Colleen Nick

Unfortunately, most of our family members are all too familiar with this pain and this circumstance.

I feel like that's a loaded question.

It's often we take one step forward and then we're often going two steps back.

Locally in Colorado, we have established a great relationship with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

They take these cases seriously.

They are responsive and they go above and beyond when it comes to, for instance, a law enforcement agency dragging their feet on issuing an alert.

They will continuously reach out to remind them that they are the resource to issue this alert and they're ready to

to go.

But that said, we still continue to face centuries of systemic issues of bias.

Most people assume that Native people only live on reservations.

However, 80% of us, which in Colorado is roughly 206,000 people, live along the front range.

So law enforcement either thinks that we don't exist or

When they do think we exist, we then face a lot of stereotypes that we're just out partying.

We still have a lot of work to do despite how far we've come.

Absolutely.

Jurisdictional issues get more complex.

So you get all these different law enforcement agency jurisdictions involved, and a lot of times they're pointing fingers at each other like, well, that's not my responsibility.

Or conversely, like my hands are tied and I'm not allowed to share information with another agency.

So there are two indigenous community-specific playbooks that have been developed by other organizations that we do refer families to.

We've also developed, essentially, we call it a script for families when they need to call law enforcement to report their loved one or their friend missing to try to generate the urgency of that missing indigenous person alert.