# data[].attributes.body
murder is the third leaading cuase of death amon american indian and alaskan native woman on tribal lands

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Searching for missing Indigenous women, tribes and lawmakers seek to raise awareness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hundreds of Native American tribal members held a vigil to commemorate the “Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People.”

# data[].attributes.body
Investigations usually end up having to be done by the family and the community members themselves

Montana has one of the worst missing or murdered rates for Indigenous women in the country – according to a state report from 2017-2019, Indigenous people comprised about 6.7% of the population but accounted for 26% of missing persons cases.

big horn country has the highest rate in the state of missing indigenous woman, 65% of people living there also identify as native american

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
enny Scott was 14 years old, a high school freshman on the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, when she went missing after a house party in late December 2018. Her family promptly reported her disappearance to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But the office took two weeks to issue a missing persons report, which "sat on a desk because the individual was out on vacation", Scott's mother, Paula Castro, told documentarians Razelle Benally and Matthew Galkin in their new Showtime series Murder in Big Horn.

There was no official search, no amber alert, no communication. "We had to do our own investigation and form our own search crew," recalled her stepfather, Nathan Stops. Eventually, the FBI stepped in, without notifying Scott's family, and found her body less than 200 yards from the house where she was last seen.

Nine months later, when 18-year-old Kaysera Stops Pretty Places went missing after a night out with friends in the same county, Big Horn authorities never notified her family of an investigation. Her body was found five days later, spotted by a jogger in a backyard abutting a busy street less than a mile from the Crow reservation where she grew up, but authorities didn't notify her family for another two weeks.

Both Scott and Places' cases remain unsolved - Scott's cause of death was ruled hypothermia, though her family says her body appeared to have bruises and a broken nose and that she was wearing someone else's clothes. The cause of death for Places was left undetermined. Their families, who both appear in Murder in Big Horn, have been pushing ever since for answers, with little help from or in opposition to law enforcement.

Lackluster responses and languishing cases are the norm for many families of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), an epidemic in the US and Canada that has in recent years received significant national media attention, though few answers for loved ones. Investigations "usually end up having to be done by the family and the community members themselves", Lucy Simpson, the executive director of the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center, told the Guardian. "In so many of these cases, it's the family that finds their loved one, that does the search to find their loved one because law enforcement doesn't participate, or doesn't feel that it's a priority, or makes excuses based on generally accepted stereotypes about Native people."

Over three episodes, Murder in Big Horn examines the MMIW crisis in microcosm and in context, through four families still seeking answers and through the history of cultural and physical violence against Indigenous people in the US. Montana has one of the worst missing or murdered rates for Indigenous women in the country - according to a state report from 2017-2019, Indigenous people comprised about 6.7% of the population but accounted for 26% of missing persons cases. Big Horn county, in which 65% of the population identifies as Native American, has the worst rate in the state; by the time Selena Not Afraid disappeared on New Year's Day 2020, she was at least the 28th missing Indigenous woman in the county for the prior year.

Benally, who is Oglala Lakota and Diné, and Galkin, who is white, began work on the series in 2020 after the disappearance of Not Afraid. The 16-year-old was last seen alive in a broken-down car with friends at a rest stop along I-90, the high-trafficked interstate the cuts through Big Horn county - Montana's sixth-largest, spanning parts of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations. Her disappearance marked a turning point in anemic public responses; within hours, there were drones, dogs and officers searching for her. Not Afraid's family camped out at the rest stop, bringing media attention to her disappearance. The New York Times and other national media covered the case. Her body was found nearly three weeks later, less than a mile from the rest stop, in a patch of open land with shrubby grass. Like with Scott, Montana officials ruled her cause of death to be hypothermia.

Montana has one of the worst missing or murdered rates for Indigenous women in the country - and Big Horn county the worst in the state. Photograph: Courtesy of SHOWTIME

The grassroots attention for her case, building on outrage over the handling of Scott's and Places', represented the "sort of groundswell of advocacy [that] grew to the point that these cases are what got the national attention on the MMIW issue", Galkin said. Along with sibling producers Ivan and Ivy MacDonald, of north-west Montana's Blackfeet Nation, Benally and Galkin traveled to Big Horn county to meet family members seeking justice. The film-makers explicitly avoided "extractive storytelling" in which outsiders parachute in, report quickly and leave, and instead "tried our best to tell the story as ethically as possible, and also with honor, to ensure that the families were able to speak their truth", said Benally. "Because let's be real, this issue needs a platform, and we needed to ensure that the families had a chance to be heard."

