The Names Nobody Says
On Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and why I couldn't look away
by G.A. Thompson
Her name was not a statistic.
She had a name. She had a mother who called her something specific in the morning, something only a mother says, in a voice that carried the whole weight of having made a person from nothing. She had a favorite place and a way of laughing and probably an opinion about the weather and someone she was in the middle of a fight with when she disappeared.
She has a case number now. If she's lucky.
I am not a Native woman. I am not Native at all — I'm a white man from the Pacific Northwest who spent thirty years in heavy industry and retired to five wooded acres in Goldendale, Washington, where I write crime fiction and memoir and the occasional thing that keeps me up at night. Nothing in my biography explains why I started writing about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Nothing explains why, once I started, I couldn't stop.
Except this: I read the number.
Not the big number — not the statistic that gets cited in congressional testimony, the one that says Indigenous women are murdered at ten times the national rate in some counties, the one that gets treated as a fact of nature rather than a policy failure. I read a smaller number. I read that on certain reservations, the number of open missing persons cases — women who simply walked out of the frame of their own lives and never came back — is higher than the total number of law enforcement officers with jurisdiction to investigate them.
More missing women than investigators.
I put the article down and sat with that for a long time. Then I started writing.
Here is what I learned.
When a Native woman goes missing near a reservation, a clock starts. Tribal police may lack jurisdiction. County sheriffs may lack resources. The FBI has jurisdiction over major crimes on federal land but often lacks both the funding and the urgency. State agencies occupy a different lane entirely. In the space between all these agencies — in the jurisdictional gap that exists nowhere on any map but everywhere in practice — a woman can vanish completely, and the machinery of justice simply stands at the boundary of its authority and watches her go.
Her family starts making calls. Her family starts driving. Her family starts printing flyers on a home printer because the tribal newsletter has a two-week lead time and her mother cannot wait two weeks. Her sister starts a Facebook page. Her cousin drives two hundred miles to talk to someone who might have seen her.
Her family becomes the investigation. Because there is no other investigation.
This is not an accident. The jurisdictional chaos around Indian Country is not an oversight — it is the accumulated weight of a hundred and fifty years of policy decisions made by people who did not consider Native women worth protecting. The Violence Against Women Act's tribal provisions, strengthened in 2013 and again in 2022, have helped. Savanna's Act, passed in 2020, has helped. The Not Invisible Act has helped. These are real improvements made by people who fought hard for them.
And yet. The names keep accumulating.
I wrote The Bone Reader because I needed to put a detective in that gap. I needed someone with jurisdiction who gave a damn — Maya Quintana, a forensic anthropologist and former FBI agent, working independently in New Mexico because the institutions she trusted failed her and she decided to become the thing they wouldn't. She finds the remains of a Navajo woman who has been in the ground for approximately fifteen years. Missing and never found. Investigated and never solved. Forgotten and never mourned.
Maya does not let her stay forgotten.
Writing that book required me to reckon with something uncomfortable: I am a white man writing about the deaths of Native women. That is a responsibility that does not belong to me by right. I tried to carry it carefully. I read everything I could find — the academic literature, the advocacy reports, the congressional testimony, the Facebook pages of families still searching, the obituaries that didn't say how she died. I tried to make Maya's investigation feel like what it actually is: not a story about a detective, but a story about what happens to a community when its women are not protected, and what it costs a person to care about that when no one else will.
I don't know if I got it right. I know I tried.
The number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States is unknown.
Not uncertain. Unknown. There is no reliable national database. Cases are undercounted, misclassified, or simply not entered. The federal government did not require states to report MMIW data until 2021. Before that, families were on their own — which, in practice, meant they had always been on their own.
Her name is not in any database I can search. Her mother has been calling the same numbers for eleven years. Her sister still drives the two-lane roads at night sometimes, looking for something she doesn't know how to name.
Her name was not a statistic.
It still isn't.
The Bone Reader and The Bone Keeper — the Maya Quintana forensic thriller series — are available at brinraven.com.
G.A. Thompson is a writer and Army veteran living in Goldendale, Washington.