Mary Annette Pember
ICT
There’s been a flash point of change in the U.S. that has brought new recognition and reckoning with the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous people.
After decades of sporadic police and public interest and investigation, public awareness, support and funding sources have aligned in a way that may finally bring closure and justice for families.
Recent developments in the decades-old murder case of Susan “Suzy” Poupart highlight the shifts.
Thirty-five years after Poupart was murdered on or near the lands of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin, tribal, federal and county agencies have joined forces to help solve the case.
In May, the tribe announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for her 1990 murder. And the tribal council also approved an identical reward for information about Melissa Beson, who went missing in March.
And, ICT has learned, that after years of struggling to pay for expensive DNA testing of evidence found with Poupart’s remains, the Vilas County sheriff’s department will be receiving help from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit, which will fund the testing as part of the agency’s initiative Operation Spirit Return. The initiative focuses on solving cold cases in Indian Country.
“The winds of change are finally coming; the new generation has a different outlook on accountability within the tribe,” Jared Poupart, Suzy’s son who now serves on the Lac du Flambeau tribal council, said in an interview with ICT.
“As leaders in the tribe, we set the standards for how people should act,” Poupart said. “People (in our community) take on the behavior of leaders as far as taking responsibility for their actions.”
The recent momentum, however, could be endangered by the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, which targets public policies or programs that examine underlying causes of problems driven by racial or social inequity.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs has canceled 373 safety and justice grants awarded to 221 organizations for violence reduction, victims services, policing and prosecution, research and evaluation and other services. The grant terminations also include subawards to an additional 362 organizations, bringing the total number of affected organizations to 554 in 48 states.
The terminations rescinded remaining balances of nearly $820 million of existing grants, most of which were made to nonprofits and other non-governmental organizations. Many of the organizations serving Indian Country are nonprofits, although the exact number of grants cut off or canceled for nonprofits serving Native communities was not available.
“We’ve come so far,” said Stacey June Ettawageshik, executive director of Uniting Three Fires Against Violence in an interview with ICT. Ettawageshik is a citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians.
“We are finally just beginning to get our voices heard and gaining access to funding,” Ettawageshik said. “But having that suddenly taken away would be devastating for our communities and leave us back to square one.”
Underlying problems
Although infamous in Native communities for generations, the epidemic of violence against Indigenous peoples has gone mostly ignored by mainstream America.
In a report from the National Institute of Justice, 84 percent of Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime, compared to 71 percent of White women. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that homicide was the fourth-leading cause of death for Indigenous women and girls between one and 19 years of age and the sixth leading cause for ages 20 to 44.
According to the FBI, more than 10,600 Indigenous people were reported missing in the U.S. in 2023, with approximately 3,300 over the age of 18. The National MIssing and Unidentified Persons System reports that of the 23,700 cases of missing persons in 2023, 255 were Native American. And the Department of Justice reports that in some tribal communities, Indigenous women are murdered at rates more than 10 times the national average.
Yet federal databases still do not contain comprehensive national data on Native Americans reported missing.
Suzy Poupart went missing in May 1990 after she was last seen at an after-hours party on the Lac du Flambeau reservation. Her remains were found on Thanksgiving Day that same year, deep in the nearby Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. Although circumstantial evidence points to three men last seen with her after the party, no criminal charges have yet been filed.
Her two children, Alexandria (Alex) and Jared, who were 3 and 9 years old at the time of her death, are now adults and have pushed to keep the case open, even raising funds to help test the DNA.
They often wonder what their lives would have been like if their mother were alive today. Although it’s too raw to even think about, Jared sometimes recalls how she carefully laid out his school clothes every night before bed.
“They took away our whole life with her,” Jared said.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit organization examining justice policy, the Trump administration has made deep cuts to grants that support research, evaluation, and data collection, largely funded by the Office of Justice Program’s National Institute of Justice. Roughly $64 million in funding for such efforts was terminated, spanning a range of public safety and justice topics.
And reductions and firings at the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as proposed funding cuts in the federal budget, will negatively impact programs addressing family, domestic and dating violence. The agency’s Family Violence Prevention Services Act is a cornerstone for funding programs serving Native victims of domestic, dating and family violence, according to Lucy Simpson, director of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
“(HHS) funding is often the only lifeline preventing Native survivors from falling through the cracks,” Simpson, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs during a hearing in May.
Ettawageshik’s organization, Uniting Three Fires Against Violence, a statewide tribal domestic and sexual violence coalition in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, is one of 20 tribal domestic violence and sexual assault coalitions that have received funding since 2022 through the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women, known as OVW.
