333 – Bridging Communities: Indigenous Approaches to Combating Human Trafficking, with Josie Heyano

Ending Human Trafficking Podcast

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Josie Heyano as the two discuss the importance of bridging communities to prevent human trafficking.

Josie Heyano

Josie Heyano, LMSW, is a Deg Xinag Athabascan advocate from Alaska, focused on creating holistic and decolonized practices to serve Alaska Native and Indigenous communities impacted by human trafficking. With extensive experience supporting youth facing homelessness, exploitation, and trafficking, she founded Signify Consulting, LLC, to further her collaboration in anti-trafficking work across Alaska. Josie is a Presidentially appointed member of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, advising federal policy, and in 2023, she received the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award for her contributions to prevention and intervention in Alaska. Her work honors her great aunt Linda Miller and others still awaiting justice.

Key Points

• Traditional introductions are important as they reflect relationships and community ties, highlighting accountability and cultural identity.
• Serving on the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, Josie highlights the importance of humility and listening to voices within her community that are often unheard. She cites a recent visit by the council to Alaska as an opportunity to humanize the data and issues surrounding human trafficking.
• Human trafficking is a symptom of broader systemic issues, such as domestic violence, homelessness, and mental health crises. There is a need for a holistic approach that addresses these interconnected challenges within Indigenous communities.
• The Alaska Human Trafficking Data Needs Assessment revealed gaps in data and understanding regarding trafficking. Community relationships and collaboration across different sectors (service providers, law enforcement, academia) are necessary to improve data collection and response strategies.
• Cultural practices and community care can serve as protective factors against human trafficking. It is necessary to integrate traditional values and practices into prevention efforts, focusing on unconditional care, relationship building, and addressing basic community needs.
• A preventative approach that extends beyond immediate trafficking interventions includes ensuring that community members have access to essential resources, support systems, and a sense of belonging from birth, thus preventing vulnerability to trafficking in the first place. Active, compassionate engagement with community members fosters safety and well-being.

Resources

• U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking
• FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award
• 277: Navajo Nation Interview, with First Lady Phefelia Nez
• Prevention Now
• Data For Indigenous Justice
• Missing and Murdered Indigenous Girls Report
• Ride my Road
• Not Invisible Act Commission Report
• Federal Indian Boarding Schools Report
• ACF MMIP Action Plan
• Alaska Native Justice Center
• Signify Consulting

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14
Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. This is episode #333: Bridging Communities: Indigenous Approaches to Combating Human Trafficking. This is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference. Our guest today is Josie Heyano. Josie is a presidentially appointed member of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, advising federal policy. In 2023 she received the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award for her contributions to prevention and intervention in Alaska. Her work honors her great aunt, Linda Miller and others still awaiting justice. I’m so grateful for you to be here with us today, Josie, and I’d like to start with a traditional introduction please.

Josie Heyano 1:30
Thank you, Sandra, good morning. Ade’ yixudz everyone. My name is Josie Heyano. I am Deg Xinag Athabascan. My mother’s family is from the village of Tanana on the Yukon River. My mother is Naina Heyano. My paternal grandparents are the late Paul and Mary Star and Alfred Miller of Anvik. My father is David Heyano from the village of Ekuk in Bristol Bay. And my paternal grandparents are the late Pete and Rosa Heyano, also of Ekuk village. It’s great to be here with you today.

Sandra Morgan 2:06
Thank you. And for some of our listeners, would you please give us a little background on the traditional introductions?

Josie Heyano 2:19
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you giving space for that introduction. It’s a really important part of how I show up, because that’s how I was taught to introduce myself. You’re taught to introduce yourself to explain your relationships, and part of that is culturally, our relationships are how we exist in the world, who we are, how we want to be seen. When I tell you that my grandmother is Mary Star and my grandpa is Alfred Miller, and I tell you about Pete and Rosa Heyano, that means that I show up to this conversation as a representation of them, and that when I introduce myself for people listening to me, they can know who my family is and know where I come from. A piece of that is accountability too, right? I always think people in the audience know my family, know the communities I come from, and it’s really important for me to speak with integrity and to speak clearly and to speak with pride. More importantly for me, is throughout my professional career, you get degrees and letters, and things like that, but the more important thing is not titles that I hold, but who I am and how I came to be here.

Sandra Morgan 3:34
Let’s talk about your degrees and your titles in addition to this, because that is also how you show up.

