Trace A. DeMeyer's Blog, page 8
August 4, 2025
MMIWG and Sex Trafficking Report
A new report by Thomson Reuters highlights the intersection between missing Indigenous women and human trafficking in Canada. The report says Winnipeg, Edmonton and the Prince Albert-Regina-Saskatoon triangle had the most MMIWG cases, and that they swiftly go from missing to appearing on sex ads.
The report, which was released Tuesday, analyzed 185 cases from 2010 to April 2024 and found Winnipeg was the city with the most disappearances, with 14 per cent. It was followed by the Edmonton metropolitan area with 10.5 per cent and the triangle between Prince Albert, Regina and Saskatoon with 10 per cent. The report noted that Winnipeg’s large Indigenous population and robust reporting of missing women and girls may have an impact on the numbers.
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Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
July 28, 2025
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the Legacy of Legal Erasure
The System Didn’t Forget Them. It Was Built to Look Away by Tony Michaels
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and the Legacy of Legal Erasure
Read on Substack In 2016, over 5,700 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing. The U.S. Department of Justice recorded just 116 of those cases. That’s not a data error. That’s a decision repeated year after year by institutions that were never built to protect Native lives.The epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is not a mystery. It is a test of whether this country can confront the systems it built to disappear people.
The federal government has delayed.
Law enforcement has failed.
The media has ignored.
And most of America has looked away.
But Native communities never have.
They’ve searched when no one else would.
They’ve named their daughters when others erased them.
They’ve demanded justice when the system delivered only silence.
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
Forced?
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Indigenous women in Canada were being forcibly sterilized by state sponsored eugenics operations as recently as 2019. A report last year concluded “this horrific practice is not confined to the past, but clearly is continuing today.” In May of 2023, a doctor was caught forcibly sterilizing an Indigenous woman.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220722024420/https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/441/RIDR/reports/2022-07-14_ForcedSterilization_E.pdf
The growing enthusiasm for eugenics thinking reached Canadian borders in the first half of the 20th century. Even though forced sterilisation was already common throughout the territory, the Province of Alberta officially enacted the Sexual Sterilization Act (SSA) in 1928, followed in 1933 by British Columbia. Considered the first Canadian eugenics law, this act legalised and regulated the sterilisation of mentally-disabled individuals.
Aggressive assimilation policies quickly extended these measures to Indigenous communities such as the Inuit, Indian, and Métis people. While it is difficult to provide an accurate estimate, researchers agree that Indigenous women were disproportionately targeted. Between 1966 and 1976, over 10,000 women would have undergone forced sterilisation in public hospitals, residential schools, and mental facilities. And It has continued since then in more subtle and nefarious ways.
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Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.meWhat is planned? Federal government to go completely electronic by September 30
What about tribes? Can this coming dystopia be stopped?I need your help and ideas! How can most poverty-stricken Native Tribes get out of the 15-Minute-City and digital currency planned by the US? Many tribes do not have electricity or running water. The majority don’t have banks. Some have modernized but not that many. There are 574 tribes. Is it even possible to do this change on the remote reservations? Or will there be a genocide (again)?? Thoughts?
- Trace L Hentz
Read on Substack Please leave a comment👇 and share with your relatives, please...
If you’re one of the 1.9 million people who still get a paper tax refund check from the federal government, you will need to make a change in the coming months. It’s the same for those who still count on Social Security checks in the mail rather than electronic direct deposit. A presidential executive order requires those and other transactions by the federal government to go completely electronic by September 30. The White House claims paperless transactions will save taxpayers as much as $657 million. At the same time, it poses a significant challenge for the high percentage of Native Americans who choose not to utilize conventional banks. READ THIS: https://www.nicoa.org/native-households-have-highest-unbanked-percentage/ Listen to Native America Calling about the issues with banking in Indian Country:
https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/tuesday-june-17-2025-preparing-for-paperless-transactions/
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Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
July 25, 2025
The Situation We Are Facing
It’s going to be horrible for the victims but they need to be interviewed LIVE on TV and explain (in graphic detail) what Epstein did to them, and also by his girlfriend Maxwell. Time to end this bullsh*t.