Those funds are now in question. In February, The 19th news organization reported that funding opportunities serving coalitions were suddenly removed from the OVW website and replaced with a message directing people not to finalize applications until the office had reviewed rules governing grants.
In late May, OVW published several funding opportunities, including the Sexual Assault Coalitions Program, but included new, restrictive “out of scope” activities for grantees that seem to fly in the face of the missions of most coalitions. Grantees, for example, may not “frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues rather than criminal offenses.”
Although punishing perpetrators of violence is important, Ettawageshik says that the underlying problem of domestic violence and assault can’t be solved by policing alone.
“Systemic racism and oppression plays a huge role in the levels of violence that our communities experience,” she said.
“These kinds of problems in our communities have so many layers and dynamics underlying generational violence,” Ettawageshik said. “Only addressing the crime itself doesn’t take into account the important elements of context.”
A recent government report that recommends taking several giant steps upstream and reforming systemic racial inequities as the best means to address high rates of violence against Native people was authorized by Trump during his first administration.
“Not One More: Findings and Recommendations of the Not Invisible Act Commission,” released in 2023, was authorized as part of Savanna’s Act and the Not Invisible Act signed by Trump in 2020.
Commission members recommended that the federal government end its systemic failure to address the crisis by fixing long-standing law enforcement, judiciary and social service institutional failures and inequities. The report vanished from the Department of Justice’s website in February, however, shortly after Trump took office. Not surprisingly, the language in the report is heavy with terms the administration now dismisses as “woke,” tainted by DEI concepts.
And Trump’s proposed federal budget, which he has dubbed the “big, beautiful bill,” is currently under consideration in Congress. The bill proposes drastic reductions to funding for law enforcement as well as services to victims of sexual assault and domestic violence across many federal agencies. Most of the organizations serving Native peoples in this capacity rely on federal funding.
More than $1 billion in cuts
In response to the funding cuts and Trump’s budget proposal, the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence held a day of action on June 5, according to a posting on the organization’s Facebook page asking supporters to demand ongoing federal funding.
Organizers note that Trump’s budget would cut Violence Against Women grants by $200 million and would consolidate the Office on Violence Against Women with other Department of Justice entities despite directives by Congress that OVW must remain a separate and distinct office.
Additional budget directives would eliminate the Center for Disease Control’s DELTA program, or Domestic Violence Prevention Enhancements and Leadership Through Alliances, and its Rape Education and Prevention program. Both are currently funded respectively at $7.5 million and $61.7 million.
During the May 21 Senate Committee Appropriations hearing reviewing the president’s budget for the Department of Interior, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska and chair of the committee, expressed concern to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum that proposed cuts of around $1 billion to the Bureau of Indian Affairs would hurt the federal government’s ability to meet its trust responsibilities to Native people.
Cuts include more than $100 million from the BIA’s Public Safety and Justice budget. According to language in the budget document, the funding cuts would serve to “streamline the tribal law enforcement program to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies.”
During the Senate hearing, Murkowski told Burgum that the Interior Department has failed Indian Country in the areas of public safety, justice and missing and murdered Indigenous people.
“Tribes have been requesting more support for these programs and I worry that cuts of this magnitude can’t be made up by asking tribes, as the budget suggests, to compete for Department of Justice grants,” Murkowski said.
Indeed, in a February 2025 written statement to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, National Congress of American Indians President Mark Macarro noted that Bureau of Indian Affairs funding for public safety and justice was funded at 14 percent of need – a $2.33 billion shortfall.
“The inadequate funding for tribal criminal justice and public safety has resulted in rates of violent crime and victimization on many Indian reservations,” wrote Macarro, chairman of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians. “Congress acknowledges that a longstanding public safety crisis in America has contributed to an ever-growing drug crisis and specifically to a public safety and law enforcement emergency in Indian Country.”
As a result of inadequate BIA funding, tribes have long sought short-term competitive grants from the Department of Justice to make up for the shortfall. But according to Macarro, the grants do little to address “structural barriers in the funding and operation of criminal justice systems in Indian Country.”
Drawing attention to the problem
Trump’s various presidential executive orders eliminating MMIP-related funding and the proposed cuts to federal monies addressing the MMIP crisis are especially poignant given the significant gains in public awareness the issue has seen in the U.S. in the past decade.
“Advocates, communities and family members kept pushing and challenging the media to cover MMIP cases,” said Nicole Matthews, chief executive officer of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition. Matthews is a descendant of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe tribe and has worked with the coalition for nearly 20 years.
