MESSAGE

were reported in 2016. But of those, only 116 were logged in with the Department of Justice database.

According to the National Institute of Justice, as of May 2023, 84.3% more than 1.5 million American Indian and Alaskan Native women experience violence in their lifetime. Victimization of American Indian and Native woman is 1.2 times higher than white women.

On a mission

Johnson and her family moved to Winnebago when she was ve and she was raised as a tribal member of the Nebraska Ho-Chunk tribe, and given the name Rainbow Woman. She left home when she was in her preteens and has kept moving.

“I don’t know if God would bless me to go further in my trucking industry or this is the end of my travels but when I see family I want to make an apple pie,” Johnson said.

Nebraska is always her home, she said, but Brighton, where her son and my grandchildren live, is her second home. She spends half her time with them.

Johnson started her mission because she was a victim of abuse herself. It was a two-way abusive situation, she said: He was abusive to her, but she fought back.

“He would put me on his lap with a knife at my throat. It was a toxic relationship; I left, and I was done. As soon that door closed, God, or wherever you want to believe, started to open other doors for me,” Johnson said.

She had worked as a construction driver in the summer and fall. She was laid o in the winter but guaranteed to return in the summer. Even so, she said she needed a more consistent job and she needed reliable transportation to do that. She found a pick-up truck she liked and approached a bank looking for a loan.

“ ey never wanted to give me a loan but I told them if you don’t give me a loan, I’m going to go somewhere else,” she said. “ is is income that comes to your bank and comes back out. ey gave me the loan and I purchased a brand-new Silverado. When I purchased the truck, that was when I left the man. I thought I was going to die leaving him and was heartbroken, but I left.”

Johnson said she drove the Silverado for a while and although it was nice to drive a cute truck, she was still broke.

“I went back to the bank and asked for a loan to trade o the Silverado for a used semi to make money,” she said.

“I told the banker it was a win-win; I could make money at the same cost Silverado,” she said. “ e woman sat across from me and said, ‘I’m going do it for you’. Usually, they didn’t give business loans.” at opened a door for Johnson, and she started her trucking company, Ho-Chunk Trucking, in 2017. After a couple of years, she was able to upgrade and buy a new semi-truck. en, after a couple’s years of hauling other companies’ trailers, she took out another loan and purchased her own trailer in 2020.

“I wanted my own trailer because women in the industry are treated badly; it’s a whole other story,” Johnson said.

Traveling platform

Johnson said that once she had a trailer she started thinking about it as a platform for other Native American women.

“I went through hell and back. What is the message I wanted to say to the world?” she said.

Johnson decided to do a custom wrap on her trailer with a message about indigenous women missing and murdered. She also included pictures of her family dressed in regalia and a friend dancing pow-pow and included information about 500 gone missing or murdered women.

One photo, showing a woman with a red hand over her mouth, is her niece Jalisa Horn who was left for dead from abuse and had to crawl to get help. Horn agreed to add her photo to draw attention to the message, “Murdered, Missing Indigenous Women.”

State laws e act also requires the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to work on investigating missing or murdered indigenous persons and also work with federal, state, and local law enforcement to e ectively investigate the cases.

Governor Jared Polis signed SB22150, a law requiring o cial reports of missing indigenous people within eight hours. Missing children must be reported to law enforcement within two, under the law.

In addition, an alert system and an agency called “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives” are responsible for reporting and improving the investigation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and addressing injustice in the criminal justice system.