Josie Heyano 3:42
Yeah, of course. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to pursue some really wonderful academic channels. I am a graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They have an incredible social work program. I am, first and foremost, academically, a social worker. I practice social work here in Alaska, and I got my masters at the University of Kentucky. I just finished up my clinical hours, so I will shortly be sitting for my licensing exam to be able to be a licensed clinical social worker. I think that’s about it for degrees.

Sandra Morgan 4:23
Oh my goodness. Well, you’re definitely an amazing leader now in this space, and you’re serving at the highest level in our nation. I’m curious what that means to you in the context of how you just shared about showing up.

Josie Heyano 4:48
I think serving at the level of the U.S. Advisory Council has meant having a tremendous amount of humility. Paying attention to the voices in my community that maybe haven’t been heard, to the topics and the issues that haven’t had the attention that they need, and doing my best to voice those, and to bring education, to bring awareness, to help people understand some of the issues facing my community. We were very privileged this year, the entire U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking actually came to Alaska with my first my persuasion. They got to walk on the streets downtown, and they got to be a part of our community and meet the people who live these experiences here. That was a really wonderful opportunity. But I think in my role in the advisory council that was my job, was to bring the members here, have them meet the people that we write about, and to bring a humanness to this work too, and remind us that we are doing really high level federal work. Behind some of those numbers and some of that research, and some of the data, are people and experiences, and that’s been a really beautiful part of being a part of the council.

Sandra Morgan 6:10
My experience, and you may have listened, I interviewed Phefelia Nez, who was leading this effort with the Navajo Nation, and we have partnered. We’ve had conversations about some of the larger systemic issues, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and Human trafficking as maybe an umbrella or a symptom. How do you see that?

Josie Heyano 6:13
Yeah, I definitely see it as a symptom. I think in my federal work, I’ve gotten to have a lot more conversations with leaders and matriarchs across the country who are leading this work in their community. I do think that human trafficking, I do look at it as a symptom. I appreciate you bringing up the missing murdered indigenous relatives conversation, because most of my work has been centered on we can’t talk about human trafficking and then talk about our missing, murdered indigenous relatives crisis. These are the conversations that we need to have together, and it is the conversation that needs to include domestic violence. It needs to include our relatives who are houseless. It needs to include mental health services, substance use services. It needs to include harm reduction. It’s really having a more holistic conversation about human trafficking, so that’s been primarily where I focused my work locally in the community, is helping to bridge that conversation and be able to talk about these issues together.

Sandra Morgan 7:53
One of the things that intrigued me as I read more about your work is you did a fellowship with prevention now, and out of that, you co-created the Alaska Human Trafficking Data Needs Assessment, which seems to fit or have an overlay with your comments just now, with all of these aspects systemically. Can you tell me about that?

Josie Heyano 8:23
I was so excited to talk about that today. My good friend Kristen Harris, CEO and founder of Prevention Now, I had actually just reached out to her as a college intern looking for practicum placement, and said, “Hey, I’m living in Alaska, and I’m struggling,” because I was working direct service, and I was kind of at the point in a person’s life where they had already experienced trafficking, and it was becoming really prominent to me that we didn’t have a lot of prevention, and we weren’t having a lot of conversations in our communities about what trafficking is. So Kristen, being the amazing human being she is, just took me under her wing and allowed me to just research and have the resources with her. That Data Needs Assessment was actually a result of; we first thought we would gather the data that existed to start to see what some of the regional factors were that were causing trafficking, and that we were going to use Kristen’s AI model to find that out. What we realized was: there wasn’t data, or at least there wasn’t data that made sense. There was data that had a lot of different definitions of trafficking. There was data with a lot of different types of people collecting those data, and there was a lot of data that wasn’t talking to each other, so there was duplicated data. There was no real way to get a clear picture of what’s the understanding. And when we started talking to people about data, the other thing that was really interesting about this project is we also got a weariness. We’re talking to direct service providers, and law enforcement, and educators, and healthcare workers who are very often underfunded and under resourced. Then we bring up the data question, which translates to the notes that you didn’t do, or the extra box to check. The Data Needs Assessment really transformed into not only what are you using to track human trafficking related data, but how do you feel about data? How does data impact your work? How do you value or see data as important in this conversation? I think that really opened up a different type of conversation, which was that people did value data and were simultaneously overwhelmed by it, and didn’t necessarily see it as helpful to them in their role. When we started the Human Trafficking Data Summit and we partnered with Data for Indigenous Justice, hopefully we can provide a link to their website, they are a local, nonprofit organization. My good friend Aqpik founded that one as well, and that’s all about reclaiming indigenous data, and they actually curated the first Alaska list of Missing, Murdered and Indigenous Relatives. One thing I’ll add about that too, is the first report that Data for Indigenous Justice released, there were 229 names curated in that report of missing relatives, which is the number of tribes that we have here in Alaska. It was a really powerful number.