That work, according to Matthews, has discouraged media from focusing on what they perceive as victims’ poor lifestyle choices or from pushing narratives that Native victims somehow deserved the violence. For instance, advocates have used social media to challenge the so-called “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” a term coined by the late Public Broadcasting News anchor Gwen Ifill to describe the disparity of media coverage between missing White women versus women of color.
“Social media has played a significant role in bringing more attention to the issue,” Matthews said.
In her years of conducting presentations and training, Matthews noted that when asked, attendees can often recall several names of missing and murdered White women but fail to name even one Native woman.
“Everybody knows Gabby Petito’s name,” she said, referring to the 22-year-old White woman, a well-known social media personality who captured the nation’s attention when she went missing in 2021 and was later found murdered by her boyfriend.
But Matthews said she was encouraged during a recent presentation when attendees recognized the name of Nevaeh Kingbird, a 15-year-old citizen of the Red Lake Nation who went missing in 2021 in Bemidji, Minnesota. The attendees, according to Matthew, said they’d heard about Kingbird on a podcast.
Indeed, the growing popularity of cold cases in the media has brought the public’s attention and support for addressing the MMIP crisis. The popular podcast, “Crime Junkie,” has aired several episodes focusing on MMIP cases, including the Poupart case.
Producers of the podcast have also created a foundation, Season of Justice, that funds cold case investigations paid for in part by public donations. The Vilas County Sheriff’s department received a donation from Season of Justice that funded a round of DNA testing in the Poupart case.
Officials are now waiting for the DNA test results to come back. And when Jordan Marie Daniel ran the Boston Marathon in 2019 with a red hand print painted over her mouth symbolizing silenced voices and lack of interest in the MMIP crisis, the graphic image grew into a wildly popular internet meme for the cause. Daniel is a citizen of the Kul Wicasa Oyate or Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
The MMIP crisis even attracted the attention of Ivanka Trump, who traveled to Minnesota in 2020 during her father’s first term in office to unveil the Missing and Murdered Native American Cold Case Office, part of the Lady Liberty Task Force created by her father. Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of the White Earth Nation, however, described the opening as “political showcasing” and a “photo op.”
In 2021, under President Joe Biden, then-Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, created the Missing and Murdered Unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs, building on the cold case investigation work of the Lady Liberty Task Force. In February, Missing and Murdered Unit leaders launched Operation Spirit Return, an initiative focusing on cold case investigations in Indian Country.
The funding provisions for Operation Spirit Return are not clear in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” but policing and justice services in Indian Country under the new Trump administration appear to focus on short-term, limited solutions, such as the recently announced FBI surge over a period of six months announced in April.
BIA officials did not respond to requests for comment from ICT about whether the funding would be cut.
Without consistent resources and trained detectives investigating crimes, however, advocates say many cases go unsolved. They called the FBI surge an essential investment, saying it should be made permanent.
“This shouldn’t be just a one-time, six-month effort,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute. “We need this type of investment to continue and for Indian Country to get the resources that we so desperately need.”
‘Say her name!’
In response to demands from communities, several states – including Arizona, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Washington and Wisconsin – as well as many tribes have formed MMIP task forces, advocacy groups or investigative units of their own.
Most of the programs, however, rely on federal funding, at least in part, for their work, leaving funding uncertain in many communities.
Despite the uncertainty, communities across the country held impressive numbers of commemorations and rallies demanding attention to the issue in May, sending the message that they won’t let attention to the issue fade away. Although various federal agencies and then-President Biden recognized May 5 as National Missing or Murdered Indigenous Awareness Day, many communities, advocates, victims’ families and allies conduct events throughout the month of May.
More than 20 speakers led the MMIP “Say her Name,” rally at the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin on May 5. Speakers noted that although Wisconsin created its task force in 2020, it remains unfunded and is staffed by volunteers.
“We lack resources, including just simple databases,” said Justine Rufus, chair of the state’s task force. “Every other police officer in the state has access to an [National Crime Information Center] database … When a person goes missing, that will go throughout all the police forces. We don’t have access to that type of equipment. That’s very vital when our relatives go missing.”
Supporters and allies vowed to continue the fight to bring awareness and resources to the issue of MMIP.
“This is not an MMIP crisis,” Shannon Holsey, president of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, told the crowd. “This is a humanitarian effort.”
Erica Ayisi, a shared Indigenous affairs reporter for ICT and PBS Wisconsin, contributed to this report.