Murder in Big Horn is thus clear-eyed on the crisis, though less attuned to dire, often faceless statistics than the personal experience of families - Scott's, Places', Not Afraid's, and the loved ones of Shacaiah Harding, who disappeared and was likely trafficked via I-90 in 2018. "These cases are not true crime stories to us. These cases are our relatives," says Luella Brien, a Crow journalist with Indigenous-led Four Points Press whose aunt Deedee Brien was likely killed - the case was never solved - at 17 in 1977, and whose sons attended school with Not Afraid. "These are not only our sisters, our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunties, our daughters, but they're human beings," said Simpson.

The series also examines, episode by episode, the perfect storm of legal, cultural and historical factors which contribute to disappeared women and girls and unsolved, unhandled cases. There's the immediate factors: the ability of I-90, which bisects Big Horn county, to swiftly move trafficked women and girls out of state. A jurisdictional tangle between state, federal and tribal authorities that allows most cases to fall through the cracks, and prevents the Department of the Interior's newly formed missing and murdered unit from having sufficient power. (Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous US cabinet secretary, announced the launch of the unit in 2021; it has since faced criticism for inefficiency and ineffectiveness.)

The jurisdictional tangle of state, federal and tribal authorities allows cases to fall through the cracks. Photograph: Courtesy of SHOWTIME

More broadly, there's the history of violence, discrimination and forced assimilation against Native people by the US government, including the reservation system that, the series argues, was designed for Native Americans to fail rather than thrive. The roots of the MMIW crisis, and pervasive indifference to violence against Indigenous women, are found in the history of colonization and "the lack of respect and humanity that Native peoples have been treated with historically", said Simpson, which "still have a holdover in a lot of these federal policies, and as well as some of the ways in which our own communities have internalized some of that".

Whereas most true crime series usually wind through leads and red herrings and contested interpretations, Murder in Big Horn hits a wall early and often: there are no theories, because there was never an investigation. (The Big Horn county sheriff's office, as well as any active law enforcement representative, declined to participate in the series.) "The mystery is that there's no mystery," said Galkin. "If you look closely enough, it's clear why these things are happening."

Benally recalled filming during the search for Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old white woman who disappeared while vacationing with her boyfriend in Wyoming, and whose case became a national news and social media fixation in stark contrast to many missing Indigenous women. "As we're interviewing families and we're listening to them talk about how there was no urgency from law enforcement to do any sort of search and rescue, to file a missing person's report, it really had me thinking, 'Well, what does it take?'" she said. "What does it take for there to be this urgent response from law enforcement, from society, when one of our girls goes missing?"

"I'll always have hope for some kind of justice," she added, for the series to reach people who could re-examine the crimes against Scott, Places, Not Afraid and Harding, to "see if there's something that can be done to find justice for these families. The families deserve some answers."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'The families deserve answers': inside the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
enny Scott was 14 years old, a high school freshman on the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, when she went missing after a house party in late December 2018. Her family promptly reported her disappearance to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

# data[].attributes.body
More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their
lifetime, including 56.1 percent who have experienced sexual violence.

murder rate is ten times higher than the national average for women living on reservations
indigenous woman are more likely to experience a rape in their lifetimes compared to other women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1 percent who have experienced sexual violence.

In the year leading up to the study, 39.8 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women had experienced violence, including 14.4 percent who had experienced sexual violence.

Overall, more than 1.5 million American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime.

Challenges

Victimization Rates

Native American and Alaska Native rates of murder, rape, and violent crime are all higher than the national averages. When looking at missing and murdered cases, data shows that Native American and Alaska Native women make up a significant portion of missing and murdered individuals.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) females experienced the second highest rate of homicide in 2020. Additionally, in 2020 homicide was in the top 10 leading causes of death for AI/AN females aged 1-45. More than 2 in 5 non-Hispanic AI/AN women (43.7%) were raped in their lifetime.

Non-Hispanic AI/AN males had the second highest rate of homicide compared with males in all other racial and ethnic groups. Homicide was in the top ten leading causes of death for AI/AN males 1 to 54 years old in the year 2020. 1 in 7 non-Hispanic AI/AN males (14.4%) were made to penetrate someone during their lifetime.

