MINNEAPOLIS — The Department of Justice is making a major investment in solving cases involving murdered and missing indigenous people.
Minnesota has been selected as one of the areas receiving extra funding and manpower to solve the growing issue in that community.
Despite making up the smallest portion of the U.S. population, indigenous people are the second highest group of reported missing persons.
Now, there will be U.S. attorneys dedicated solely to finding them and their killers.
Andrew Luger says his first case as a U.S. attorney involved abuse in Indian Country. Ever since then, he’s known more could be done.
“Our office and I think other U.S. attorney offices just haven’t had the resources, the expertise and the training, along with the FBI, to do what we’ve always wanted to do, which is to dig in, in both trying to solve these cases as well as address it on the front end before it happens,” Luger said.
The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates more than 4,200 missing and murdered cases involving indigenous people have gone unsolved.
That’s why the Department of Justice is assigning five assistant U.S. attorneys and five coordinators to work exclusively on those crimes.
“So this gives us an opportunity to coordinate more closely with tribal law enforcement, bring in experts and compare notes across the country by having people coordinate this work,” Luger said.
It’s an expanded effort local activists say is long overdue.
“We have a lot of cold cases, a lot of stories that have not been told, a lot of families who are waiting to find out what’s happened, waiting for someone to investigate these crimes, waiting for someone to connect to them,” said Nicole Mattews, Executive Director of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition.
Matthews is hopeful having more resources — especially at the federal level — will help bring more attention to the issue.
“We all deserve that same level of visibility. There are many Gabby Petitos in the Native community that haven’t gotten that kind of visibility and haven’t gotten their faces all across the nation like that. And we deserve that,” Matthews said.
Luger says they’re in the process of hiring for the positions now. He expects the new staff to be in place and coordinating with those communities sometime this fall.
