'I shouldn’t be here with everything that was going on. I should be dead.' Ashley Maha’a, who was trafficked into the sex trade as a teen, is joining a new task force that will study the issue of missing and murdered Native Hawaiian women and girls.
The Urban Indian Health Institute’s report didn’t include data on Native Hawaiians because the organization is funded by the Indian Health Service, a U.S. agency that serves Native Americans and Alaska Natives but not Native Hawaiians. The Seattle institute didn’t have the resources to extend the study to Hawaii, Director Abigail Echo-Hawk said.
Public and private agencies don’t always collect statistics on race. And some data groups Native Hawaiians with other Pacific Islanders, making it impossible to identify the degree to which Hawaii’s Indigenous people are affected. About 20% of the state’s population is Native Hawaiian. “It’s not like someone is kidnapped off the street. It’s that person is enticed and convinced to cut off their family if they’re a child, or a teenager,” Jabola-Carolus said.
“I’ve met so many people on the mainland, and so, so, so many of them have told me that when they were being trafficked nationally, they would be flown here for a period of time and work here when things were slow, because the demand is so high,” Maha’a said. Rosemond Pettigrew, board president of Pouhana ’O Na Wahine, a grassroots collective of Native Hawaiian women advocating against domestic and sexual violence, said land is family, and not being connected to it severs Native Hawaiians from their past.
She suspects some of its biggest obstacles will be in getting cooperation from law enforcement agencies and not having dedicated funding. Lawmakers didn’t allocate the panel any money, so its members are relying on existing resources to do their research. The most successful state task forces had funding, Echo-Hawk said.
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