Sandra Morgan 11:23
Wow.

Josie Heyano 11:24
But the data Summit, really, above all else, became kind of a gathering of women. This is kind of a strange way to take this conversation, but when I think back on the data summit and how that came to be, we also partnered with ride my road. So my friend Lauren came, has strong connections in Alaska. She came and volunteered her time, and it was a bunch of women who said, “We recognize this is a problem in the community. What are we going to do? How do we start the conversation?” And we recognized that in order to start having this conversation, we needed to have relationship with each other. We needed to have relationship with the people in the work, and this was kind of right after COVID, too. We also recognized, we need to bring people together again, and so we did. We had a very small event. Our very first Human Trafficking Data Summit was in a small community area, and it was wonderful. We had people from multi disciplines come and show up and be a part of the conversation. More importantly, though, I think we just spent time with each other. We got to know each other, we got to know each other’s work, and we invested in the relationships that we had with each other. I think that’s what has developed, for me, into a larger impact, is that we didn’t just come to talk about data, we came to actually care about the work that we were all doing and show up for each other.

Sandra Morgan 12:54
I think we’re moving into a space where we can shift the conversation, shift the narrative from, “Here are all the bad things happening, here’s the vulnerability,” to some kind of approach, strategic plan for how we’re going to do prevention and protect our community. Can you speak to that?

Josie Heyano 13:28
I can definitely speak to that. One of the things that I’m really excited about is just, especially with my my federal platform, getting to meet people across the country. There is so much being done in tribal communities right now that really focuses on our culture, and our culture as a prevention and as a protective factor. I think even if you look in this last four years, what the Biden-Harris administration has done to emphasize work on Missing, Murdered Indigenous People, and to really address that crisis. We’ve seen the Not Invisible Act Commission Report.We’ve seen the the Federal Boarding School Report. We’ve seen all of these reports that are really putting data and information to the things that we have known in our communities for a long time, and so through that we’ve also seen a lot of focus on culture. A lot of focus on combating human trafficking through the lens of ‘we actually already know how to do this,’ and how we know how to do this is caring for our community. And so many people say it better than I do, so many other indigenous leaders across the nation. If we’re going to have the human trafficking conversation, if we’re going to show up and care about combating human trafficking, we have to show up and care about each other. We have to care about every member of our community. We have to have spaces for people to be fed. We have to have spaces for people to be warm, and clothed, and cared for. Ultimately, we have to have spaces for people to experience connection, to be in relationship with each other, and to know that they are valued, and they’re important, and sacred. I think that’s what makes me the most excited right now, is there are so many programs across the country, and more needed here in Alaska, I’ll say, but that are starting to emphasize that the way that we combat human trafficking doesn’t have to look like the checklist that other people, in other places are using. It can actually be the way that we’ve always addressed harm, which is to just unconditionally care for people. There’s so much beauty in that, there’s so much ease when you take the step back and say, “Human trafficking isn’t this complex, unapproachable topic that we don’t know what to do with. Actually, as Native people we do know, inherently, how to care for and protect everyone in our community.” I think seeing the programs across the country that are emerging, that are focusing on culture as the protective factor, I’m thinking about programs in the lower 48 where there are naming ceremonies for trafficking survivors, where they get to be named by their community and really hold the power of that name and learn what that means. I’m thinking of programs where there are sweat lodges, there are ceremony incorporated into the healing process, and the recognition that that might not be right for everybody, so having nuance within that to make sure that we can help whoever is impacted by harm in the best way possible. I think in the Alaska version of this, I’m better at talking about Alaska and my community, that looked like, when I was working direct care, there was kind of this, “Here’s a list of things to do for a trafficking survivor,” and I used to, probably to people’s dismay, throw that list out the window, because it was ridiculous. What I actually needed to do was to sit and have tea. What I actually needed to do sometimes was to just sit, and sometimes just to say, “My door is always open and I see you, and you can be here anytime that you want,” and to have those non transactional relationships, and to just see people and to show up and care about them unconditionally. I think when I think of culture, that’s what I think of, that piece there, where there is no transaction in our relationship. I accept you and respect you and care for you, because you are you, and that’s a really important piece of this conversation.

Sandra Morgan 17:50
Integrating those traditional values and practices in the healing and restoration, I keep going back to, because I find it so amazing, the Alaska Human Trafficking Data Needs Assessment. Now, how do you take that and leverage it in your comment earlier about accountability?