Human Trafficking

In September 2017, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report titled ''Human Trafficking: Investigations in Indian Country or Involving Native Americans and Actions Needed to Better Report on Victims Served.'' GAO surveyed tribal and major city law enforcement agencies and victim service providers on human trafficking investigations, victim services, and barriers to identifying and serving Native victims.

Twenty-seven of the 132 tribal law enforcement agencies that responded to the survey reported initiating investigations involving human trafficking from 2014 to 2016 and six of 61 major city law enforcement agencies reported initiating human trafficking investigations that involved at least one Native victim during the same time period.16 Survey respondents identified lack of training on identifying and responding appropriately to victims, victim shame and reluctance to come forward, and lack of service provider resources as barriers to investigating cases and serving victims.

Need for Focused Data

While these rates are staggering, research data shows that national averages hide the extremely high rates of murder against American Indian and Alaska Native women present in some counties comprised primarily of tribal lands. According to the National Institute of Justice Centers for Disease Control and prevention 2008 the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), less than half of violent victimizations against women are ever reported to police.

According to the National Crime Information Center, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the US Department of Justice's federal missing persons database, but the national information clearinghouse and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases across the United States, called the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) only logged 116 of those cases.

While it is estimated that rates of violence on reservation can be up to ten times higher than national averages, research is missing on rates of murder violence among American Indian and Alaska Native women living in urban areas. An NIJ-funded study from 2008 found that the rates of violence on reservations are much higher than the national average. However, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute, no research has been done on the rates of such violence among American Indian and Alaska Native women living in urban areas despite the fact that approximately 71 percent of American Indian and Alaska Natives live in urban areas.

Moreover, reports indicate that there is no reliable count of how many Native women go missing or are killed each year.11 Researchers have found that women are often misclassified as Hispanic or Asian or other racial categories on missing-person forms and that thousands have been left off a federal missing-persons.

Need for Investigative Resources

Statistics show us that approximately 1,500 American Indian and Alaska Native missing persons have been entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) throughout the U.S. and approximately 2,700 cases of Murder and Nonnegligent Homicide Offenses have been reported to the Federal Government's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. In total, BIA estimates there are approximately 4,200 missing and murdered cases that have gone unsolved.

These investigations remain unsolved often due to a lack of investigative resources available to identify new information from witness testimony, re-examine new or retained material evidence, as well as reviewing fresh activities of suspects.

Additional Information

Additional Resources

Contact Us

Office of Justice Services Headquarters

1849 C Street NW, MS-3662-MIB
Washington, DC 20240

Open 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Monday-Friday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1 percent who have experienced sexual violence.

# data[].attributes.body
a short movie that shows an example of how missing indigenous woman cases are taken care of in the United states

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We're facing a crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) in the United States. Here's what you need to know about it.

# data[].attributes.body
If i go missing graphic novel is a serise of letter written by a girl calls out the authorities for neglecting to immediately investigate missing Indigenous people and urges them to not treat me as the Indigenous person I am proud to be if she were to be reported missing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read 201 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. If I Go Missing is derived from excerpts of a letter that went viral and was also the basi...

# data[].attributes.body
in Canada the rise of missing and murdered Indigenous women, has been declared a “genocide" Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or to go missing than members of any other demographic.

The Sovereign Bodies Institute, an Indigenous-led research organization has helped by tracking missing and murdered woman, by compiling data submitted by talking to families community members, and retrieving information from newspapers, social media, historical archives, public records, and missing person databases. 60% of cases are homicides and most of them never get solved.

only 18 percent of indigenous female homicide victims get coverage, compared with 51 percent for white female and male victims

The Savanna’s Act, was signed  in October 2020, and was made to help law enforcement track, solve and prevent crimes against Native Americans, particularly women and girls.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Social media/KCM

Why these cases are being underreported, and even ignored.

National attention on the tragic murders of young women like 22-year-old Gabby Petito and 23-year-old Lauren Smith-Fields has raised newfound awareness around missing person cases. But while they received significant media attention, these cases certainly don't tell the whole story. In fact, in 2020 alone, according to the National Crime Information Center there were 5,295 reports of missing women and girls - all of them American Indian and Alaska Natives.

