This week on Minnesota Native News, members of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe vote on blood quantum requirements. Also, we hear from Juliet Rudie, who now heads the state’s new Office of Missing And Murdered Indigenous Relatives.
Juliet Rudie – a Lower Souix Indian Community citizen – now leads Minnesota’s new office of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives in St. Paul. It’s the first state office of its kind in the nation.
The office was created based on the findings of the Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women & Relatives Task Force.
The office will work with the 11 sovereign tribal nations in Minnesota; federal, state, and local law enforcement; federal and state agencies; and community-based organizations and advocates.
Rudie has nearly 30 years of experience in public safety, starting as a patrol officer for St. Paul police in 1990. She later joined the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office in 2011, serving as an Inspector, Undersheriff of the Administration Division and Chief Deputy.
Rudie retired in 2017, but she says she felt she needed to do more, something focused on helping native women and children.
Juliet Rudie recently spoke with my sister Leah Lemm and I on Native Lights: Where Indigenous Voices Shine. Here she is talking about the new position.
“I got a call that said, Hey, this job is going to be posted…. so I read the task force report, which is 163 pages. And I’m like, this document is amazing. They did research on why this was happening and they, and they managed to piece together some data, the data’s in silos. So I give kudos to the research company, which is Wilder, where they were able to pull this information and then give it to, um, the task force. And then they were tasked with, um, there were five, uh, areas they were to look at, and then they were, and then from those five areas that came up with these 20 mandates.
so whenever I get like overwhelmed in a, oh, by the scope of the work, I go back and I look at the report and I go, okay, you’re on track, Julie, you’re doing these things. Um, and, and then, so when I have to report to the legislature in January, I can say, these are the mandates that I touched.
At this time, Juliet Rudie says she’s narrowing the focus of the office in an effort to tackle as many mandates as possible…
“it’s prevention, um, reporting response, and making sure we have enough for victim resources and those. So that’s, those are the four areas that I’m gonna focus on. Um, and then, and it’s, it’s bigger than that.”
Juliet Rudie is now in the process of hiring more people for the new office.
“I’m determined to make some type of difference, um, for the victims and the victims’ families and survivors, because it’s just sad … I have a friend who lost his daughter to gun violence. He was a native officer that I worked with… he said to me, he said that we need to do more. We need to do more in our community and we need to be better. We need to make things better.
You can listen to more of the conversation with Juliet Rudie on Native Lights Where Indigenous Voices Shine.
Cole Premo reporting for Minnesota Native News
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