COLONIZATION, FORCED DISPLACEMENT AND VIOLENCE against Indigenous people in the U.S. have left years of generational trauma. Now, a first-ever report quantifies these impacts on Bay Area Native communities.

The Indian Health Center of Santa Clara Valley released a report this month showing the extent in which local Indigenous people survived sexual abuse, have missing or murdered relatives, struggled with substance use and more. It surveyed 254 participants in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. Santa Clara County is located on the ancestral homelands of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which are not federally recognized.

Half of the survey respondents said they had a missing relative — with many having multiple missing relatives — 55% said they had a relative who was murdered, 54% have experienced sexual assault, 56% have suffered domestic violence and 26% have misused alcohol.

Sonya Tetnowski, CEO of the Indian Health Center, said Indigenous people have raised the alarm for years about the brutality happening in and to their community. Now that there’s the data to support it, tribal communities can move toward healing.

“I feel like we have now the proof we need to say, ‘This is happening to us right now,’” Tetnowski told San José Spotlight. “It has a historical context, but it’s happening today. We’re losing our children today.”

Misclassified and erased

Indigenous communities have been historically misclassified or erased. Data collected by health agencies often puts groups in broad categories such as Black, white, Asian, Latino or other.

“A lot of our data might go into ‘other’ or ‘multiple ethnicities’ so then we completely lose the data,” Anecita Miller, a prevention services program director for the Indian Health Center, told San José Spotlight. “They call that data genocide because now they’re saying that we don’t exist.”

Prior to the Indian Health Center’s report, the only local data available for missing and murdered Indigenous people came from the Urban Indian Health Institute, a division of the Seattle Indian Health Board. The institute combed through law enforcement records, state databases and news articles — and found zero cases in San Jose, in part because the city did not respond to its Freedom of Information Act requests, according to the study that began in 2017.

A 2016 report by the National Crime Information Center found 5,712 Indigenous women reported to be missing nationwide, but the U.S. Department of Justice only logged 116 cases.

In Santa Clara County, 101 people out of every 100,000 females reported sexual assault per year from 2018-2022, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The lack of data underscores why the Indian Health Center’s report is so significant — and the findings are staggering, Tetnowski said.

“The hardest for me to even read or talk about was sexual assault against the children,” she said. “Children should feel safe in their home.”

More than 70% of survey participants said they experienced abuse when they were 10 years old or younger.

Indigenous people face the greatest risk of sexual assault, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. Nationwide, nearly half of women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence and one in six women have experienced rape or attempted rape.

In Santa Clara County, 101 people out of every 100,000 females reported sexual assault per year from 2018-2022, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Pushed off reservations and into cities

Native Americans make up less than 2% of Santa Clara County’s population of nearly 2 million people. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 pushed Indigenous people out of their reservations and into cities by offering job training, with hopes they would assimilate. In California, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles were designated as relocation sites. This resulted in a loss of culture, homelessness, unemployment and more. As a result of federal policies, the majority of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in cities and not on reservations, U.S. Census data shows.

“The things that were given to us for healing and for survival — those rituals or ceremonies or songs or dances — those were all taken from us,” Miller said. “(Violence is) happening in urban environments, not just on tribal lands. We need resources here.”

Muwekma Ohlone Tribe Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh said while the report’s findings are significant, it stops short of addressing landlessness as the root cause of inequality.

“Justice demands action, not just awareness,” Nijmeh told San José Spotlight. “Concrete next steps must include mandatory improved data collection disaggregated by tribe and urban Indigenous status, full implementation of Savanna’s Act and Not Invisible Act provisions in California, increased funding for culturally grounded prevention and response programs and meaningful government-to-government consultation with recognized and unrecognized tribes alike.”

Santa Clara County District 2 Supervisor Betty Duong said the county must respond with culturally centered care rooted in trust and healing.

“Misclassification has erased Indigenous communities from our systems, making it harder to respond with the urgency and resources this crisis demands,” Duong told San José Spotlight. “As a county, we have a responsibility to do better, that starts with data.”

Contact Joyce Chu at joyce@sanjosespotlight.com or @joyce_speaks on X. 

This story originally appeared in San Jose Spotlight.