Hey, true advocates, it's me, Eric Carter-Londine, and today I am back with part two of the

isolated series, the Zachariah Jawan Shorty story.

The... The The Before we get back to Vanji and Elvira, as they discuss what happened with the investigation into what happened to Zachariah,

Vandji had asked me to talk about some of the issues that families of the missing and murdered indigenous people face.

One of the biggest challenges that exists out there when it comes to MMIP, MMIW cases, is the issue of jurisdiction.

And before we get too far ahead of ourselves on that, there's a little bit of history that we have to go through to try to understand why things are the way they are.

And I want to give a shout out to my right hand, Jackie Moranty, for helping me with

this part of the episode.

There are more missing and murdered indigenous relatives from the Navajo Nation than any

other tribe in the U.S.

Right now, that number's over 300, and some of these people have been missing since the 50s.

Unfortunately, the number continues to grow daily.

In 1838, the federal government signed treaties with the Native Americans, and in those treaties,

they gave them the right to their sovereignty.

What this means was that the tribes could govern their own people

in any way that they saw fit.

There, of course, were caveats.

The tribes may or may not have had the right to arrest

or try non-Native Americans for crimes that are committed on the reservation.

But if a Native American committed a crime off the reservation,

they would be subject to arrest and trial by non-natives.

In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that tribal governments couldn't arrest non-natives who committed crimes on the reservation at all.

...