In Canada, the rise of missing and murdered Indigenous women, also known as MMIW, has been declared a "genocide." Prime Minister Justine Trudeau started a national public inquiry to look into it in 2015, and a report was issued in 2019. Among the key findings, it found that Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or to go missing than members of any other demographic. Since the report's release, Trudeau announced $2.2 billion in funding over the next two years to help impacted families and communities. "New funding won't bring back the lives we have lost or heal the pain that so many feel," Trudeau said in a statement in June 2021. "And as we move forward, we all have a role to play in ending this tragedy and telling the truth of these injustices."

The true scope of this crisis unfortunately remains unknown: Advocates have long warned of a lack of comprehensive data from the U.S. government and states leading to concerns about the underreporting of cases. The Sovereign Bodies Institute, an Indigenous-led research organization, has been tracking missing and murdered cases like these over the past few years, by compiling data submitted by families and community members, and retrieving information from newspapers, social media, historical archives, public records, and missing person databases.

While almost 60 percent of the reported MMIW cases are homicides, the vast majority remain unsolved. Ashley Loring Heavyrunner is among them: She was just 20 years old when she disappeared from Wyoming's Blackfeet Indian Reservation in June 2017. Her sister, Kimberly Loring, said that Ashley had "big dreams and goals in her life" before her disappearance, and was enrolled in Blackfeet Community College as an environmental science major. Now, five years have passed and there still aren't any answers, even after tribal police, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the FBI got involved.

In a heartbreaking coincidence, Loring Heavyrunner was personally concerned about the epidemic of missing Indigenous women and girls. "Ashley wanted to help find these missing and murdered Indigenous women and she wanted to address this - that's one of the last conversations that I had with my sister," Ashley's sister, Kimberly Loring, recalls in an interview with KCM. She has since teamed up with host Payne Lindsey to investigate her sister's case in the podcast Up and Vanished.

Jermain Charlo vanished in 2018 after leaving a bar in Missoula, Montana, and hasn't been seen since. There was a new development in the young mother's case in 2021, when her ex-boyfriend Michael DeFrance faced two indictments for illegally carrying a firearm around the time of Charlo's disappearance after lying about his domestic violence conviction (which would have prevented him from acquiring a gun in the first place). Though his case went to federal trial, it remains held up in court as DeFrance's lawyers continue to file motions to dispute the indictments.

So why haven't these women been found yet? It has to do with a number of factors, but the most obvious may be the sheer lack of media coverage paid to women of color, in comparison to white women and men. In Wyoming, where Petito's body was found, only 18 percent of indigenous female homicide victims get coverage, compared with 51 percent for white female and male victims. This is also known as "missing white woman syndrome," a term coined by the late PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill, to refer to the obsession with missing or endangered white women.

This lack of coverage could also explain the lack of awareness around the fact that Indigenous women and girls face disproportionate amounts of gender violence. In fact, American Indian and Alaska Native women living on tribal lands are murdered at rates more than 10 times the national average, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Journalist Connie Walker, a Cree from Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, says she couldn't help but think of Charlo when Petito's case was making national headlines. Walker's podcast, , takes a first-hand look into Charlo's disappearance as part of an eight-part series.

"If she'd had even a fraction of the attention on Gabby's case, maybe her family wouldn't be still wondering three years later, and struggling with not knowing the truth about what happened to her, and [it] would have helped bring her home," Walker says. "And unfortunately, there are so many other indigenous women and girls who deserve the same kind of attention."

Another key hurdle to solving this crisis of missing indigenous women is the patchwork laws surrounding tribal, state, and federal agencies. UCLA professor Lauren van Schilfgaarde points out that missing Indigenous cases are often disregarded by law enforcement and lost in bureaucratic gaps concerning which local or federal agencies should investigate. She warns that this is why Indigenous women have become targets for everything from murder and violence to sex trafficking.

"The missing and murdered indigenous person's crisis is multifaceted," says van Schilfgaarde, who currently serves as a board member for the National Native American Bar Association. "And so we need a multifaceted response."

"Tribes exist, tribes have the right to self-govern and the federal government. Continuing to act as this colonial power is just hurting women," she adds.

