Melanie James was like “a second mom” to her sister Melissa. The two girls lived in Farmington, New Mexico, a city bordering the Navajo Nation, and their mother, Lela Mailman, often had to work two or three jobs to make ends meet. “This one day, it was my birthday, and we didn’t have nothing. All I wanted to do was to go to the park, so my sister took me there—but then she was, like, ‘No, this isn’t enough. Let’s go, kid’—that’s what she called me,” Melissa told me recently. “We walked up the road to this grocery store and she got me a cupcake, a candle, a bag of Hot Cheetos, and a Dr Pepper. We walked back to the park and we sat under this big tree, and she sang me ‘Happy Birthday.’ Every year after that it was kind of like our little thing.”
In the spring of 2014, after Melanie, who was twenty-one, stopped visiting or responding to text messages, Melissa, who was eighteen, and her mother went to the police in Farmington to report her missing. They sensed that they weren’t being taken seriously—perhaps, they feared, because the family was part Navajo, or because they were temporarily homeless, or because Melanie had a criminal record. When the police finally opened an inquiry, Lela Mailman said, it felt perfunctory. One report referred to Melanie as “Melissa”; when Mailman brought in Melanie’s cell phone, she was told that investigators couldn’t get it to charge. Melanie’s name wasn’t entered into NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, until three years later. (Steve Hebbe, the police chief in Farmington, denied that bias played a role in the investigation, and said the case was difficult to solve in part because Melanie’s family waited several weeks to report her missing. “We want to find people just as much as anyone else,” he said.)
Mailman tried to get the local news to run a piece about Melanie, without success. “They said, ‘We’re busy right now, we have important coverage we have to do.’ And we watch the news that night, and there’s a story about a horse that’s missing,” Mailman told me. But Mailman and Melissa kept coming across things that felt like clues—messages on Melanie’s Facebook account, gossip around town, security-camera footage from a Dollar General showing someone who looked like her. On a crime show on TV, any one of these details could have been the key that unlocked everything; instead, it felt as though time was slipping away without any progress. Sometimes Mailman heard Melanie’s voice, startlingly clear, saying, “Mom,” as if she were just in the other room.
On days when Melanie’s absence felt particularly heavy, Mailman took long drives to clear her head. One morning, she drove south, over the spine of the Chuska Mountains, past Window Rock, the headquarters of the Navajo Nation. In Gallup, she stopped to let a crowd cross the street. “I thought, O.K., must be a funeral or something,” Mailman said. Then she noticed that the group was mostly women, and that many of them were carrying signs bearing the abbreviation M.M.I.W., for “missing and murdered Indigenous women.” (Some advocates prefer M.M.I.W.G., for “missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls,” because many victims are underage; others use M.M.I.R., “missing and murdered Indigenous relatives,” to include men, who face even higher rates of homicide than Indigenous women.) The march was for Ariel Begay, a Diné woman who was missing for three months before her body was found, at the foot of a bridge. (The case is still unsolved.) Mailman got out of her car and joined the group. It was alternately consoling and infuriating that what had happened to Melanie was not merely an isolated incident but, rather, part of an alarming trend of unsolved crimes against Native people, particularly women. (The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates that there are more than four thousand cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Natives that have gone unsolved.) In the following years, Mailman joined M.M.I.W. activists at marches, protests, and prayer gatherings. Grief was isolating; advocacy brought her back into the world. “They’ve been there, they understand my situation without judging me,” Mailman said. “They’ve felt more like my family than my family.”
I met Mailman and Melissa this winter in Albuquerque, at the office of their attorney, Darlene Gomez. New Mexico has the highest number of M.M.I.W. cases in the nation; in recent years, Gomez has served as the pro-bono family advocate for twenty such cases, helping families negotiate court proceedings and communicate with law enforcement. “I’m a fund-raiser, I’m a therapist, I’m a policymaker, I’m an advocate, I’m an activist,” she explained. Gomez has dark bangs, excellent posture, and a taste for large jewelry; she wore a silk skirt bordered with tiny red handprints, the symbol of the M.M.I.W. movement. Volunteer work now occupies the majority of her time. “My accountant was, like, You’re going to have to cut back,” Gomez told me, sounding unconvinced.