Josie Heyano 18:19
Actually, the Alaska Native Justice Center here in town, is getting ready with a new Data Needs Assessment that I’m excited to see come out, kind of a chapter two of this. But what we did with that Data Needs Assessment was we had another summit, and this one was bigger, and this one was fantastic. We had, well they were both fantastic, last- oh my goodness, that was actually this Spring, I think. Time is so strange lately. We had the Data Summit again this Spring, we had it at the local library, and we had so many more participants, we had so many more workshops and speakers. This time, we really said, “Okay, here’s what we know is missing, how are we going to address these things?” We brought in people from academia, and we said, “Who are the researchers? Who is in programs right now and you’re looking for a thesis? Who needs a question to be asked to our community?” Here are now the service providers who have a problem. Let’s pair the service providers and the researchers together in the same room so that they can actually understand, so that the researchers aren’t just asking the question they think needs to be asked, they’re hearing from the service providers, “Here’s where the gap is.” Then we took the law enforcement and Department of Law, and prosecutors in the room and we said, what is it that you’re struggling to prosecute? What is it that you’re struggling to see and understand? And we took those service providers, and we took those people with lived experience, and we put them in a room to say, ‘where are the gaps?’ Where might someone not want to tell you what their story is because of how some of these laws work? And so we really asked people to come together and to be solution focused in this, and to say, “Hey, from what we know from the data, the data is not great. And why is that?” Well, the biggest reason was that we’re not talking to each other. We’re kind of creating our own data systems, our own methods of combating human trafficking in a really siloed way, which was not unique. I think we’ve seen that across the country, but I think what was really unique about the Needs Assessment leading to the Data Summit is that we really intentionally said, “We’re not going to set up zoom meetings. We’re not going to just continue to be in groups or task force, or whatever you want to call them, we’re actually going to get together in a room, and we’re going to try to solve a few problems while we’re there together.” I think what came out of that was really deep, meaningful relationships and groups of people who historically are not in the same room together, or who have maybe feared being in the same room together. We created safe places where people could come and have the conversations, because we all had a mutual interest, we all had a mutual goal, and because of that, we were able to have conversations with each other that we hadn’t had before.

Sandra Morgan 21:17
I am just so inspired and encouraged by your vision for the future of integrating your own cultural practices with decades of challenges that we’re all facing in this movement. I’ve been in it a really long time, so listening to you is extremely encouraging for me, and I’m going to send this interview to some of my other friends who are also, the word you used at the beginning is weary. We need your generation, Josie, to bring all of your excitement, your energy, and your big questions. I also wanted to work into our conversation a little bit about Savannah’s Act and how that may have influenced the conversation in indigenous communities. Can you take just a couple minutes to speak to that?

Josie Heyano 22:28
It’s a little early, and I don’t have a lot of the dates and facts off the top of my head, but I think most impactful to me coming out of Savannah’s Act was the Not Invisible Act Commission. Most impactful for that, for me, were the listening sessions. Part of the Not Invisible Act Commission’s work in their first report, was going to communities and listening. I think that goes back to the conversation we were just having about the Data Summit, which was really what that was about, right? We need to listen to each other, we need to listen to the stories being told, and we need to understand from those stories, not showing up with our bias, or our anger, or our weariness, but to show up and hear each other. That was really impactful for me. That was actually one of the first times that I spoke or addressed anyone on a federal level about what was happening in my community, and I got to speak for the very first time at a federal level, I got to sit there and say, “Our Alaska Native youth are dying and are being killed, and are going missing and they are being murdered, and human trafficking is a common denominator in so many of these cases, and it’s not anywhere. It’s not in our news, it’s not in our community discussions.” Sometimes for me, that was a lot of anger. I was coming out of years of direct service where I was seeing people harmed. I was seeing a lot of harm because of trafficking, and still, our community wasn’t really having a very high level trafficking conversation, or too high level, you might say. We talk about the weariness. One of the things I always notice is how tired I am of having the Human Trafficking 101, conversation. I really appreciated the Not Invisible Act Commission. I really appreciate the work in Savannah’s Act to help create coordinated community response plans, and to start having more community efforts in our tribal villages, our reservations. Here in Alaska, we are PL280 states, so we don’t have reservations in the same way that the lower 48 does. But Savannah’s Act and Not Invisible Act, really helped to start to tell some of those stories and to create action from those stories. For me, it was a lot of forward momentum.

