Carolyn DeFord was hoping for change. She was hoping for answers. She’s been hoping for 24 years.
On Feb. 18, 2019, DeFord was making the long trip from her home in central Washington to Oregon — a drive she had made many times to search for her missing mother, Leona Kinsey, who disappeared from her home in La Grande in 1998. This time the drive was different.
DeFord was traveling to testify in the Oregon Capitol. A first-of-its-kind bill in Oregon would declare missing Native American women a statewide emergency, launch an investigation into the crisis and produce a report to decipher the underpinnings of the problem. DeFord, a citizen of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, thought it could make a real difference.
“ I went just hoping to have a couple of minutes to share,” DeFord said. She discussed the story of her mother’s disappearance, how she seemed to vanish. The coffee pot was on, the beloved dogs in the yard — but Kinsey was gone.
Nearly 25 years later, Kinsey remains missing and police have made no arrests related to her case. The 2019 bill, sponsored by Rep. Tawna Sanchez, passed, but it hasn’t made the difference DeFord hoped.
Five years after DeFord made that drive to Salem, there have been state and federal reports examining the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous people, a series of proposed improvements and a handful of public events and photo ops. But there has been little progress on the main recommendations to improve data management and inf.