Mailman, who wore a shirt with her daughter’s name and the phrase “We Will Be Heard” in cursive, was there to discuss Gomez’s ideas for advancing Melanie’s case.
“We use our Facebook, we use TikTok, we put it out there,” Gomez suggested. “So people will know who Melanie is.”
Mailman explained that she worked as a beverage server at a casino, which didn’t leave much free time. “Sometimes I get off late, I’m sleeping most of the day, by the time I wake up it’s time to go back. I don’t have time to get on Facebook or anything,” she said, apologetically.
By early afternoon, Mailman and Melissa were flagging; they hadn’t eaten anything all day, and they still had to make the three-hour drive back to Farmington. Gomez stood to hug them. “All we need is one opportunity for someone to see that picture of Melanie and say, I think I saw her here. Or a private investigator to say, You know what? Let me take this case on for free, and look at all the evidence, and go back and interview people,” she said. “Just knowing that somebody cares and is going to try to help when they can. That’s what we have. All we have is that hope.”
People living and working in Indian Country have long been aware of the alarming numbers of Indigenous women who have experienced interpersonal violence—more than eighty per cent, according to the National Institute of Justice. But, as with other recent social-justice movements, it took a hashtag to galvanize broader awareness. In 2012, Sheila North, a Canadian journalist and a member of the Cree Nation, began using #mmiw on Twitter posts. As a reporter with the CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, North had covered many cases of missing Indigenous women. She was frustrated by the fact that Native women’s high rates of victimization were often explained as a result of domestic violence within Native communities, as if non-Indigenous Canadians didn’t need to feel responsible. As North saw it, the issue was inextricably entwined with Canadian society and its long history of violence, colonization, and racism. Many of the missing and murdered Indigenous people had been through Canada’s fraught foster-care system, or had done stints in residential schools, boarding schools aimed at assimilating Native children. Institutions that were supposed to protect them had, in many cases, made them more vulnerable. North was particularly struck by how many cases went unsolved—evidence, to her, that society regarded Native women as essentially disposable.
Naming the problem made it visible to a wider audience that was beginning to reckon with the systemic harm done to Indigenous populations. “It surprised me at how fast the hashtag picked up, and how far it went,” North told me. The online attention was bolstered by offline protests by family members of the missing and murdered. “Sometimes it was three people, sometimes it was three thousand,” North said. “In all kinds of weather, from minus thirty to plus thirty. Rallies and walks and vigils. They were relentless—they kept going and going.” In 2016, the Canadian government commissioned an inquiry into the situation, calling the violence an “epidemic” and noting that Indigenous women, despite making up only four per cent of Canada’s population, accounted for twenty-four per cent of its murdered women. The movement soon spread to the United States, where the Senate declared May 5, 2018, National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls; a year later, Donald Trump established the Presidential Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native woman to hold a Cabinet post, has called the issue a priority for the Biden Administration; under her guidance, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has formed a Missing and Murdered Unit and hired dozens of investigators to staff it.
Darlene Gomez’s interest in M.M.I.W. cases began in 2001, when her childhood friend Melissa Montoya went to a bar on St. Patrick’s Day and then disappeared. Montoya grew up in Dulce, New Mexico, a small town near the headquarters of the Jicarilla Apache Nation. Gomez is from Lumberton, a neighboring village. More than ninety per cent of the population of Dulce identifies as Native American; Hispanics like Gomez are in the minority. (In the seventeenth century, the Gomez family received a land grant from the King of Spain; when the U.S. government established the Jicarilla Apache reservation, in 1887, the family refused to cede its property. Since then, the Gomez ranch has existed as a pocket of New Mexico within the bounds of the reservation.)
