Of the many roles in which Detective Julia Oliveira has served over the course of her nearly 25 year long career in law enforcement, Missing or Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) Investigator with the Yurok Tribe in Northern California is one that has brought a unique set of challenges – not least of which is that she’s the first person to ever take on the job.
Most recently serving with the Blue Lake Rancheria Tribal Police Department, and prior to that the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, Oliveira is no stranger to difficult investigations. Still, the vastness of the position – which demands overseeing cases as far north as the Oregon border all the way south to the Central Valley – on top of a sheer unprecedented set of assignments and cultural considerations, means that it’s a job requiring an especially seasoned set of investigative skills in order to properly combat the nationwide epidemic of violent crime haunting the indigenous community.
California has the largest indigenous population of any state in the country, making up 1.7% of the state’s entire population as of 2022. The rate of indigenous individuals who go missing or murdered per capita is extraordinarily disproportionate at over 37% – a number that can be ascribed to a combination of generational trauma, geographic isolation, economic vulnerability and a number of other systemic issues impacting communities of color. Of these cases, an inestimable amount go cold due to a sharp lack of proper investigative attention.
Detective Julia Oliveira
“I have a mother who calls me at least every other week to make sure I haven’t forgotten her daughter,” says Oliveira in explaining the depth of the harm a historic lack of care about crimes within the indigenous community have caused. “If I am fortunate enough to solve that case, it will be tough. And it has been…But it’s also kind of an honor to be able to do it and to be able to try to help these families.”
Noting insufficiencies in official law enforcement databases, the Yurok Tribe set out to fill in the heavily ignored gaps of information on their ‘stolen relatives’ in 2020, conducting a study in collaboration with the US Marshals titled To’ Kee Skuy’ Soo Ney-Wo-Chek (which when translated hints at the idea of bringing home the missing). What they were confronted with at the end of the study was 105 forgotten and unsolved cases within their territory alone, a number signaling an even more urgent need to push back than had initially been anticipated.
Though the Yurok Tribe is the largest in California – comprising a total of 5,000 members and a reservation that stretches across Humboldt and Del Norte counties – legal restrictions prohibiting communication between tribal and local law enforcement mean limited resources for shared investigations and, as a result, an ever growing number of cold cases. In need of a new type of position specifically designed to bridge these gaps while also maintaining an exclusive focus on MMIP cases, Oliveira’s role was formed in 2023.
Given that the rates of those who go missing or murdered amongst the indigenous community is a largely unseen crisis nationwide, not just in California, Oliveira’s first year as MMIP Investigator has demanded attention given to issues both local and far-ranging. In addition to advocating for physical resources, such as access to forensic labs or even a department drone with which to scan remote swaths of land, she’s also had to fight to instill a priority around cultural awareness within investigative practices.
“When you start from nowhere, I think that there’s always sort of a burden to start to build those blocks,” describes Oliveira, “And we kind of had to hit the ground running. As my boss would put it, the plane was already flying and we still didn’t have the wings put on.”
In the year since Oliveira was appointed to the position, she has managed to reopen an impressive total of 15 cases involving members of not only the Yurok Tribe but also the Miwok, Pomo, Hoopa and more. Of these cases, a handful of them have made significant waves prompting calls for increased national media attention, such as the cases of Emmilee Risling and Allan Olvera.
Emmilee Risling was a beloved 33-year-old mother of two when she disappeared after last being seen walking across a bridge in a remote corner of the Yurok Reservation known as “End of Road” in January 2021. She was also a straight-A college graduate in pursuit of a masters degree and an accomplished traditional dancer. Yet, in the months leading up to her disappearance, Risling’s behavior turned uncharacteristically erratic, with family members theorizing postpartum psychosis compounded by drugs to cope with the trauma of abuse were likely to blame. At the time of her disappearance, she was one of 5 indigenous women to go missing from the same isolated “Lost Coast” stretch of northern California land in a short matter of just 18 months where indigenous women had disappeared. Since then, none of those 5 cases have been solved.
All too similarly, Allan Olvera was killed in 2001, but over 20 years later his family is still without answers. 51-year-old Olvera, who was a member of the Miwok tribe as well as heavily involved in the Sacramento Native American Caucus, was first noticed missing by family members when he failed to show up to a community event. Though initial investigators theorized that the killer was someone Olvera likely knew – who he invited inside his home before stealing a handful of his personal artifacts – no promising leads were ever generated. However, a newly reviewed autopsy report from California’s DA’s office has led to fresh insight into his cause of death and rejuvenated hope for an arrest.
Since a significant percentage of the cases Oliveira works on have long gone cold, much of her time is spent digging through a too-large archive of forgotten evidence, reinterviewing old witnesses and working with family members whose grief has only grown deeper over years with no resolution. At times, it’s also been a struggle for Oliveira to build the community’s trust in law enforcement while at the same time crossing jurisdictions to work with the original investigators on reopened cases, all without causing current rifts to grow.
As a registered Native American herself with a long-standing familiarity with the Humboldt community, Oliveira credits a sense of attentive care as the most crucial need in this line of work: “There are so many people that I’ve talked to with their missing that have gone missing under suspicious circumstances. I think you have to be able to delineate and talk to them and, you know, be able to honor those families. So as an investigator, you have to hear the families to know and honor their wishes as well.”
Though Oliveira’s position is formally funded through the Yurok Tribe’s law enforcement office, she wants others to know that it was made possible by the contributions and collaborative effort of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, a separate tribe from the San Bernardino County area.
“I think what we’re hoping for is that people will band together and help each other and start working on this crisis,” explains Oliveira. “We can talk to each other and bounce ideas off of each other and share information, and that’s what I hope happens with this position. I hope it just helps it grow.”
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