- [Ernie] On this edition of Native Report we attend a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women rally.

- [Rita] We then interview Tammy Suomi a mother who lost her daughter and grandson to violence.

- I just wish I could have been there to get her out of there.

- [Ernie] And then you learn about Tewa Women United a support group for women from the Pueblos of the northern Rio Grande - We also learn what we can do to lead healthier lives and hear from our elders on this edition of Native Report.

- [Narrator] Production funding for Native Report is provided in part by the Blandin Foundation.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Native Report.

Thank you for tuning in I'm Ernie Stevens - And I'm Rita Aspinwall.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women or MMIW is a recent movement to bring recognition to the disappearances and murders of native women and girls.

While the movement is new with the issue of MMIW is not throughout Canada and the United States a disproportionate number of native women and girls go missing and or are murdered.

Tonight we'll look at how one crime impacted a native nation and the response by the community.

(gentle music) - [Man] This Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's staff and we are blessed with the eagle.

So we all had similar dreams.

So we put her together been taking her out everywhere.

She's been all over the country.

- We gonna be gifting Tammy with this ribbon scuff so that she can honor Jackie and the ways and that she wishes and that we're gonna give her this blanket to show her that as a community, we're here for her and we're gonna support her.

(wind whooshing) when a loved one is lost that trauma will stay with you for the rest of your life.

So Gitchigumi Scouts I founded in 2018 and what we do is we search and patrol for Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and relatives and we patrol our community to help lower the statistics that indigenous people face by watching for predatory behavior.

(singing n foreign language) With MMIW we have a lot of missing women who are still in the home, but they're missing inside themselves.

They're struggling with that addiction spirit and the area I live in we struggle with drug and sex trafficking.

And so she reached out to me and she was worried that her daughter, Jackie may be missing.

And I said to her that day Tammy, I'm gonna stick with you.

I'm gonna stick with you until the very end of this.

As Jackie's community we're rallying around Tammy and we're demanding justice for both her baby Kevin and that unborn baby.

When I talked about MMIW within our area I say MMIW are Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and relatives because within our area, I've recognized that it's been a lot of men who've gone missing.

And when I think about that, it terrifies me because when there is an empty seat at the big drum that should scare us all because men within our community, the men are our protectors and we're gonna continue searching for them.

And following up on any leads we get, even if it's like some random person has sent me a message on Facebook with a gut feeling, I'm gonna follow up on that tip.

Because I have the resources to do that.

Whereas law enforcement there have specific protocols that they need to follow.

I'm not a law enforcement officer so I can be more creative in my searches.

And I can be more creative in the way that I go about this because I'm not bound by the specific protocols and laws and agreements that law enforcement officers have to follow.

(singing in foreign language) when we do a search, If it's an actual search, I will call upon the other Scouts.

There's about 10 of us and what we'll do is we'll line up within like shoulder, shoulder width apart and we'll search, we'll comb through an area.

And we're just grateful for the men in our community who do show up and follow women's leadership because MMIW belongs to the women, but we made it very clear within this area that our men are our protectors and we need to need them to stand up.

And after saying that every man within our community they heard that and they've been making changes and they've been like stepping forward in ways that make the community feel safer.

And that's my end goal is to make our community safer.

The reason I do the work that I do is I'm a survivor.

I've been through domestic assault.

I've been through sexual assault.

I've been held against my will.

And I've been in a position where a man told me that he was going to take my life.

So I know what that woman felt before, before she left us, 'cause I've been there.

And I made a solemn promise that every time that I've been harmed, every bruise, every single one for me has become a steel plate of armor.

And I'm gonna choose to stand and protect other women in our community.

Because I mean it, when I say not one more 'cause I've been there and the men in my community, (child shouting) they listen and they're hearing us because a lot of the men within our community, a lot of violence within our community, it started with our men, like when you take that from a man that toxic colonial and masculinity that are forced upon our men, you take everything.

You have a generation of men who were told that they can't cry.

They can't grieve.

They can't feel.

And if they can't feel they can't heal and we need to change that for our men.

We need them to know that this is a safe space not only for our women, but for them.

And if we can make men feel safe if we could raise men with as much care as we raise our daughters, we can change the world.

There's been men in my community who have been involved in that and I don't want to shame them.

I want to hold them accountable.

I like watching these men hold each other accountable because that's how I know I'm safe in my community is because these men will call each other out and hold them accountable.

And they'll uplift each other instead of shaming they'll uplift each other and remind them that as men we have a job to do, and I've seen that within my community.

And I wanna see that grow into other communities.

Moving forward when it comes to MMIW starts with supporting the family.

And so right now that is my main priority is making sure that Tammy feels heard and the Shabaiash family feels heard, and that on both sides they have the support of the community.

With the pandemic it's a lot harder now for my group and for me to watch for our predatory behavior.

Because a lot of the times what we're reading is like body language and like different cues that women will give you when they feel unsafe, which is all within the facial region.

And so it's really hard to tell if a woman is feeling uncomfortable or feeling unsafe and, with the current lock downs and the quarantines it's been, I've seen an increase of domestic violence.

