Two years ago, Merle Kirk asked Oregon legislators for help. During a House committee hearing in February 2019, she told the story of the women in her family who have disappeared or were murdered over the last 60 years. Kirk told lawmakers that her sister, Mavis Kirk-Greeley, died in 2009 when her boyfriend deliberately hit her with his vehicle on the Warm Springs Reservation. He was never convicted of a crime. For Kirk, her sister’s death echoed the 1957 murder of her grandmother, Mavis Josephine McKay, on the Yakama Indian Reservation and adds more grief to the loss of yet another relative. “My first cousin, Lisa Pearl Briseno, she’s been missing since 1997,” Kirk, who’s of Wasco, Warm Springs, Dine and Yakama heritage, said in a recent interview. “That affects our whole family. I was raised with her, she stayed with my dad and mom until she graduated. And so, she’s like my sister. In Native ways, all our cousins are brother and sister.”