The search for Reena Mae Risingsun began like many others – with a family’s growing concern, a delayed police response, and ultimately, a community mobilizing when official channels fell short.
Risingsun, a 35-year-old Northern Cheyenne woman, vanished near Lame Deer, Montana last April. Her family reported her missing immediately, but it took authorities nearly three weeks to issue an official alert.
“We couldn’t wait for permission to search,” explains Risingsun’s cousin, Lynnette Woundedface. “By the time they started taking us seriously, critical evidence was compromised by weather and time.”
This pattern repeats across North America, where Indigenous women and girls face violence rates significantly higher than the general population. According to data from Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Indigenous women are 12 times more likely to be murdered or go missing than other women in Canada.
The U.S. numbers tell a similar story. The National Crime Information Center reported nearly 5,700 cases of missing Indigenous women in 2020 alone, though advocates believe the true number is substantially higher due to jurisdictional complications and reporting inconsistencies.
“These aren’t just statistics,” says Mary Kathryn Nagle, legal counsel for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. “Each number represents a person whose disappearance has left a wound in their community that cannot heal without answers.”
The crisis stems from a complex web of factors: historical trauma, economic marginalization, jurisdictional gaps, and systemic racism within law enforcement. When Indigenous women go missing, investigations often stall in the bureaucratic tangle between tribal, state, and federal authorities.
On many reservations, tribal police lack authority to prosecute non-Indigenous offenders who commit crimes on tribal land – a loophole exploited by those targeting Indigenous women. This jurisdictional maze was partially addressed by the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, but significant gaps remain.
“The system was essentially designed to fail Indigenous women,” explains Annita Lucchesi, executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute. “When multiple agencies can point fingers at each other, cases fall through the cracks.”
I reviewed hundreds of pages of testimony from families affected by this crisis. A recurring theme emerges: the devastating disparity in media coverage and police resources allocated to Indigenous cases compared to missing white women.
The “missing white woman syndrome” – where disappearances of white women receive extensive coverage while similar cases involving women of color go unreported – has real consequences. Without media pressure, law enforcement priorities shift elsewhere.
“My sister’s case got three paragraphs in the local paper,” says Thomas EagleFeather, whose sister vanished from the Pine Ridge Reservation in 2018. “Meanwhile, when a college student went missing in the same county, it was front-page news for weeks.”
Grassroots movements have emerged to fill these gaps. Indigenous-led organizations like the Montana-based MMIP (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons) Coalition conduct independent searches, maintain community databases, and provide support to families navigating the aftermath of disappearances.
These community efforts have also pushed for policy changes. In the U.S., Savanna’s Act and the Not Invisible Act, both signed into law in 2020, improve data collection, require standardized protocols for responding to cases of missing Indigenous people, and increase coordination between federal, state, and tribal agencies.
In Canada, the National Inquiry delivered its final report in 2019, containing 231 “Calls for Justice” aimed at addressing root causes of violence against Indigenous women. Implementation has been uneven, but advocates point to increased awareness as a crucial first step.
“Ten years ago, most Canadians had never heard the term ‘MMIWG’,” says Gladys Radek, co-founder of Families
