Two years ago, Ashley Heavy Runner Loring vanished without a trace, like thousands of other Native American women who go missing at alarming rates every year. Around the country, a remarkable movement, driven by Native women themselves, is leading the charge to find them.
In June 2017, sisters Ashley and Kimberly Heavy Runner Loring were full of plans. Ashley hoped to leave her home on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, east of Glacier National Park in Montana, later that summer for Missoula, where she would live with Kimberly while studying environmental science at the University of Montana. But while Kimberly was away for a few months getting to know her fiancé’s family in Morocco, Ashley grew despondent.
Kimberly suspected that her sister’s disappearance had something to do with Ashley’s new group of friends, but tribal police told her they had not yet found evidence of a crime. She worried they had started too slowly—too skeptically—in those critical first days, that no one had pursued it aggressively enough. Who else would search as fiercely as a family?
Left: Mark SureChief is a family friend who has worked in search and rescue and helped look for Ashley. A trailer in the village of Blackfeet.Lisa Brunner, codirector of Indigenous Women’s Human Rights Collective, says some blame belongs to the “party girl” stereotype, in which Native women are assumed to be on benders, hampering serious police responses in the hours and days after a disappearance.
The Indian Law and Order Commission, an independent volunteer national advisory group tasked with evaluating how to make Native communities safer, called this situation a quagmire that offers criminals impunity to the “endangerment of everyone living in and near tribal communities.” In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice found that U.S. attorneys across the nation had declined to prosecute more than half the violent crimes on reservations, often because no one had found enough evidence.
On the way to the next site, the car bumps through a rocky pasture on private property where an acquaintance told them to look. The searchers crest a hill where a derelict trailer creaks in the wind, then follow the slope down toward a clearing. Kimberly grows antsy: A psychic once described to her a scene exactly like this, promising that Ashley was left there. A few feet away, the wreck of a second trailer is flattened by wind. They lift up grimy plywood and broken appliances.
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