I've been, I've responded to multiple different calls where domestic violence is just like running rampant.

And it's been 50, 50, it's been both men and it's been women.

And it's just been a scary time, 2020 has been a scary time, but I've also seen the community rallying around survivors, rallying around victims and amplifying their voices and all these shelters are they're packed and there they can, some of them can only be at half capacity because of the current pandemic.

So what I'm hoping to see is more, more community involvement when it comes to women needing help.

That way they don't have to go all the way to a shelter.

They can stay with someone like local within the community.

And I have seen a lot of that, especially within Fond du Lac.

I myself have been involved in situations where the family believes this loved one was murdered and they're written off as a suicide.

And we've seen that happen in multiple, multiple places, all across Carolina.

(singing in foreign language) (soft music) (speaks in foreign language) - I'm Dr. Arne Vainio, as Ojibwe people, we don't tell our creation stories unless there's snow on the ground.

Way-na-boo'zhoo was half human, half spirit.

And when the earth was formed, he named everything and he gave us our language and he was wise and he was generous and he was foolish and he was greedy.

And the stories about him were to tell us as Ojibwe people how to be and how not to be.

And part of me worries about telling those things because maybe it's not my place to talk about Way-na-boo'zhoo and to talk about our creation stories and we have storytellers that do that better.

But the thing that I wanna talk about was, something that happens to all of us I think, an imposter syndrome thing where when I was in medical school, there was a big part of me that thought maybe I didn't belong there.

And one day somebody was gonna come up and find me sitting in a classroom and go, aha.

And I wasn't supposed to be there but the truth is I did belong there.

(wind whooshing) If you're in school, law school, medical school if you're in high school or college you belong there and you've earned that seat and you need to be doing what you're doing.

This isn't just for Ojibwe people.

If you're watching this, this applies to you.

If you're someone that's working in a job that maybe you didn't want to be in in your thinking about tech school or if you're a single mom, raising kids, trying to get your GED at night, you need to be doing that.

And it's important to you.

And it's important to us.

It's important to all of us.

And in these times of isolation we do need to be reaching out to our elders.

Those stories are with them.

They remember, and you need to teach them how to Skype and how to Zoom.

And we need to remember to call an elder.

They've been waiting for your call.

I'm Dr. Arne Vainio and this is Health Matters.

(bright upbeat music) - Tammy Suomi is the mother of Jackie Defoe and grandmother to Jackie's son Kevin, both of whom are victims of domestic violence.

Tammy was willing to share with us her personal story of loss and grief.

She hopes that her story and that of her daughter and grandson will serve as a wake-up call to the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

(gentle music) - That's baby Kevin's dad.

There's Jackie there's my grandson and there's her older son.

I felt that I was all alone on this journey.

Fighting for justice for Jackie and not to have her be forgotten.

I felt lonely in the beginning, but these people I've met that were Jackie's friends and loved her and cared about her.

I didn't know all these beautiful people and they've helped me so much.

Well, they were both silly, always laughing and smiling.

Everywhere Jackie was baby Kevin was right with her.

When Jackie was pregnant with baby Kevin, she was homeless.

So I took her in when she came time to have baby Kevin.

I was there enough for him when she had him.

And I got to see her bring baby Kevin into this world.

I got a chance to be there.

Jackie was very, a very independent woman strong.

People would say she couldn't get a job.

She went out and got a job better than them.

Somebody said she couldn't do it.

She did it.

And she wanted to make a better life for her and her son.

The people who do violent crimes towards native women or take 'em is a very cowardly thing to do like Sheila St. Clair, she been missing five years, nobody knows where she's at, but there's probably somebody out there that knows.

(soft music) Baby Kevin and Jackie, they take pictures like this all the time.

There's not random things that mothers and your babies do that was her little love.

My grandson's birthday, he was birthday was, he would have been two on June 18th but he was taken away and she didn't get a chance to live like where there is lot of life.

He was a cute old boy.

He loved his momma and she loved him.

I've been out to visit her once and I do plan to go back and visit her, my heart, just breaks that she is not here I can no longer give her a hug, tell her, I love her.

Be silly, doing dance, silly dances and all that.

I just miss her so much.

She always helped me out and I helped her out.

And I just wish I could have been there to get her out of there.

Whatever shall we do?.

And I'm not gonna forget her.

I'm not gonna let her be forgotten.

(gentle music) (orchestral music) - Six years old my mother was murdered, I'm on a much older woman now.

As tribal people we know that we have budget restraints in our community galore and we're faced with issues like alcohol and drugs, domestic violence, by murder.

If you're with a man and start showing them how to be scouts again and start showing them how to really run their community.

And don't all you women need me, you need to stand by me When I do that because doing it alone, it ain't, nobody's gonna answer to it.

(orchestral music) - Tewa Women United started in 1989 as a support group for women from the Pueblos of the northern Rio Grande.

Their mission is to provide courageous spaces for indigenous women to uncover their power, strength and skills.

They possess to become positive forces for transformative change in their families and communities.

(gentle music) (bright upbeat music) (speaks in foreign language) I'm from Santa Clara Pueblo.