Montoya has never been found. “My mom passed away two years ago. She was almost ninety-two,” Gomez told me. “She had Alzheimer’s, and one of the last things she kept telling me, in the very last days of her life, was to help find Melissa. That is one of the memories that stayed in her brain.”
Gomez went to law school intending to work on water policy. She ended up primarily practicing family law, with mostly Native clients; she also served as general counsel for the Jicarilla Apache Nation. All the while, she continued to pay attention to stories of missing and murdered women. It can be difficult to get reliable statistics about victimization rates among Native women and girls, but the data that were available are dismal: in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Indian and Alaska Native women had the second-highest rates of death by homicide in the U.S. (Black women were killed at the highest rates.) Rates of victimization on some reservations are up to ten times the national averages. These reservations are plagued with the same issues as other isolated or rural communities—underfunded and under-trained law enforcement, poverty, addiction—but the problems are compounded by the dysfunctions of the American legal system and the legacies of colonialism. Tribal nations are ostensibly sovereign, but they rely on the federal government to prosecute—and, often, to investigate—major crimes. Until relatively recently, the Navajo Nation didn’t have full access to programs that much of the country takes for granted: officers couldn’t issue an Amber Alert or enter a victim’s information into the National Crime Information Systems.
In August, 2019, Medicine Wheel Ride, a nonprofit group of Indigenous women motorcyclists, connected Gomez with what she calls her second M.M.I.W. case, after Montoya’s. Jamie Yazzie was a thirty-one-year-old Diné woman with round cheeks and a habit of giggling at her own jokes. She lived in Pinon, Arizona, an isolated town in the Navajo Nation, a hundred and twenty-five miles northeast of Flagstaff. “She liked living out there. I think we all do,” Yazzie’s aunt, Marilene James, told me. “It’s a great place to raise kids and teach them traditionally, about crops and things. But the only thing is the drugs and alcohol, and nothing to do, and no jobs.”
In July, 2019, when Yazzie didn’t report to her job as a home health aide and stopped responding to texts, Marilene went to the police station to report her missing. “They said, ‘Maybe she just went out of town, maybe she didn’t want to be found.’ But we knew that wasn’t true, because we knew she wasn’t like that,” Marilene said. According to rumors around town, Yazzie had last been seen with her boyfriend, Tre James, at a house owned by his grandmother. The house had a bad reputation around Pinon—“drugs and guns and violent people,” Marilene said—and Tre had a history of being abusive. Yazzie’s mother, Ethelene Denny, worked at Pinon’s only grocery store, a clearing house for rumors. She learned that neighbors had heard gunshots and the sounds of a woman’s screams coming from Tre’s grandmother’s house. Knowing that some residents of Pinon are wary of contacting law enforcement, Marilene wrote a Facebook post asking people to share information with her about Yazzie’s disappearance. “I had all these people calling and messaging me, giving me an idea of what happened, telling me about seeing her there, or that their boyfriend had something to do with it,” she said. She made a list of all the tips and provided it to the police. The F.B.I. searched Tre’s home shortly after Yazzie went missing and collected blood evidence. But months went by, and Tre James wasn’t brought in for a formal interview. The officer Marilene had given the list of tips later told her that he’d misplaced it. When Marilene continued to search for Yazzie, she says, an officer told her that she could be charged with a felony for interfering with the case. (The Navajo Nation Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.)
Marilene told me that some of her relatives disapproved of her outspokenness about her niece’s disappearance. In Navajo culture, she said, there’s a taboo against speaking about negative things. “We weren’t allowed to talk about her in a way where something bad happened to her—we’re supposed to just expect and pray for her safe return,” Marilene said. “You don’t talk about it, because that’s just basically, like, manifesting it.” But she feared that, if she stopped pushing, the case would stagnate.
