-Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls,
a case study by the Urban Indian Health Institute
Author’s Note
I was plotting this story when Mollie Tibbetts went out for a run near her home in Brooklyn, Iowa, one evening in July of 2018 and never returned home. The case gripped me. I checked the news obsessively every day to see if she had been found until word of her body being discovered was released on August 21st.
I did not know Mollie. I cannot fathom the grief those who loved her feel. But I was still devastated to read that press release, even though I knew it was coming.
I was devastated, because all women have the potential to be Mollie. We leave our homes and venture into a world that we know is never completely safe, not for our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, or ourselves. We women never expect to be victims. We women never go jogging or hiking or out for a drink or on vacation expecting to not come home. But regardless of how strong and smart and prepared we are, we women are acutely aware of our vulnerability, of the weight of statistics against us. We may well go out for a run one evening and, like Mollie, never return.
Because we have all been Mollie. We have all been young and beautiful, tender-hearted and filled with hope for our futures. We have all felt safe and secure. And we have all had to learn that one day, we could potentially become a headline.
But the stark truth is not all women who go missing make it to the headlines. The undeniable fact is that it is missing white women who are given the spotlight in our news coverage. In a recent case study, the Urban Indian Health Institute identified 506 unique cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls across seventy-one selected cities. The number is likely much higher, but there is no comprehensive data collection system regarding the number of missing and murdered women in Indian country.
The National Crime Information Center reported that, 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 only logged 116 cases. That is a staggering, paltry number, any way you look at it. It means that in a single year, 5,596 women not only went missing, but they were also allowed to fall through the cracks, disappearing not just from life but from the data as well. If you want more gut-wrenching numbers to illustrate how unacceptable this is, it means that over the course of 365 days, fifteen women went missing every single day, and there is no record of their disappearance in our federal databases. Not only are they gone, but the country has forgotten about them.
Native women living on tribal lands in America are murdered at an extremely high rate — in some communities, more than ten times the national average. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women.
There is an epidemic of violence and abduction against Indigenous women, a harrowing normality of mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends being gone one day, never to be seen again. There are no resources put to use to find them, no widespread media coverage, and no remembrance of those lives in our data.
The Violence Against Women Act has a specific section addressing safety for Native women. Congress needs to reauthorize, expand, and improve the VAWA. In 1978, the Supreme Court case Oliphant v. Suquamish stripped tribes of the right to arrest and prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on Indian land. There were some amendments added to VAMA that would allow tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians who sexually assault tribal members, but the bill has languished, and more needs to be done. There needs to be a restructuring of how law enforcement in and outside Indian country communicates, and law offices in Indian country need funding and resources to help combat this data gap.
Savanna’s Act aims to bring justice for missing and murdered Native American women. The legislation would improve data collection on tribal victims, remove barriers for tribal law enforcement, and create guidelines for responding when someone’s reported missing. The bill would improve tribal access to federal databases for tracking missing tribal persons, require the Department of Justice to consult with tribes while developing guidelines, mandate reporting statistics regarding missing and murdered Native Americans to Congress, and streamline coordination between tribes and law enforcement agencies with training and technical assistance in putting the guidelines in force. The bill stalled in the U.S. House in December 2018 but was reintroduced in 2019 along with the Not Invisible Act.
I do not think there is a simple solution to the epidemic of violence and invisibility Native American women face. It is a complex situation steeped in racism, injustice, and infrastructure failure.
Perhaps the first step toward change is a nationwide awareness of this tragedy. I hope this story has shone a light on the horror Indigenous women face on a daily basis. My book is fiction, but for the women who are living this, it is a heinous, appalling fact. These women should not be invisible. And they should not be forgotten.
About the Author
Meghan Holloway found her first Nancy Drew mystery in a sun-dappled attic at the age of eight and subsequently fell in love with the grip and tautness of a well-told mystery. She flew an airplane before she learned how to drive a car, did her undergrad work in Creative Writing in the sweltering south, and finished a Masters of Library and Information Science in the blustery north. She spent a summer and fall in Maine picking peaches and apples, traveled the world for a few years, and did a stint fighting crime in the records section of a police department.
She now lives in the foothills of the Appalachians with her standard poodle and spends her days as a scientist with the requisite glasses but minus the lab coat. She is the author of Once More Unto the Breach, available now from Polis Books. Follow her at @AMeghanHolloway.
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