Van Schilfgaarde believes the first step in addressing this crisis is removing the U.S. government's limitation on tribal power, which includes amending the 1978 Supreme Court ruling, Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, when Indian tribal courts lost authority to seek criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians. That means tribes can't criminally prosecute non-Indians for anything - not even for murder, explains van Schilfgaarde.

"Congress did recognize the tribes do have jurisdiction over all Indians, regardless of what tribe you belong to," she says. "They have not been willing to extend that to non-Indians, and that's the problem, because statistically speaking, that's who's murdering and kidnapping indigenous women."

This struggle between tribal governments and outside law enforcement hasn't gone unnoticed by the federal government in recent years. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold the position, acknowledged that investigations into violence against Native peoples have been systematically underfunded for decades, with murders and missing persons cases often left unaddressed. That's why Haaland has pushed for Savanna's Act, which was signed into law in October 2020, and aimed at helping law enforcement track, solve and prevent crimes against Native Americans, particularly women and girls. She also set up the multi-agency task force, Missing and Murdered Unit, which will investigate a crisis she said was "centuries in the making."

But advocates remain hopeful that increasing awareness coupled with additional resources will challenge the status quo and give families of these victims some long-sought-after closure. Walker says, "There's a long way to go, but I am heartened by the fact that that people are at least understanding in 2021 that we need to be doing a better job, that there are communities, like indigenous communities, who are more disproportionately affected by this kind of violence."
This story was originally published in October 2021 and has been updated with new reporting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indigenous Women are Going Missing at Alarming Rates - Here's Why You Haven't Heard About Them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why these cases are being underreported, and even ignored. National attention on the tragic murders of young women like 22-year-old Gabby Petito and 23-year-old Lauren Smith-Fields has raised newfound awareness around missing person cases. But while they received significant media attention, these cases certainly don't tell the whole story.

# data[].attributes.body
Dr. Jill Doerfler, professor and department head for University of Minnesota-Duluth’s (UMD) American Indian Studies department, explained " Doerfler said, “it depends on where the crime occurred, on reservation or off, and then it's a matter of if the victim and/or the perpetrator is Native American or not, depends on who's going to have jurisdiction, different tribal nation"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As a result, people are reluctant to report crimes like these. There is a major distrust between law enforcement and Indigenous communities, and a lot of victims don't want to relive their trauma when reporting and have no justice come from it.

In many cases, negative stereotypes play a role in the lack of prosecution and investigation into these matters. The victims are often blamed, for a variety of reasons like alcohol/drug use or homelessness. In addition, the hyper-sexualization and dehumanization of Indigenous women plays a role in the disproportionate rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women .

"In American society, in general, there is a hyper sexualization of women," Doerfler said, "In addition, many Americans think of being American Indian not as a real identity for people, but as something that is a fun thing to pretend about, it has real consequences. I think that the men who commit these horrible crimes are able to do so because they don't see their victim as a real person. ."

Because of negative stereotypes, when Indigenous women go missing, the search for them is often hindered. Many times, law enforcement doesn't take reports seriously, and the media rarely reports on these matters.

According to Native Hope , these stereotypes include portrayingIndigenous people to be "lazy, drug addicts, and alcoholics who rely on the government to survive."

"Moreover, this modern stereotype was created through acts of colonization and cultural assimilation," the online report said. "Pre-colonization, Native societies traditionally revered and honored the sacredness of women. Women held positions of authority and did a large portion of labor within their camps, but the European colonists with patriarchal views took the women as slaves to the men. Soon, Native women had been victims of rape, violence, and submission. This mistreatment can be traced throughout America's history. Natives were viewed as 'savages.'"

In Minnesota, Indigeous women make up 1% of the population, but 8% of all murdered women and girls are Indigeous . Legislators created a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's

Task Force in Minnesota to work on this problem.

While states like Minnesota are taking steps to fix this crisis, there is still so much to be done. This is a systematic problem that has been ingrained in the society of the United States that is based on racism, sexism, and violence.

Mending the Sacred Hoop in Duluth, MN has great resources for Indigenous women experiencing violence or other problems.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Missing and Murdered: Understanding why Indigenous women are murdered and go missing at higher rates than other populations - The Bark

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There is a nationwide crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Indigenous women are more likely to go missing or be murdered than any other ethnicity. Because the population of Indigenous people is small (making up 2% of the population), it is not reported on a lot.