When Gomez heard about the case from Marilene, she was reminded of her friend Melissa Montoya. “Just the fact that the family was on their own, pretty much. Nobody was helping them,” she said. “But I knew the federal court system, I knew the chief of the Navajo Nation police, I knew the B.I.A. system, I knew the F.B.I.—I had these connections.” Gomez arranged meetings between family members and the U.S. Attorney’s office to discuss the case, which she felt was not being investigated aggressively enough. The initial meetings were “really tense,” Gomez said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of trust.” One of the attorneys assigned to the case, Jennifer LaGrange, told me that it wasn’t typical to meet with a victim’s family members before a suspect had been charged. “In this particular case, we felt like it was important to meet with this family because we knew that they were grieving, and we knew that they were upset, and we wanted to assure them that we were working on this case,” she said. Afterward, Gomez questioned her own aggressive approach. “For me, it was reëvaluating how I need to present myself,” she said. “But, then, if I would have just kept my mouth shut, maybe they would have just breezed over the family and myself.” (Gomez now characterizes the relationship with the U.S. Attorney.’s office as one of “mutual respect and trust.”)
As her work with Yazzie’s family continued, Gomez connected with other families of the missing and murdered at protests and in Facebook groups, and began adding many of them to her roster of pro-bono clients. She worked to drum up attention for her cases, posting TikToks, working her connections in the media, and helping organize protests and rallies. When Michelle Lujan Grisham, the governor of New Mexico, expanded the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives Task Force, in 2021, Gomez was asked to join.
In some corners, Gomez developed a reputation for being difficult to deal with. When Haaland spoke at the University of New Mexico law school, in September, Gomez helped organize a protest. “We just wanted to have a face-to-face with her, to know that she cared about the missing,” Gomez told me. Late last year, after Lujan Grisham disbanded the state’s task force, saying that it was meant to be temporary, Gomez rallied women for a sit-in at Lujan Grisham’s office to demand that it be reinstated. “We have to push,” Gomez said. “It’s constantly pushing and making a scene—I hate to say that, but we have to make a scene.” Lujan Grisham later announced the formation of a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Advisory Council; Gomez was not on it.
Two years after Yazzie disappeared, a land surveyor found her remains on the Hopi reservation, near the border with the Navajo Nation. She had been shot in the back of the head. Tre James was charged with her murder. At his trial, several women testified that he had assaulted them; at least one of the incidents took place in the years since Yazzie had disappeared. (Women had filed police reports against James, but the Navajo Nation Police Department hadn’t passed some of the cases along for prosecution.) In September, James was convicted of first-degree murder, as well as several acts of domestic violence; he is scheduled to be sentenced in May. The verdict was a victory of sorts: few of Gomez’s cases have had a suspect charged, much less convicted.
North, the journalist who coined #mmiw, told me that she has mixed feelings about the movement’s success so far. “Now the issue is well known. You can go to the grocery store and turn to your neighbor in line and pick up a conversation about it,” she said. “But awareness can only do so much.” Canada allocated more than forty million dollars for its National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. “There was a lot of hope in the inquiry—that people would be held accountable, that cases would be solved,” North said. “None of that has really happened. A lot of these cases still remain unsolved.” In part, that’s because cold cases, like the disappearance of Melanie James a decade ago, are notoriously difficult to solve, particularly when forensic evidence is absent. Listening to Melanie’s family tell their story, I had the uneasy thought that justice in her case might not look like answers, arrests, and convictions but, instead, like subsequent missing-persons cases being approached respectfully and rigorously the first time around.
Some M.M.I.W. advocates are also pushing for a broader conception of justice. The Canadian inquiry ended with two hundred and thirty-one “calls for justice.” Some of the measures involved bolstering law enforcement: the elimination of jurisdictional gaps, improving accessibility to remote regions for major-crime units, and equitable funding for tribal police. But these were balanced with other suggestions—funding shelters, expanding access to health care, and ending the “social, economic, cultural, and political marginalization” of Indigenous women and girls. “We want to have a fair shot at a good education, good jobs, a good life, at having our human rights upheld,” North said. “If things don’t change at a higher level, in terms of policies and procedures and laws to make things more equitable, the statistics will remain the same.”
An earlier version of this article misstated Michelle Lujan Grisham’s last name.
