their county who fell in the same criteria as their people, because they recognize their people were interacting with them. So the tribes vaccinated the county here in Washington state, we saw another tribe who vaccinated all of the teachers because the teachers were having to go back into school and they were teaching their children.
And so not only did we take care of our own people, exercising our tribal sovereignty, our political status as sovereign nations within this nation but we also took care of our communities as a whole. And that’s who native people are. We’re always going to take care of not only our tribal people, but the people that we live with we work with and interact with. We are a key component to this nation’s public health system and safety net. And we saw that during COVID-19.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: When you talk about the Seattle Indian Health Board as part of the Indian health system, can you just tell me what is that system and what’s the sort of like, you know, statutory guidance for it? Like why does it exist and how does it work?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: The Indian Health Service exists as part of our treaty rights for healthcare, not only on the reservations, but where native people live. So as part of that, we have what we call the ITU system of care. We have the urban Indian health programs, that’s the U.
We have the Tribal Health Systems. And that is where the tribes have gotten contracts from the Indian Health Service to provide healthcare services to their tribal people. And we have the I, which is the Indian Health Service where they operate independently, either with tribes or operate hospital systems that are operated by the Indian healthcare system. And so under our treaty rights, we are supposed to have quality healthcare. This was recently upheld in a 2021 Supreme Court decision.
We’re supposed to have quality healthcare. And yet despite that we are chronically underfunded. And what we find is organizations like mine, the Seattle Indian Health Board, that we’re always fighting for the resources we need to provide basic primary care to the relatives that we serve to anybody who steps in our doors, we serve them the native way. And this system, while chronically underfunded, when given the resources can be one of the most successful systems in the country.
In fact, the special diabetes program for Indians is one of the most successful public health programs in preventing diabetes and halting, you know, somebody who’s pre-diabetic and kind of stopping them from moving into diabetes. The most successful examples of that in the nation for any race or ethnicity is American Indians and Alaska natives under the special diabetes program for Indians.
But despite that, even right now, we’re fighting to keep that program funded. And so even despite our successes, despite the great data we continuously are fighting for our basic treaty rights.
Chris Hayes: Is that an annual appropriation that comes from Congress to the whole system?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yes. The special diabetes program for Indians. Yes. And in fact, it was just in this most recent budget that we were able to actually get for the Indian healthcare system, mandatory appropriations. And so it had been a fight we had been in for decades to ensure that.
Chris Hayes: Oh, you were doing it every year.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Oh, wow.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: For the Indian healthcare system. And we saw huge impacts with government shutdowns, for example. During the government shutdowns prior to having mandatory appropriations, we weren’t able to get the resources. And in fact, we saw programs across the United States, either close their doors or they were only operating certain days a week. And in fact, during a government shutdown during the Trump administration, I received a phone call from a community member whose daughter had been sexually assaulted and raped.
And the community clinic that could give her a sexual assault nurse examiner exam was no longer open on the weekend. And in fact, when she called in, they said, well, can you just keep her in the same clothes and she can come in —
Chris Hayes: Jesus Christ.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: — three days later. And I told them, no, don’t do that. That is bad for her mental health. What you need to do is to bring your traditional healers. You need to bathe her. You need to comfort her. You need to love on her. And yes, you need to contact the authorities, but you’re not going to be able to get her this exam.
And that was a direct result of a government shutdown.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: It has incredible detrimental impacts. And so mandatory appropriations, we don’t have them permanently, but we are actively fighting towards that permanent authorization for mandatory appropriations.
Chris Hayes: I want to go back to COVID-19 because I remember reading both a lot of stuff about the effects it had among indigenous folks, sort of disproportionate health effects we saw in terms of, you know, elevated mortality. Also the efficacy of tribe based vaccination programs, some of which were the most effective and fast in the entire nation, right? There were places that were getting the vaccine out incredibly quickly and near a 100 percent vaccination rates. What did COVID-19 sort of illustrate about the sort of underlying health inequities between indigenous folks and non-indigenous folks?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: So Seattle was the original epicenter of COVID-19. And in March of 2020, our clinic here was overrun by folks who needed testing, who were getting sick. The most vulnerable people in the country were in our clinic. And so we actually ran out of PPE. And so we put out a call to our state, our federal, and to our county partners asking for basic mask. We had physicians who were sewing their own mask.
We were as an executive leadership team, washing scrubs at our own homes for our providers to change in and out of scrubs between each patient because we didn’t have gowns. So we sent out that request and we get a box in the mail. The CEO and myself are like, okay, this box looks small. We’re going to go and take a look what’s in here. So we can allocate the scarce resource for our providers.
When we opened up that box, instead of finding any kind of PPE, we found body bags. We had been sent body bags instead of PPE. And it was devastating. I remember holding up one of the bags and the toe tags fell and hit the table. And it was like, my heart stopped at the same moment that those toe tags hit that table. And I remember driving home that day and crying in my backyard for about 30 minutes.
