Lack of awareness, data hinders cases of missing and murdered Native American women, study finds

The mysterious circumstances surrounding McConnell's killing is one of hundreds of cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls across the United States that never garnered national headlines or social media attention or demands for justice from powerful people.

The absence of awareness or widespread scrutiny in these cases is the focus of a report released Thursday that documented 2,306 missing Native American women and girls in the U.S., about 1,800 of whom were killed or vanished within the past 40 years.

Nearly 60 percent of the cases are homicides and 31 percent involve girls 18 and younger, according to data analyzed by the Sovereign Bodies Institute, a nonprofit, Indigenous-led research organization that began counting and mapping such missing and murdered cases over the past few years.

Advocates have long complained about the lack of comprehensive state and federal data on missing and murdered Native Americans, which is often linked to incidents of sexual violence and human trafficking, and they believe poor record-keeping, racial misclassification and adverse relationships between tribal governments and outside law enforcement have led to an underreporting of cases.

Researchers said they were able to examine 105 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls from the region and found that 62 percent of cases were never included in any official missing persons database; 74 percent of cases have no public documentation related to manner of death, whether charges were filed or a suspect or person of interest was found; and 56 percent of cases don't mention or make public the victim's tribal affiliation.

A 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice estimates that 1.5 million American Indian and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence, including sexual abuse, and the Justice Department found that women on some reservations have been killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

On Monday, Ivanka Trump and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt touted the opening in suburban Minneapolis of the first federal task force office dedicated to solving cases of missing and murdered Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, including men.

Annita Lucchesi, a Cheyenne descendant who started the Sovereign Bodies Institute, said becoming invested in the issue has to go beyond opening an office and also requires the difficult work of meeting with families and understanding the systemic racial and economic disparities that foster cycles of violence, poverty and crime.

Abby Abinanti, the chief judge of the Yurok Tribe and the first Native American woman to be admitted to the California State Bar, said attitudes toward Indigenous women today can also be traced historically to the stealing of Indigenous children to work as indentured servants for white settlers through the Civil War and the sending of thousands of Native American children to boarding schools for federal assimilation programs in the late 19th century, in effect severing cultural connections and damaging familial relationships through the generations.

Abinanti said that while it's important for tribal, local and state jurisdictions to find common ground in order to solve cases today, a lot of mostly rural communities are struggling to respond with adequate resources, and many don't have the staff with the cultural competency in working with Indigenous communities.

Kyle Wallace of the Shasta County Sheriff's Office said every homicide comes with its own set of challenges, whether or not the victim is Native American or lives on or off a reservation, and rural departments in particular face geographic barriers and crime scenes that "don't fit into a single box.".

"People don't pay attention to Native women because maybe they think it's their fault what happened to them," the teen said