Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: A Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight
Every year, thousands of Indigenous women and girls vanish. Most never make the news.
This is not a mystery with an easy solution. It is not a problem confined to one region, one tribe, or one jurisdiction. It is a national crisis — documented, studied, and repeatedly acknowledged — that continues largely unaddressed while families bury their daughters, mothers, and sisters, or worse, wait for answers that never come.
It is called MMIW: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. And it is one of the most urgent humanitarian emergencies in North America.
The Scale of the Crisis
The numbers are staggering. Indigenous women in the United States are murdered at rates more than ten times the national average. In some regions, that figure climbs as high as twelve times. On some reservations, the violence is so pervasive that it has become a grim backdrop to everyday life.
In 2016, the National Crime Information Center recorded 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls. That same year, the Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database logged only 116. The gap — nearly 5,600 women effectively invisible to the systems designed to find them — is not a clerical error. It is a symptom of systemic failure so deep and so longstanding that it has become normalized.
These are not abstractions. These are real women with names, with families who love them, with futures that were stolen.
Why Cases Go Unsolved
The barriers to justice are layered and reinforcing.
Jurisdiction is perhaps the most immediate obstacle. Depending on the location of a crime, tribal affiliation, and the nature of the offense, responsibility for investigation may fall to tribal police, local law enforcement, state authorities, or the FBI. In practice, this often means that agencies spend more energy determining who is responsible than actually investigating. Cases fall through the cracks. Families are passed from office to office. Time — the most critical resource in any missing persons case — runs out.
Funding compounds the problem. Law enforcement on many reservations is severely underfunded and understaffed. The resources required for comprehensive investigation simply do not exist.
Then there is the silence of the media. When a white woman goes missing, the story dominates the news cycle. When an Indigenous woman disappears, there is often nothing. This disparity — sometimes referred to as “Missing White Woman Syndrome” — means that Indigenous families are frequently left to become their own search parties, printing flyers, orgThe psychological toll on Indigenous communities is immeasurable and multigenerational. Children grow up without mothers. Elders carry the weight of unresolved grief. Entire communities live with the trauma of ongoing violence and the additional wound of official indifference. The damage is not just to individuals — it erodes the cultural fabric of communities that have already survived so much.
anizing community searches, and fighting for attention that should never have required fighting for in the first place.
Signs of Change — And the Distance Still to Go
In recent years, the MMIW crisis has received increased attention. The 2020 passage of Savanna’s Act — named for Savanna Greywind, a pregnant Indigenous woman murdered in North Dakota — was a meaningful step, requiring law enforcement agencies to develop better protocols for handling missing persons cases involving Indigenous people. Grassroots organizations led by Indigenous women, including the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, the Sovereign Bodies Institute, the National Congress of American Indians, and the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, continue to do extraordinary work documenting cases, supporting families, and demanding systemic accountability.
But legislation and advocacy, as vital as they are, cannot substitute for the sustained political will, adequate funding, and genuine cultural shift that this crisis demands. Indigenous lives must be valued equally — not in policy language, but in practice.
Why I Write About This
As the author of The Bone Reader, The Bone Keeper, and Desert Angels, I have returned to the MMIW crisis across multiple books because I believe fiction, at its best, can do something statistics alone cannot: it can make people feel the weight of a single life. It can put a face, a name, a heartbeat on a number that might otherwise scroll past unnoticed.
The characters in these novels are fictional. The crimes depicted are invented. But the crisis that surrounds them is devastatingly real, and I have tried to treat it with the gravity and care it deserves. My hope is that readers finish these books not only entertained but informed — and perhaps motivated to learn more, to pay attention, to say the names.
These women matter. Their families deserve justice. Their communities deserve safety.
How You Can Help
If you want to support efforts to address the MMIW crisis, I encourage you to explore the work of these organizations:
National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center — niwrc.org
Sovereign Bodies Institute — sovereign-bodies.org
National Congress of American Indians — ncai.org
Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women — csvanw.org
And if you encounter a missing persons case involving an Indigenous woman — share her name. Demand answers. Do not look away.
The fictional cases in my books end with a measure of justice, however imperfect. In the real world, thousands of families are still waiting.
And beneath all of it lies a history that cannot be ignored. Centuries of broken treaties, forced assimilation, and institutional betrayal have created a justified and profound distrust of federal and state authorities within Indigenous communities. Many families face an impossible choice: seek help from systems that have historically failed them, or navigate the crisis alone.