Sandra Morgan 24:46
You’ve created a lot of interest for me now, to learn those stories, and I’m going to be seeking them out. I’ve already started making a list of people you’ve mentioned that I’m going to ask you to introduce me to, but I I want to go down the path of what you see for the future in prevention. We started out Prevention Now, prevention is one of my heart’s desires. I go into the schools, we equip our students here at Vanguard to go into the schools. What can we do for indigenous people groups for prevention?

Josie Heyano 25:30
When I think about prevention and the human trafficking conversation, I like to ask people to take a step back from just the trafficking conversation. I struggle in this space a lot because I don’t identify strongly with ‘lived experience expert,’ I don’t identify strongly with ‘survivor.’ I don’t know many other Alaska Native women that have not had similar experiences as me. The data, which is terrible, and Alaska shows that we have all survived many things, and we also have these incredible gifts and these incredible protective factors that make us these immovable forces. I think when I show up to the trafficking conversations, my first thing is we have to take a step back. We see the excitement with trafficking, where people want to lean in and they want to do the work, and we know that it’s a problem in our communities, and I ask people to take a step back and look around. Yes, we want to prevent human trafficking, and the way that we do that is what I said earlier. Do people have places to live? Do people have food? Do people have clothing? Are our relatives outside and cold right now? Because if they are, we’re not preventing human trafficking, and we can’t only care about their lives and their value when trafficking occurs, that’s not okay. We have to care about the humanity and the livelihood of every member of our community from the very beginning, not just when a crime has occurred. That’s where I think I find the most heartache sometimes, and balance it with where I do the most service, is we have a lot of members of our community that are struggling and that are not seen as valued or worthy of resources. For prevention efforts, I would ask service providers, what are your policies? Who’s turned away at your door, who is not able to access services, and how can we amend that? Locally here, we have a lot of people who will not be able to access services because they use substances. We have a lot of people that won’t be able to access services because through their lifespan, they’ve never had the access to mental health interventions and services that could have supported a better, safer, and just overall better well being for them. It’s really hard for me sometimes when people say, “We want to fight trafficking,” and it’s the same people who don’t want to fund housing programs, who don’t want to fund community food banks, who don’t want to fund community centers. It goes down even further than that. When we go to our villages, our reservations, our communities, is there clean water? Is there access to healthy, nutritious food? Do young people have a place to go to experience connection, belonging, mentorship? Is there a sense of pride of who you are and where you come from? Is there a way to instill that if there’s not? Those are the things that are prevention to me. I have never met someone in Alaska, in my work, who experienced trafficking, that didn’t have a very long, long story that started far before a trafficking experience occurred. We can’t just show up when it’s trafficking, and prevention means from the day that young person is born, all throughout their life, do all members of our community have safety, have access to community? I think above all else, my grandma Mary Ellen taught me this, and she didn’t teach it because she preached it or she said it in words, I just watched her. My grandma loved people unconditionally. You didn’t have to say the right thing, dress the right way, look the right way, she just loved you. She wouldn’t even say that necessarily, but you could tell in her actions that she would never treat people unkind. She would never snub her nose at people. She would never have judgment. She just knew and understood how complicated it is to be human, and how much all of us need to be seen, to experience connection, and to have another human being look at us with value and respect. When I think prevention, that’s what I try to do in my role. It’s not the big frameworks, it’s not the big systems, those are helpful. Number one, prevention: how do you go out every day in your community and show the people around you that they’re cared about?

Sandra Morgan 26:36

We talk about for kids here, if they have one adult attachment, one person who sees them, and knows them, and cares: that is prevention. I feel like today, I’ve had the opportunity to become a little bit of a part of your community, Josie, and I want my listeners to follow you. How can they find you?

Josie Heyano 30:14

Absolutely. I have a small consultancy. I had to kind of formalize it because I was just going out and talking at people, and then people would want to know more information. I have a website, signifyconsultingak.org. There’s ways to get in contact with me on that website, I’m also on LinkedIn. You can find me under Josie Heyano, but those are probably the two best places to get in touch. Right now, my work is pretty locally focused, especially I think these next few years, I’m really going to turn my attention to my local community to see where the need is and to be more connected in that way. I still do some work in the federal spaces, but my heart is really on the ground, with people still.

Sandra Morgan 31:33
Josie Heyano, what a pleasure to have you with us today. For our listeners, we’re inviting you to go to the endinghumantrafficking.org website, where you’ll find these show notes and links to the things that Josie has talked to us about. It’s also a great opportunity to start subscribing to the newsletter where you’ll get an alert when a new episode drops. Follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram, and I’ll be back in two weeks for our next episode.