And then the CEO, myself and the rest of our executive team and our staff were like, you know what, we’re not going to accept body bags for our people. We’re tired of them sending us the things to bury them in. We are going to do whatever it takes to ensure that they live. And so we got to work along with communities across the country, the Urban Indian health Institute, which I direct here at the Seattle Indian Health Board, we did what no one else did. And that is we actually surveyed American Indians and Alaska natives on what they wanted, what they needed to know about getting vaccinated.
Up until that point, a survey that I had no money for that I wrote at night with a former staff person of mine who didn’t even work for me anymore, we wrote the only national survey that was done. And then that data was used to shape the public health campaigns to ensure that native people got vaccinated. It’s been cited by President Biden. It was used across the nation and it was done by two indigenous women and a native organization that refused to let our people die.
And so we stepped up along with other folks across the country, but we shouldn’t have to, I’m tired of taking body bags and turning them into something positive. And in fact, I took one of those body bags. And during COVID-19, I’m an artist and a poet. And I took that body bag and I turned it into a healing dress. I sewed it. I turned it into what’s called a ribbon dress, which is a dress that carries prayer in strength.
And I hung it up the back of my door. And every time I’d walk out to my office, leaving my children and thinking about how I come back in, like, I got to make sure that I’m not going to carry COVID home. I want to take care of my family. And I would touch that dress as I would go out, knowing that we can take things that have caused harm and turn them into things of beauty. But do we have to all the time? I’m tired of people saying we’re resilient and saying that they can just keep throwing, you know, bad things at us.
Our resiliency is action, and we need the rest of the country to take action with us. We shouldn’t be in situations where we see body bags. We should only be in situations where our treaty rights are being fulfilled and we’re getting the resources that we need in order to ensure the lives and wellbeing of our people.
Chris Hayes: The public health campaign that you just talked about, that the president cited and got a lot of attention. I remember, I think we probably covered it on the show. I mean, it’s striking to me, right? At one level, you have health disparities for indigenous first nonindigenous folks, but then it’s sort of flipped on its head when you look at vaccination campaigns, right? I mean, the U.S. has really struggled to get full vaccination. It’s been persistent and it’s led to the unnecessary deaths of, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, literally.
I mean, it has been one of the most catastrophically costly aspects of our response, which is this vaccine skepticism and these sort of channels of distrust that have been exploited by really, really cynical and predatory folks in my mind. Can you tell me a little bit about the mechanisms by which the vaccine information campaign, the sort of survey and the sort of like relationships of trust produced this very different outcome for Indian country than it did for the rest of the country?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. I was sitting on calls with the federal government where they were talking about as they were going to push forward these national campaigns. And they were saying, okay, we’re just going to use what we already know. And they had surveyed other populations, but they hadn’t surveyed native people. And I’m looking at their messaging and I can see as a native person, who’s worked in this field for a long time, I knew their messaging was off.
And myself and many others were like, you need to get the information from our communities.
Chris Hayes: Wait, can I stop you there? Sorry. I want to stop you right there. When you say you knew it was off, what was throwing up red flags to you?
Abigail Echo-Hawk: They were focusing on individual decision making. They were saying, okay, like, somebody’s going to want to do this vaccine because that’s going to make sure they live longer. For native people, we think about ourselves as individuals contributing to a community that is a cultural value that we live by. And so when my former staff member, Leah Dudge (sp?) and I wrote the survey, we actually took questions that had been done in other big national surveys. And one of these questions was why would you get vaccinated? What is important to you?
And the rest of the country, Hispanic, Latinos, African Americans, white folks, they were all saying they would do it because it was individually better for them. We saw more of that in the white population. It shifted a little bit differently for the Hispanic, black folks. It was a little bit more community focused. But when we saw native people overwhelmingly, 74 percent of the people we surveyed would get vaccinated not because they trusted the federal government, not because they actually believed in the vaccine, they would get vaccinated because if their community told them it would benefit their elders, their youth, and that it was going to benefit the community as a whole, they would do it.
And so if that original campaign materials that were being put out had focused on the individual, it wouldn’t have worked in Indian country. And so the survey results that we got were completely different and we were able to focus not only our campaign, but I gave that data to any tribal community who wanted to use it. And in fact, I actually got a request from the federal contractors that the United States government had contracted to do these public health campaigns. And they asked me for the data prior to me publishing it.
And I told them, no, the data was going to go to our communities to do it our way, not to folks who weren’t putting the resources in our communities and those who didn’t know how to do it appropriately. And yet here are the people who were getting paid by the United States government asking me for the work that we weren’t even getting paid for.
Chris Hayes: The results of this, I mean, what’s interesting and you just sort of alluded to, this is like, if you’re thinking of any, you know, there are many communities inside the country that would have good reason to be extremely distrustful of a message from the federal government. I mean, people have talked about black folks and the history of Tuskegee and things like that and all sorts of reasons that there was a lot of distrust. There were very focused efforts to, you know, have credible messengers across various communities.
But if there’s, you know, a community that would have every reason to distrust a big message to the federal government saying, you know, take this shot, it would be indigenous folks. And so finding that kind of like internally resonant message and figuring out sort of unlocking that trust relationship is pretty profound because there’s something to be learned there that’s broadly applicable, right? About not just public health messaging, but basically how all trust relationships function, right?
