Within the United States, there is an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Using data from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) repositories on missing and unidentified women, we examined how demographic and regional differences affected case status. Within the NamUs database, we found that American Indian/Alaska Native women are 135% more likely to be listed within the “unidentified remains” cases than women of other races. The results also showed that in states with relatively high urban population densities, women of all races were 250% more likely to be found dead and remain unidentified than women in places with a low urban population. We conclude by discussing three areas in which policy can help bring Indigenous women’s plight back to the fore: (a) in data collection efforts, (b) in increased support for Tribal police, and (c) via the media’s purposeful focus on Indigenous issues.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.