Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: The Crisis With Historical Roots

Native American and Alaska Native women are murdered at more than ten times the national average in some regions of the United States.^1^ They are reported missing at a rate wildly disproportionate to their share of the population. And the agencies responsible for investigating those cases — a patchwork of tribal, federal, and state law enforcement systems that frequently fail to coordinate, share data, or close cases — have historically treated these disappearances as low-priority. The MMIW crisis is not a recent phenomenon. It is the present-day expression of policies that spent two centuries systematically stripping Native women of legal protection, economic security, and political standing.

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The Numbers That Expose a System Failure

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified homicide as the third leading cause of death for Native American and Alaska Native women, behind heart disease and cancer. A 2018 Urban Indian Health Institute report documented 5,712 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across 71 urban cities over a roughly two-year period — and noted that 2,700 of those cases had not been entered into the federal National Crime Information Center database. Cases that don’t enter the NCIC become effectively invisible to investigators in other jurisdictions.^2^

On the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, a community of approximately 10,000 people reported 34 missing persons in a 30-day period in 2018, prompting the tribal council to declare a public emergency. The Navajo Nation, the largest reservation in the United States with roughly 173,000 enrolled members, saw 36 women reported missing in 2017 — a rate that, scaled to the general U.S. population, would represent a national crisis receiving front-page coverage daily.

How Federal Law Made Native Women Legally Unprotectable

The jurisdictional framework governing crimes on reservations is one of the most dysfunctional products of federal Indian law. Under the Major Crimes Act of 1885, serious felonies committed on reservations fall under federal jurisdiction, not tribal. The Supreme Court’s 1978 ruling in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe held that tribal courts have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians — meaning that if a non-Native person commits a crime against a Native woman on a reservation, tribal law enforcement cannot prosecute them and must refer the case to federal or state authorities.^3^

The result: when non-Native men — who commit a significant portion of violence against Native women, particularly in cases involving sex trafficking — commit crimes on or near reservations, tribal police can detain but cannot prosecute. Federal prosecutors, operating out of offices that may be hundreds of miles away and handling a full range of federal crimes, frequently decline to prosecute due to limited resources and the practical difficulties of working in remote areas. State authorities may have no jurisdiction at all depending on the specific reservation’s legal status. Cases fall through the gaps and stay there.

The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 partially addressed this by restoring some tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indian domestic violence offenders, but the provision was limited in scope and did not cover other categories of violent crime. The 2022 VAWA reauthorization expanded tribal jurisdiction to include sexual violence, sex trafficking, and stalking — a significant change, but one that came nearly 150 years after Oliphant’s jurisdiction framework was being built.

The MMIW Crisis Did Not Come From Nowhere

The vulnerability of Native women to violence is not a quirk of current jurisdictional structure. It was created deliberately and incrementally through the same policies that structured everything else in federal-tribal relations. The boarding school system produced intergenerational trauma, disrupted family structures, and normalized violence within institutions. The Dawes Act’s allotment of land into individual parcels disproportionately benefited men under its framework, reducing women’s economic standing within communities. The dissolution of traditional governance structures — replaced with male-dominated tribal councils modeled on Western political structures — displaced forms of Native governance in which women frequently held significant authority.^4^

Sarah Deer, a Muscogee Creek legal scholar and MacArthur Fellow, has documented the connection between the historical diminishment of tribal jurisdiction and the current rates of violence against Native women. Her research traces how the systematic removal of tribal authority to prosecute and punish violence against women created a vacuum that non-Native perpetrators were able to exploit. Her 2015 book The Beginning and End of Rape frames the MMIW crisis explicitly as a sovereignty issue: the inability to protect Native women is the direct consequence of the inability to govern. The same broken treaties and forced sterilization programs that targeted Native women’s bodies in previous generations created the legal and political conditions that make them vulnerable today.

Savanna’s Act, signed in October 2020, directed the Department of Justice to develop protocols for responding to missing and murdered Indigenous cases and required law enforcement agencies to enter data into the NCIC. Hanna’s Act, also signed in 2020, created a missing and murdered Indigenous persons coordinator position at the Department of the Interior. Both laws were named for specific women: Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a Spirit Lake Dakota woman who was murdered in Fargo, North Dakota, in 2017 while eight months pregnant; and Hanna Harris, a Northern Cheyenne woman who went missing from the Lame Deer area of Montana in 2013.

The legislation is a beginning, not a resolution. The data systems are still being built. The jurisdictional problems have been partially addressed but not solved. The communities doing the most active work to find missing women — families posting on social media, tribal members organizing search parties, Indigenous activists maintaining databases the government has failed to keep — are operating without adequate federal support. What they are fighting is a crisis that the federal government spent two centuries constructing and has spent a few years beginning to acknowledge.

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Sources:

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Violence Prevention: Native Americans. 2016.
2. Urban Indian Health Institute. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Seattle Indian Health Board, 2018.
3. Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978).
4. Deer, Sarah. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.