I mean, you know, we’re sort of the country in many ways is in this sort of perilous state regarding its democracy because it’s become a lower and lower trust country and there’s lower levels of social trust. And it’s just interesting to hear how the work you did sort of use the bonds of social trust within indigenous communities to produce this pro-social outcome that did have the effect of saving people’s lives, right? I mean, if particularly in indigenous communities that are already facing, you know, higher mortality rates, higher levels of diseases that would make people at risk of hospitalization death from COVID. Like, it’s a huge, I mean, the accomplishment is it can be counted in lives of many, many people because of the work that you guys did.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. And that social trust has been so key and our cultural value systems in it, even when folks lost people who were taken to hospitals and then they weren’t able to be with their loved ones as they passed on, as a result of COVID. In our cultural ways, you’d have big families there, you’d sing, you’d laugh, you’d cry, you’d be there with your family members, they passed on.
I know a lot of folks in the United States were also very traumatized by not being able to be there.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, definitely.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: But for native people, while it was still very difficult, we also, many of us have the cultural value system of knowing that our ancestors were there with them that they did not die alone, that they were welcomed into the arms of their loved ones who stood with them around those hospital beds. We had something different that the rest of the country didn’t.
And I think it is one of the reasons when we thought about doing education around COVID-19 to engage with that cultural value system, to let people see that when they did something, whether it be vaccination, mask wearing, hand washing that when they did that, they did that for all of our relatives, our relatives from the past, those in the present and those in the future. So social trust was key to us being able to communicate that message. And it’s one that the rest of the United States was missing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, that is in some ways, the real key to much of the disaster that befell us was that lack of social trust, particularly once the vaccine gets introduced and there’s this, you know, really insidious campaign to whip up fears about it. I started this conversation talking about Indigenous People’s Day, and I suspect that there’s something sort of maybe a little frustratingly tokenizing about like being like here’s one day a year to talk about like the people that occupied this land and lived on it for thousands of years.
But I am curious to get your thought on it as a sort of more habituated and observed holiday and what it means and if it’s a good thing that more and more places, as far as I can tell are sort of converting that day into some kind of observance.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: I think indigenous people say is really important to our communities. Our history is often not only acknowledged, but it’s been actively erased. So very often I’ll step into conversations and people will talk about American Indian, Alaska native people as being historically underserved. It’s like whose history, whose history are you attaching to me? My history did not start with Christopher Columbus.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: I am not historically underserved.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: I’m historically loved. I was historically prayed for. I’m colonially underserved and oppressed, but I’m historically resilient. And Indigenous People’s Day allows for the opportunity of the rest of the United States to not ignore our history and to recognize that there were people not only here first, but we had vibrant thriving communities that are still here and active today. It helps break down that invisibility. And of course, we need to do it beyond one day. But in that one day, we get to celebrate and bring the vibrancy of our community to the rest of the United States.
Again, we’re historically resilient. We are not historically underserved. We have, and will continue our thriving cultures,
Chris Hayes: That point about the framework. I mean, it is really an interesting thing. It’s an I guess an obvious point that I had never thought of, right? Like what is, when you talk about the history, what history are you talking about? Are you talking about thousands of years? Or are you talking about post the Columbus encounter or are you talking about post exile from the lands that say the Pawnee had lived in? Like, because if you’re talking in these longer terms, it’s a very different story in a very different story to think about than if you’re talking about in the more specific terms of say the last two centuries.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Yeah. And for us as native people, it’s important for us to recognize where we came from, where we are and where we’re going. During my work on missing a murder indigenous women, I was reached out to, by some folks in Nebraska, who were starting to look at the crisis there. And as I was talking to this woman, she was a native woman working for the state of Nebraska. She told me, she said, I know who your family is. I know what tribe you come from.
I want you to know that when you advise us on this project, that you are doing it for your relatives who were here before. And it just like hit me right in my heart. I was like, wow. I have an opportunity to bring healing to that land into the people where my ancestors were at 500 years ago, a thousand years ago. And I know my association with them and my responsibility to them. So as native people, we are always talking about where we are in its relation to our past and in relation to our future.
What if the rest of the United States and the people in it, we’re making decisions for seven generations in the future, 100 generations in the future? We’d have a different look at climate change. We’d have a different look at addressing the social determinants of health. Everything would change. And I think that’s what is lacking in the United States is bringing in those indigenous cultural value systems of the people who were here continue to be here and who will be here in the future.
Chris Hayes: Abigail Echo-Hawk is director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, which focuses on research and decolonizing data for urban American Indian and Alaskan native community. She’s executive vice president of the Seattle Indian Health Board. And she is an enrolled citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. Abigail, that was fantastic. Thank you so much.
Abigail Echo-Hawk: Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Abigail Echo-Hawk. We would love to hear your feedback. You can get in touch with us on the site formally known as Twitter using hashtag WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok searching for WITHpod. You can also follow me on threads @chrislhayes and on Bluesky @chrislhayes. Why Is This Happening presented by MSNBC and NBC news produced by Doni Holloway Brendan O’Melia. Engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?