This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Let’s Talk About Missing Indigenous Women and Girls

Indigenous women are 135% more likely to be found dead and remain unidentified than women of other races.

You may have seen it: a red handprint, usually across someone’s mouth. This symbol, which is becoming more widely known, represents the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis in the United States and Canada. This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, it’s past time to protect Indigenous people, but the scope of this problem isn’t widely known.

A recent study titled “Understanding the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis: An Analysis of the NamUs Database” found that Indigenous women were most likely to be categorized as unidentified, when they were found, in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons system. The NamUs database system is the nation’s most comprehensive for missing and unidentified persons, run by the Department of Justice.

One of the key statistics from their analysis is that Indigenous women are 135% more likely to be found dead and remain unidentified than women of other races.

Nikolay Anguelov, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, emphasized that the study specifically refers to women who were found and remain unidentified. It does not speak to murder rates.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that Indigenous women experienced the second-highest homicide rate in 2020. In 2019, homicide was the seventh leading cause of death for Indigenous women ages 1-45, according to a CDC analysis of data in the National Violent Death Reporting System.

Susie Red Feather works with MMIW USA, an organization that works to combat the widespread issue of violence against Indigenous people, which leads to people going missing and getting murdered, according to their website.

Although the common perception of victims is women and girls, MMIW USA, and many organizations like it, advocates for missing and murdered people of all gender identities and expressions, often referring to them as MMIP – missing and murdered Indigenous people.

Susie is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe and although she did not grow up on the reservation, she’s known women and girls who have gone missing or have been confirmed dead.

“When an Indigenous girl goes missing, it’s almost like, well, they'll turn up or they probably left a party,” she said. “There's just no immediate awareness brought to that situation, no priority. We advocate for people so we sometimes have to help families even through the process of getting a missing persons report done.”

A Legacy of Colonialism

A central concept that looms largely over the discussion of missing and murdered Indigenous people is the legacy of colonization of what is now the United States. Across more than 600 tribes that were on this land, cultures varied, but there was generally a strong emphasis on the importance of women in society.

Sexual abuse and murder were key parts of the colonization strategy of Indigenous lands, Robin Whyatt, Professor Emeritus at Columbia’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, wrote in Progressive Magazine.

Whyatt explains how prior to colonization, these types of acts of violence against women were uncommon and almost unheard of. There’s a Cheyenne proverb that says: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons.”

In a 2022 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner report, “Violence against Indigenous women and girls,” the author emphasizes the connection between colonialism and violence today. “Furthermore, the lack of recognition of Indigenous land rights can lead to poverty, food and water insecurity, and barriers to access natural resources needed for survival, and can create unsafe conditions that facilitate the perpetration of gender-based violence acts against Indigenous women and girls.”

In some cases, as laborers are brought in to work on pipeline or oil projects, crime and crime against women spikes.

In a 2022 hearing before the House of Representatives titled The Neglected Epidemic of Missing BIPOC Women and Girls, Rep. Robin Kelly explained in her introduction: “Studies have shown that the placement of man camps statistically coincide with dramatically significant increases in crime. For example, the Fort Berthold Reservation saw a 75-percent increase in sexual assaults on native women after man camps arose in their region during the oil construction boom of the late 2000s. Notably, there was no corresponding rise in crime outside of this area.”

Missing White Woman Syndrome

Almost every expert and advocate in this work agrees that the invisibility and erasure of Indigenous people in the media plays a role in this crisis, pointing to “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” a term coined by late Black journalist Gwen Ifill “to describe the media's fascination with and detailed coverage of, the cases of missing or endangered white women—compared to the seeming disinterest in covering the disappearances of people of color,” according to NPR.

The media coverage and activity around the 22-year-old missing woman Gabby Petito is a recent example of the syndrome, but the problem is widespread.

“Research, including my own work, has shown that white missing women and girls do receive more initial coverage and they do receive more repeated coverage,” Danielle Slakoff, an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento, who researches criminal justice and the media, told The New York Times in 2021. “White victims tend to be portrayed as being in very safe environments, so it’s shocking that something like this could happen, whereas the Black and Latino victims are portrayed as being in unsafe environments, so basically normalizing victimization.” Slakoff was also an author on the NamUs analysis.

In the search for Petito, law enforcement agencies found the remains of several formerly missing people. Advocates argue that those remains might have been uncovered previously if the attention and resources had been dedicated to them.

Protecting Indigenous People Today

“The effects of the violence suffered by Indigenous women and girls permeate all aspects of their lives and severely affect their human rights to life, dignity, personal integrity and security, health, privacy and personal liberty, and their rights to a healthy environment and to be free from ill-treatment,” the U.N. paper explained.

Susie Red Feather, a survivor of domestic violence, said she lives in fear of kidnapping, murder, or some other form of violence each day, for herself, but especially for her teenage daughter.

“That's kind of my driving force, is because I don't ever want to experience that and I don't want anybody else to have to experience that,” she said.

The organization does everything from offering assistance to families in working with law enforcement when a loved one goes missing to providing funding to reunite someone with their family or, in the worst case, transfer remains back to their loved ones.

“I don't think people are aware how bad this problem is – and I don't want to just say Indigenous girls, I know it's going on with Black girls as well – because [the perpetrators of violence] know that we fly under the radar. They know that law enforcement isn’t too fast to send out Amber Alerts or give public notice. But through our work, we're starting to see a change.”

From a research and data-gathering perspective, Anguelov said a good first step to understanding the true scope of the problem is for the NamUs database to change the way it operates by not removing cases of missing people from the database once they’re resolved.

“How can we analyze factors that help us tackle the crisis of missing and murdered Native women, if we don't have information about the factors that contributed to solving a case?” he said. “Just don't take the cases out of the database so we can have a control group. When a case is solved, keep it there.”

In the past few years, there has been movement at the federal level in an effort to fill in the gaps left by the jurisdictions and resources of tribal law enforcement and local law enforcement.

In 2020, Savanna’s Act was passed and requires the DOJ to “review, revise, and develop law enforcement and justice protocols to address missing or murdered Native Americans” and requires the FBI to include gender in their annual statistics on missing and unidentified people. The bill is named after Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Nation of North Dakota, who was 22 and eight months pregnant when she was murdered in 2017.

The Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022 recognized the same principles of the 2013 Act that allowed tribal law enforcement to prosecute certain crimes in their jurisdiction, regardless of the person’s Native or non-Native status.

This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Susie Red Feather is using the time to celebrate with loved ones, but she also wants to spread awareness not only about MMIP but also about Indigenous people and Indigenous issues in general.

“We may be a small part of the population, but we're still important,” she said.

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