Addressing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons
Last updated 1/28/2021 at 8:19am Around 7 percent of Montanans are Native Americans, yet Indigenous people account for 26 percent of the missing persons cases in our state. Addressing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons must be a priority for all leaders and communities throughout Big Sky Country, and as both a state senator and a member of the Northern Cheyenne, I’ve made it a top priority. Unfortunately, it can be extremely difficult to locate missing Indigenous people due to the vast, rural expanses of Montana and the jurisdictional barriers among federal, state, local and tribal governments. To help overcome these challenges, I worked with my colleagues in the 2019 Legislature to establish the Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force. Over the past two years, the MMIP Task Force has collected data through its Montana Missing Persons Clearinghouse database and has identified over 3,000 missing Indigenous individuals, 80 percent of whom were under the age of 18. Due to the MMIP Task Force, 97.9 percent of people reported missing during the past two years were found.