Dodging a Bullet

Reflecting on my lost sisters

Living and working on the Yakama reservation for 18 years, I became involved in the movement to bring justice to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, my missing and murdered sisters. The issues surrounding the disappearance and murder of Indigenous women is controversial and uncomfortable. Many of the women who disappear and are later found dead are commercial sex workers and addicts, throwaway people. The narrative goes like this: These women made bad choices and put themselves in risky situations. It is sad that they are lost, but they brought it on themselves. In response to “bad behavior,” the dominant culture initiates campaigns to abate drug use and appoints task force after task force to analyze the problem. There is no motivation to examine the underlying injustice that puts women like me in dangerous situations. The dominant culture spins the fiction that this is a matter of personal responsibility, that poor and ignorant people can be educated to behave in a way that is more wholesome. The locus of intervention is on changing the behavior of individuals we pity. 

I would like to share with you here that I was groomed to become a prostitute, and I avoided that fate narrowly. I am a professional woman, who earned an NIH fellowship during college and multiple advanced degrees. I have contributed to significant legal and policy reforms in the county and state where I live, and I launched a global movement. All of this would have been lost if one man had wanted me as a commodity. I might have been a prostitute and disappeared at an early age. Instead, I have contributed meaningfully to my community. I repeat this here because I wonder what my lost sisters might have contributed to their communities and the world we share. 

Here is my story.

When I was a teenager, my father experienced stretches of incarceration. During these times, I lived with my older brother and sister and the three children of my dad’s girlfriend. We were all children, trying to get by without being caught by child protection and placed in foster homes. All of us worked. Since I was under the legal working age, I cleaned motel rooms ($1 per room) and homes in a working-class neighborhood ($35 per home). My siblings ran a small yard maintenance service, and the younger kids, including me, worked for them.