My name is Beata Tsosie, and I work with Tewa Women United, in our Environmental Health and Justice program.

I'm also full spectrum doula that I was trained through TWU, have a background as an educator.

And I'm really passionate about food and seed sovereignty work and our tribal communities and esecure communities.

Yeah I've lived here in the Tewa region, Tewa basin for Northern New Mexico all my life.

And I've been working with Tewa Women United.

It's a nonprofit in Espanola, New Mexico for about 11 years now.

We have our circle of grandmothers or Sayain that are a lot of them are the founding mothers of Tewa women United.

And they'd also are pretty fierce community organizers and activists, and that their are also that traditional intergenerational support within the organization and for a lot of our outreach and interactions with the community.

And it came together originally as just a support group for Pueblo women, because of all the issues they were facing in their communities, in their homes around substance abuse and physical sexual abuse, addictions, alcoholism, suicide, all the things that a lot of communities are struggling with under colonialism.

It grew from that into the non-profit.

This year because of COVID we have had to scale down community events and there was some annual events that we had every year, here at the Espanola Healing Foods, Oasis.

This is a project I've been managing for about five years now, we're in our fifth year working on this project we've here in the garden every year for regeneration Fest, we would usually do like a ceremonial tree planting.

And so we partnered with Northern youth project that we've been doing some collaboration this summer and mentoring of youth on indigenous sustainable design at their garden.

Yeah, it was just a way to still reach out to the youth of the community, have something for them to engage in, in a positive way, have something that mirrors that idea of what regeneration Fest is, which is to show young people that they're loved and cared for.

And I think there's a really strong metaphor when it comes to planting trees.

That is a commitment to the future and not always seeing the fruits of your labor doing it anyway, because you know it's gonna benefit somebody in future generations or even your own self, maybe like 10 years from now.

So a lot of the stuff here that we have planted is real baby baby trees, baby medicines, baby foods but everything's edible medicinal or herbal, this whole garden, these initiatives around reconnecting community with that ancestral energy of our food traditions of our land-based culture is really powerful it's a strength-based approach to environmental, health and justice.

To where we know that we need strong bodies, We need strong immune systems.

We need to be nurturing these spaces where we can remember how to use these be in relation with our plant elders.

And they were here before humans were on this planet.

So the Espanola Healing Foods Oasis is unique because it is really very much based on the story of place.

It's very much a collaborative project between the people of the community, the organizations within the community, whether they're birth workers farmers, herbalists, teachers, educators, youth workers all different walks of life have come and professions have come through this garden.

And the garden really is an intersection for all the social justice issues.

And because it is a dry land drain water garden, it's teaching water conservation it's teaching indigenous agricultural techniques of farming in the Southwest.

It's keeping that resilience of our seeds by growing them out consistently in this climate.

It's an outdoor educational space.

We just opened a seed library in the public library next door in March this year where any plant you find in this garden, you could go to the seed library and get seeds for those plants.

So we're harvesting seed.

We're also growing annual vegetables, like Three sisters and Hemerocallis.

It shows those methods of water conservation at the same time of like looking at water as a resource and not a liability, which is very Western but at the same time, while it lifts up indigenous techniques and science and technology it's also recognizing the benefits of working alongside Western technology.

So like we have a modern drip line system integrated with the garden.

And so like it shows the rapid solutions that can come with balancing Western and indigenous science and technologies together which is what we kind of need right now.

There is urgency and coming up with a lot of these solutions, even as a response to environmental pollution where we're doing the micro and bio-remediation workshops here which can clean pollution up to zero it's pretty rare for a city entity to collaborate with a nonprofit on the scale.

And that was a big learning process.

Even that alone of just being in partnership with the City of Espanola on this project and having it in a space that's accessible to everybody.

And we do wanna replicate this in other, in Pueblo communities but this was a good pilot project to create that template.

(bright upbeat music) (orchestral music) (speaks in foreign language) My name is Nathan Gordon.

I'm the Red Cliff Bands Vice Chairman here for the tribe.

Oh, I think overall is a sovereignty, to myself means, the ability to exercise your own rights, here in Red cliffe for the band here, it's, again, you can governor and make regulations and oversee your own people, but exercising your sovereignty, hunting, fishing, and gathering.

We had that when we signed the treaties.

For me it's exciting, it gets handed down from generation to generation.

There's old timers that used to go fishing, hunting for this place, we can hear stories upon stories that get passed down years after years to their children.

And now we're starting to see their children getting into the fishing and going out on the boats now.

So again, to me, it's real exciting.

That they're out there exercising their treaty right in making a sustainable way of living for themselves in their families as they move forward in a time that we're, hit with currently.

I think overall the pandemic it hit really hard, around the area and then over time it slowly came in.

So again, we never know what tomorrow's gonna bring.

(orchestral music) - For more information about Native Report, look for us on the web at nativereport.org, on Facebook and on YouTube.

- Thank you for spending this time with your friends and neighbors cross Indian country I'm Rita Aspinwall.

- And I'm Ernie Stevens.

See you next time on Native Report.

(orchestral music)