Amelia Schafer
ICT
RAPID CITY, South Dakota – There are 273 deceased and unidentified Indigenous peoples across the country. In an effort to return them to their families, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and South Dakota are offering free DNA drive this week.
“It’s important to get your DNA in there just to be able to potentially identify some of those Jane and John Does across the U.S.,” said Allison Morisette, Oglala Lakota and the South Dakota MMIP liaison through the state attorney general’s office.
Typically DNA testing to identify a deceased individual can cost law enforcement on average $1,000-$1,500 per sample, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. This creates a barrier for small law enforcement departments or tribal law enforcement who don’t have the resources to process the tests and sequence DNA on their own.
Funding from the missing and unidentified human remains grant allowed the BIA and South Dakota Attorney General’s Office to provide a two-day DNA drive on Dec. 18 and 19 at the Monument Arena.
The December drive is free of cost to participants and made possible through a partnership with the University of North Texas where DNA will be cataloged, sequenced and uploaded.
The drive is a first for the South Dakota MMIP program and Morisette said she’s hopeful that hosting it during the annual Lakota Nation Invitational will allow for as many participants as possible to come. The invitational is an annual multi-sport tournament that attracts Native people from all over the country.
“[The tournament] a general area where we know a lot of our relatives will be for training, for basketball games, for vendor booths,” Morisette said. “I’m sure there’s a lot of people who have missing relatives and haven’t had access to or haven’t been swabbed for DNA yet. I wanted to be able to bring that to them completely free of cost, and be potentially able to bring them some closure.”
TELLING THEIR STORIES: MMIP IN SOUTH DAKOTA
South Dakota Searchlight and ICT have partnered on a long-term project, funded in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, that aims to provide a snapshot of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People cases by combining multiple sources of data.The publications have also created a form for people to share a tip about their missing loved one, for possible inclusion in the project.
Participants need to have a loved one who is missing and preferably are direct relatives of that individual (not distant cousins or distant relatives).
DNA gathered from a direct relative like a parent or sibling has a much higher chance of providing a clean, high match with remains cataloged by law enforcement.
Data taken from the event will be only used for cross-referencing in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, also known as CODIS. It’s the agency’s national DNA database.
Genetic material and DNA results will not be used in any other manner or for any other case. Its use is solely for comparison to unidentified remains.
DNA will be stored until a match is made or until the participant requests its removal. Families can request the removal of their data sample at any time.
“This is completely voluntary,” Morisette said. “If they thought about it, and they don’t want to have their DNA in the system, they can then shoot us an email or a text, we’ll send them a form, and then we’ll completely destroy that profile.”
MMIP advocates have identified four of the 273 unidentified Indigenous individuals believed to be Oceti Sakowin — Lakota, Dakota and Nakota — specifically from South Dakota.
Those individuals are an adult man found on Medicine Mountain outside of Rapid City in 1978, a young woman found in southcentral rural Colorado in 1999 believed to be Sicangu Lakota, a man using the nickname “Albert Crazy Buffalo” who died in 1992 in Scranton, Pennsylvania also believed to be Sicangu Lakota and an adult woman found in Gordon, Nebraska in 1970 believed to be Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge and Mexican.
DNA taken from participants during the be sent to the University of North Texas where researchers will enter data from DNA swabs into the FBI’s DNA database while simultaneously cross referencing DNA with all the Jane or John Does in the system.
Obtaining a sample from a family member is easy, Morisette said. A team member will take a long Q-tip swab and gently swipe the inside of a participant’s cheeks several times on each side. Two separate Q-tip swab samples will be taken to ensure at least one sample is viable.
After the DNA collection, swabs are placed into a secure kit ready to be shipped to Texas for processing.
While the event is held in South Dakota it’s not exclusively open to South Dakota residents or even members of just the nine tribes in South Dakota. Any Indigenous person who is a direct relative of a missing individual can participate in the DNA drive, Morisette said.
“Let’s say that you had a loved one who got on a bus down to Arizona, and then you never heard from them again, or they went missing down there [it would be open to you],” Morisette said.
IF INTERESTED…
WHEN: Thursday, Dec. 18 and Friday, Dec. 19
TIME: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mountain Standard Time
PLACE: The Monument, Civic Center Room 206 (444 N Mt Rushmore Rd, Rapid City, SD 57701)
COST: Free
ELIGIBILITY: Open to any Native person who is a direct relative of a missing individual (not distant cousins or distant relatives)
BRING: Information about the missing individual: case number (if known), date of their last known sighting, name and birthday of the relative