- Trace L Hentz
Read on SubstackThe Epstein case has many people triggered. Many of us adoptees were abused, sexually and physically when we were children. Telling someone the truth helps greatly.... Epstein was a pedophile and so was his girlfriend. The victims (thousands of children) need to be allowed to tell their story... TraceQuestions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
July 21, 2025
Finding Your Ancestors in the Archives
PHOTO: Author Joseph Lee. (Photo/Aslan Chalom)By Shaun Griswold | July 19, 2025 Yahoo News
A mixture of memoir, reportage and commentary, it documents Lee’s family history, describing how land and ancestry forged strong links to his Aquinnah Wampanoag home on Martha’s Vineyard. Lee’s stories echoed my own rez dirt memories, layers of loving Indigenous relationships with foundations deeper than any historical record.
[Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in "High Country News. Used with permission. All rights reserved.]
Lee spoke with High Country News before his book’s July 15 release.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News : Your book demonstrates how you and your family live as Indigenous people on colonized land. Can you introduce those experiences?
Joseph Lee: I’m a Wampanoag, and my family and my tribe is from Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a small island in the Northeast, known for being this fancy vacation place where presidents and movie stars go. I grew up spending summers at my grandparents’ house, and that was the original framing for the book: How I thought about being Indigenous and being Wampanoag was filtered through the experience of how people see Martha’s Vineyard, along with how people see Wampanoag people and Native folks in the Northeast: We were there when the pilgrims came, Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, all of that.
That confused me, because what I was being told about being Indigenous didn’t really match up with the way I was experiencing it personally. I went to tribal summer camp, I went to our cranberry festival harvest. I did all these things, and none of it aligned with this version of stereotypical Nativeness, the disappeared Native gone in the past.
I was trying to make sense of the way that we’ve lived and the choices that we’ve made, and what is this going to look like in the future?
keep reading👇
HCN : The book speaks clearly about how you approach mixed heritage and background. How did you define Indigeneity in researching and writing this book?
JL: Indigenous identity, like many identities, is something that is so often defined by external sources, by outsiders, people telling us, “Here’s what you have to be, here’s what it means to be Native.” For a long time I internalized that, even though I rejected it. I didn’t want that to be the only way to be Native, but I couldn’t necessarily see another way beyond those external expectations or stereotypes.
I’d spent all this time thinking about defying stereotypes or being upset at these expectations, and I hadn’t spent enough time thinking about what it means to be Indigenous — what does that mean to me?
My dad’s family is from China and my mom’s mother is from Japan, and then my mom’s father is Wampanoag. So one of my four grandparents is Wampanoag. For a long time, I sort of saw those things as all separate. I felt like I had to talk about being Wampanoag in one box and one part of my life and being Asian in another part of my life. Ultimately, I realized that it’s all me, it’s all part of my life. I can’t separate those things.
HCN : Some of the book recreates or imagines your grandparents’ experiences. What was that like for you?
JL: It makes me feel closer to my grandparents and my family and my entire community. I grew up knowing three of my grandparents, but they passed away when I was fairly young. So most of my life, I haven’t been able to spend time with my grandparents. Recreating their lives, who they were, was a really special part of the book.
One of the best compliments I got is after my mom read it for the first time. She said that she felt I really captured her mom, my grandmother — somebody I knew as a child but wasn’t around anymore from a pretty young age. There was so much I didn’t know about her.
It’s a unique experience to go back and see them as young people and growing older and navigating the world — and, in many cases, navigating some of the same questions and challenges that I’m now navigating myself.
HCN : How did you share your research with your family?
JL: I think the question you’re asking is important — this question of the historical record and preserving and sharing information — because a lot of that has been lost, sometimes deliberately erased. There’s a lot of misinformation; Indigenous voices aren’t the most prominent ones when you look back through history, and so it’s important to surface those things. Just because Indigenous folks weren’t featured in all the history books doesn’t mean they weren’t saying things.
When I went back through my own tribe’s history, people had opinions and were writing and reading and researching and making art and doing all of these things. It was just an amazing experience to be able to go back through all those records. There was so much I didn’t know about my own tribe, my own family and my own community. I knew that information was out there, I just had to find it. Some of that was hard-copy records, some was oral history, talking to people, memories. It’s important to not value one of those over the other. I’m grateful that I have my parents and other family members and folks in the tribe I could lean on.
SOURCE: https://nativenewsonline.net/arts-entertainment/finding-your-ancestors-in-the-archives
Questions? EMAIL: tracelara@pm.meNative Bidaské: Alligator Alcatraz — The Fight to Protect the Everglades
How Public Media Cuts Hurt Native Americans
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