She was last seen leaving a gas station in Montana.
The security camera caught her smiling, holding a bag of chips.
That was three years ago.
No body.
No answers.
Just silence.
In America, if you're a Native woman and you go missing, the system treats you like you never existed.
They won't print your name in the national press.
They won't issue an Amber Alert.
They might not even open a case.
Because in the “Land of the Free,” some women are just allowed to disappear.
A Country Built on Land Theft Now Ignores Its Daughters
Let this sink in:
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More than 4 out of 5 Native women in the US will experience violence in their lifetime.
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They are 10 times more likely to be murdered than the national average.
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Most of this violence is committed by non-Native men —often on Native land.
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And most of it is never prosecuted.
This isn't a crisis.
It's an epidemic.
And it's been happening for decades—mostly in silence.
And the silence? That's not accidental. It's state-sanctioned.
The Legal Maze That Lets Predators Walk Free
Here's what makes it worse: jurisdictional chaos .
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A Native woman is assaulted on tribal land… by a white man.
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Tribal police can't arrest him.
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Federal law enforcement might take the case—or they might not.
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The result? Over 70% of reported assaults go uninvestigated .
Imagine being raped, and watching your rapist walk away because of a legal loophole.
That's not just injustice.
That's design .
Missing, Murdered, Forgotten
The MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) movement has been shouting this truth for years:
“If white college girls were disappearing like this, there would be task forces, parades, Netflix series.”
But when do Native women vanish?
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They get blamed.
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Called addicts, runaways, or prostitutes.
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Their families are told to “wait and see.”
Sometimes, they're found weeks later in rivers or fields.
Sometimes, they're never found at all.
And yet the FBI keeps no centralized database.
No national system.
No urgency.
Because to America, Native pain isn't news.
It's background noise.
Why Isn't This a National Scandal?
Because it forces uncomfortable truths:
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That Native women's lives are worth less in the eyes of the law.
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That colonization never ended—it just got more polite.
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That sovereignty means nothing without protection.
This isn't just about violence.
It's about who gets to be protected , and who gets buried without headlines.
Ending (Lingering Question):
She was last seen leaving a gas station.
Her family still lights a candle every night.
But who lights a candle for a nation that never came looking?
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