The Stolen Sisters: The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People
In 2017, the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI), a tribal epidemiology center, set out to document missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in urban America. A year later, its report counted 506 cases across 71 cities and called the figure a likely undercount.
Among them was Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a young Native woman murdered in Fargo, North Dakota — one of the cities in that survey, and the namesake of a federal law. Savanna's Act, signed into law in October 2020, requires the federal government to better track cases of missing and murdered Indians. Yet as UIHI pointed out, because cases in urban areas are not federal jurisdiction, the women and girls of America's cities — including Savanna herself — had long fallen outside the data the bill was meant to capture.
The crisis known across Indian Country as MMIWG — missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people — is measured in numbers that collapse under their own weight. In 2016, the National Crime Information Center logged 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, according to the UIHI report; the federal NamUs database held just 116 that year. UIHI also found that roughly 80 percent of documented cases occurred since 2000, and that about 71 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in cities — far from the reservations where federal attention has historically focused.
The violence behind those gaps is documented by federal agencies themselves. According to the UIHI report, the CDC has reported that murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women, and that rates of violence on reservations can run up to ten times the national average. A CDC analysis published in November 2021 recorded 2,226 homicides of American Indians and Alaska Natives from 2003 through 2018 across 34 states and the District of Columbia, and found homicide a leading cause of death for this population — with the suspect most often a current or former intimate partner for female victims, in 38.4 percent of cases.
The violence that precedes those deaths is staggering: a 2016 study funded by the National Institute of Justice found that 84.3 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women — more than 1.5 million women — have experienced violence in their lifetime. Executive Order 14053, issued in November 2021, cited research that approximately half of Native American women have experienced sexual violence, approximately half have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner, and the vast majority of Native survivors report being victimized by a non-Native person.
Why does the country not know how many of its citizens are missing? The answer is written into the jurisdictions that govern Indian Country. A case can fall to tribal, federal, state, or local authorities depending on where it happened and who is involved, and cases that cross those lines can stall while agencies argue over who owns them. Executive Order 14053 was blunt: criminal jurisdiction complexities and resource constraints have left many injustices unaddressed.
For decades, tribal courts were largely barred from prosecuting non-Native offenders who committed crimes on tribal land, even against Native victims. The Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization of 2013 began restoring tribal jurisdiction over certain non-Indian defendants in domestic and dating violence cases, as the executive order noted. The 2022 reauthorization went further, expanding tribal courts' special criminal jurisdiction to cover non-Native perpetrators of sexual assault, child abuse, stalking, sex trafficking, and assaults on tribal law enforcement officers on tribal lands.
Pressure from Native families and advocates has produced a federal response — and a reckoning. In late 2019, Executive Order 13898 created the Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives — Operation Lady Justice. On October 10, 2020, Savanna's Act and the Not Invisible Act of 2019 were signed into law on the same day. Savanna's Act directs the Justice Department to update its protocols and databases — including the National Crime Information Center — and to collect data on missing and murdered Indians regardless of where they reside. The Not Invisible Act created a joint Interior and Justice Department commission to recommend responses to violent crime against Native people, and designated a federal coordinator within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In November 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14053, declaring that Native Americans face unacceptably high levels of violence, and are victims of violent crime at a rate much higher than the national average. On May 4, 2022, he issued Proclamation 10389, designating May 5 as Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day. For generations, the proclamation read, Indigenous persons, including American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, have been forced to mourn a missing or murdered loved one without the answers and support they deserve.
The people who have supplied those answers are the families themselves. From the red handprint painted over the mouth — now a symbol of the movement — to vigils, marches, and searches organized by groups like the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, the Native Women's Society of the Reclaiming Our Sacred Energy, and MMIW USA, Native communities have built the support systems the state has been slow to provide. The term stolen sisters, used by UIHI for women whose stories were never told, has become a rallying cry, and Native-led research organizations such as the Sovereign Bodies Institute maintain their own databases of the missing and murdered.
None of this is finished work. The laws exist, but implementation lags; the data gaps persist; and the families still search. What advocates say is needed is not another task force but durable change: tribally accessible data systems, dedicated federal resources, and respect for tribal jurisdiction in every case, urban and rural alike. The crisis will end the way it began to be documented — because Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people and the families who love them refused to be invisible.
— The Indigenous Beacon Editorial Team