‘I gotta stay strong’: the Native American families with a legacy of violent deaths

When Pauline HighWolf’s son came to her home in Montana three months ago to tell her that her sister was dead, she was overwhelmed by a painful jolt of deja vu.

HighWolf, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, had been helping her 64-year-old sister Laverna Wallowing to transition out of homelessness in California to a senior living apartment in southern Montana. Wallowing had died of a head injury, but HighWolf still doesn’t know how or why.

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Almost five years earlier, HighWolf had received similar news at her home. Her youngest daughter Allison, or “Babez” as her family liked to call her, was found dead in a Rodeway Inn in Hardin, Montana.

Officials reported there was a fire in the 25-year-old’s motel room and she died of smoke inhalation. But in a coroner’s report from Montana’s forensics department that was shared with the Guardian, the manner of death was listed as “undetermined”.

When HighWolf saw her daughter’s body, she said there was a dent on her forehead, bruising on her nose and hands, scraped knees and red around her neck.

“What’s going on with my family?” HighWolf, 60, asked. “There’s times when I just want to cry and scream, but I gotta stay strong.”

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Wallowing and HighWolf may be two of the thousands of Native American women and girls who have been killed in the US. But the fact that they are relatives means that they are also part of a distinct, yet lesser known group of Indigenous families who have been hit hardest by this crisis.

It’s very difficult to say exactly how common it is for a Native American family to have more than one immediate relative be found dead in unexplained circumstances, have been murdered or gone missing, as there is no single federal database specifically tracking these crimes.

Though HighWolf does not know for certain what happened to her loved ones, her suspicions of foul play are not unfounded. Native Americans disappear at twice the per capita rate of white Americans, despite comprising a far smaller population, according to FBI figures. In 2008, research funded by the Department of Justice found Indigenous women who are living on tribal lands are murdered at more than 10 times the national average in some places.

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There have also long been complaints over gaps in law enforcement’s response and prosecution when it comes to cases involving Indigenous women and girls.

The Imperial county sheriff’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Wallowing’s case. The Big Horn county sheriff’s office did not return calls for comment on Allison HighWolf’s case.

The Sovereign Bodies Institute recently released a report with Brave Heart Society in which they documented more than 50 instances in the US and Canada in which a missing or murdered Indigenous woman or girl (MMIWG) had a similar case in their immediate family. Many of these cases included daughters and granddaughters of a MMIWG, according to the report.

Annita Lucchesi, a Southern Cheyenne descendant and the executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, said the number is surely much higher.

“It’s hard enough for a family to talk about one case but to have to talk about two, it takes such a huge, deep toll, that a lot of families don’t have the capacity for that,” she said.

The report gave the example of Harriet Wilson, 42, who was found in the Yellowstone River in Billings, Montana, in April 2018, after some type of blunt force to her body and being strangled, according to her mother, Mary Wilson. She said Harriet Wilson had been with friends Sunday morning at a park when she walked across the street to a convenience store. By 2pm, she was found dead. The case has never been solved.

“It’s really hard because she was, like, my strongest kid,” said Mary Wilson, a member of the Crow Tribe. “She’s a very humble person. It will never be the same.”

At the same time, Wilson, 64, is still trying to get justice for her aunt (also named Harriet Wilson), who Mary Wilson said she found raped and shot inside her trailer near Hardin, Montana, 45 years ago. The year before Mary Wilson was born, her grandmother, Rose Old Bear, was also found dead, likely due to strangulation, inside her car. Both cases have never been solved.

Mary Wilson said unsolved murders across three generations of her family have made her very protective of her children and grandchildren. But after her daughter’s death, she said, “I don’t go out unless I have to, because when I go out, it’s like I see her everywhere.”

“I try to move on, continue with my daily activities and daily things, but it’s just – I can’t,” she said.

Sarah Deer, a tribal member and professor at the University of Kansas, who has written extensively about violence against Native Americans, said it’s difficult to say exactly why multiple people in the same Indigenous family are murdered or go missing, as it tends to be case specific.

But these crimes can also be linked to earlier traumas, which tend to compound over time and across generations, explained Lucchesi. She referenced a study done in Alberta in which local tribal community elders met with Indigenous homeless people. They noticed that most of the people living on the streets were direct descendants of those who had been most severely physically and sexually abused at residential schools.

“The people who are on the streets now, that generation, they were never in those schools to begin with, but that legacy of that violence and all of the trauma trickled down and left for them to struggle in all sorts of ways and be targeted for all sorts of violence,” she said.

But these types of crimes happening in the same immediate family also illustrate the fact that Indigenous women are being targeted, said Lucchesi. It doesn’t matter what type of home you grew up in or what kind of loss your family has experienced or even the choices you make on a day to day basis, she said, referencing the fact that she was trafficked while a college student.

In a report released by the Canadian government last summer, its authors estimated as many as 4,000 instances of Indigenous women and girls being killed or going missing in the past 30 years, calling this crisis a “Canadian genocide”. But it also admitted that the exact number will never be known.

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Pauline HighWolf experienced the effects of this crisis long before her sister or daughter died. When she was 12 years old, her older sister was killed by her boyfriend. She said she remembers being told that the couple were arguing in an alley, when he hit her on the head.

The difference with that case was that her sister’s boyfriend went to jail. Now HighWolf wants justice for her other sister and daughter.

She said the most difficult part about losing her loved ones is not knowing what happened to them. She spent the first month after her sister died calling police in El Centro, California, almost every day, in an effort to get an update on the investigation.

“Nobody would return our phone calls,” said HighWolf. “We called the jail and asked for the detectives and they just kind of bounced us around.”

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She said she doesn’t know whether her nephew (Wallowing’s son), who she doesn’t have a good relationship with, may have told law enforcement not to release information to her, or whether the police are just not being very forthcoming.

After her daughter died, HighWolf said she pushed for law enforcement in Hardin, Montana, to further investigate the case, even hiring two pro bono lawyers to help. But she is still searching for answers.

The postmortem report by Montana’s Department of Justice, which was shared with the Guardian, states that Allison Highwolf had “prior history of suicide attempts”, and “that this death may represent a suicide”.

Pauline HighWolf said this is not true. Allison HighWolf would call just about every day to let her four young children, who all lived with Pauline HighWolf, know she loved them. And, just like her aunt, she had been looking to make big changes in her life – trying to go back to school and get treatment for her alcohol addiction.

“I need answers,” said HighWolf.

On Sunday, the Sovereign Bodies Institute held a vigil at the Rodeway Inn where Allison HighWolf was found dead in 2015. They have called for justice for her case, which they say was not “adequately or thoroughly investigated”.