Invisible by Design

by Kimberly Tinsley

College of the Muscogee Nation

The atrocities committed throughout history against the Native inhabitants of North America is a well-documented branch of the Mvskoke Nation’s lineage. Since colonization, the federal agenda towards Indigenous people comprised a methodical and calculated effort to denigrate the value of Indigenous life. Shrouded in generations of silence, the voiceless scourge of stolen sisters is a direct result of this unfettered dehumanization schema. This pervasive plague has been allowed to sweep across tribal communities in shadowed toleration and if their plight for justice remains systematically unattainable, victimized Indigenous women will continue to be the invisible casualties of a culturally targeted historical tragedy. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls epidemic is perpetuated because of deficient media attention, inconsistencies in law enforcement involvement compounded by ambiguous jurisdictional boundaries, and the insidious fetishization of Native women.

A recent example emphasizing the importance of mass media involvement while simultaneously accentuating the imbalance in missing women of color is the Gabby Petito case. Petito, a young and beautiful Caucasian woman caused a media firestorm when she disappeared while exploring the Bridger-Teton National Forrest in Wyoming. As a direct result of the massive outpouring of media attention people, not familiar with Petito personally, were able to assist the investigation by submitting video evidence and first-hand accounts of her whereabouts. Due to this culmination of evidence through public interaction, authorities were able to locate Petito's remains in a heavily secluded section of the vast 3.4-million-acre national park. 

Conversely, 710 Indigenous people have been reported missing in Wyoming since 2011, with minuscule media coverage and negligible public support; a striking contrast to the response in the disappearance of Petito, as asserted by the Director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, Abigail Echo-Hawk, in a 2021 PBS NewsHour interview. While Petito's influencer lifestyle on social media is reported to have played a factor in the investment of her case, according to Clayton Edwards’ article in the Outsider, Petito amassed the majority of her fanbase only after her disappearance gained national news coverage. These factors corroborate that the public's investment was directly fueled by the influx of dedicated daily airtime and further supports the notion that the media holds the discretionary power to either bolster or silence a missing person’s story. 

Missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls are not only critically underrepresented in news coverage, but their cases appear to be under-investigated resulting in diminutive prosecutorial rates. The 2016 Centers for Disease Control report list murder as the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women, a rate disproportionately higher than any other ethnic group. While many Indigenous nations have worked tirelessly to regain the tribal sovereignty stripped away through Manifest Destiny-Esque legislative atonements, historically, the federal authority has been hesitant to relinquish unrestricted autonomy to tribal nations. By limiting the investigative and prosecutorial capabilities, federal, state, and local agencies have caused an insurmountable blockage to tribal nations’ ability to seek justice for their citizens swiftly and effectively. Compounding issues further, Native communities lack the proper support networks to respond to criminal complaints in a timely manner and many tribal governments possess restricted criminal jurisdiction over non-tribal perpetrators, even if a crime is committed on tribal land and the victim is a tribal member. Although a demographic with disproportionately high victimization rates should have equitably high prosecution rates, since evidentiary support is essential in establishing a solid prosecutorial case, any hope of legal remediation is futile when there is a lapse in investigative effort and response. 

The lack of legal rectitude in MMIWG cases does little to rebuild trust in an institution built upon the marginalization of First Nation inhabitants. Although some First Nation families have been accused of being uncooperative during investigations, many fail to realize that Native peoples' distrust of non-tribal authority stems from a long and sordid historical cycle of trauma and abuse. Observing multiple law enforcement agencies conduct the Petito investigation collaboratively without issue or stalemates provided irrefutable evidence that cooperative investigations are possible and highly effective, leaving many Native people to view the absence of similar investigatory efforts involving MMIWG cases as a continuation of what the Urban Indian Health Institutes’ 2018 MMIWG data analysis called a “deeply flawed institutional system…that remains complicit in violence targeting Indigenous women and girls.”

Part of this complacency lies within the historical characterization of Indigenous people as mythical beings. These characterizations have led to a societal acceptance of an overtly perverted cultural representation. While First Nation people are survivors of a primordial generational saga, deservedly possessing the innate right to be celebrated for overcoming the systems designed to irradicate cultural identity, reverence can become another method of systematic dehumanization. Although First Nation people are culturally diverse, a single personified representation has manifested to represent all nations. This glorified “Indian” icon represents hundreds of individual tribal nations, deepening the diminished mortality of Indigenous people. The sexualized iconization of Indigenous women only furthers this narrative of indifference and allows Native women’s humanity to be corrupted by a fetishized distortion. This pejorative ideology not only ensures the preservation of racialized stereotypes, it also resigns Indigenous women to objectified apathy.

Whereas specific actions throughout history can be definitively interpreted as overt declarations of war; however, sometimes, inaction can also reverberate louder than a war cry. The prevalence of Native women's victimization rates will continue to exist until the foundational blockages to Indigenous peoples’ humanity are removed, permitting silenced First Nation women and girls to be acknowledged. Until this disparity is addressed and rectified, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis will remain embedded in the institutional model designed to reduce Indigenous people as outlanders of civilized society, resulting in an iconized entity stripped of humanity and underserved of basic rights. However, reclaiming Native narration and addressing the disparity in media coverage of Indigenous women while ensuring that investigatory cooperation leads to favorable prosecutorial outcomes will finally allow First Nation women and girls to shed their cloak of invisibility and provide a revolutionary advancement towards ending the constructed systematic oppression of Native people.