It’s the first meeting of its kind in the state to elevate California’s response to the missing and murdered Indigenous persons crisis. The gathering occurred along the North Coast in Humboldt County, home to several Indigenous lands.
It is a brutal and silent crisis: the growing number of missing or murdered Indigenous women across the U.S., including right here in California. Many of these cases are under investigation and remain unsolved.
Tribal leaders say kids as young as 13 are addicted to fentanyl, as the synthetic opioid hits Native American communities harder than others in its path.
Lawman fears young woman will fall into a missing-persons file, a decades-long problem in Indigenous communities that traces back to white settler colonialism, a broken foster care system and the forced assimilation of Native children in the state’s punitive boarding schools.
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