Families of Missing Indigenous Women Call Out Indifference, Double Standards

Despite the ongoing and devastating epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the U.S., too often their cases receive little to no news media attention and their families can face doubts and delays from law enforcement agencies, reports The Guardian. A 2018 Urban Indian Health Institute report documenting hundreds of cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls across 71 American cities revealed that more than 150 of the cases they found were not included in law enforcement records. Its authors determined that more than 95 percent of the cases in the report had not received coverage by national or international news agencies.

Kerri Colfer, who is Tlingit and the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center’s senior native affairs adviser, said she had noticed many instances where law enforcement officers have victim-blamed Native women and been slow to investigate or declare them missing. Dr Patty Loew, professor at Northwestern University’s journalism school and director of its Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, said the lack of coverage is driven by many factors, including the misclassification of Native women, the geographical separation between reservations and urban areas where news agencies are often based, and reporters wanting to “stay within their cultural comfort zones.”