An Epidemic of Invisibility by Meghan Holloway

My recently published thriller, HUNTING GROUND, is dedicated to the women who have disappeared, to the women who have felt their vulnerability, and to the women who have been forgotten. 

I was plotting this story when Mollie Tibbetts went out for a run near her home in Brooklyn, Iowa, one evening in July of 2018 and never returned home. The case gripped me.

I checked the news obsessively every day to see if she had been found until word of her body being discovered was released on August 21st. I did not know Mollie. I cannot fathom the grief those who loved her feel. But I was still devastated to read that press release, even though I knew it was coming. 

I was devastated, because all women have the potential to be Mollie. We leave our homes and venture into a world that we know is never completely safe, not for our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, or ourselves. We women never expect to be victims. We women never go jogging or hiking or out for a drink or on vacation expecting to not come home. But regardless of how strong and smart and prepared we are, we women are acutely aware of our vulnerability, of the weight of statistics against us. We may well go out for a run one evening and, like Mollie, never return. 

Because we have all been Mollie. We have all been young and beautiful, tender-hearted and filled with hope for our futures. We have all felt safe and secure. And we have all had to learn that one day, we could potentially become a headline. 

But the stark truth is not all women who go missing make it to the headlines. And the undeniable fact is that it is missing white women who are given the spotlight in our news coverage. In a recent case study, the Urban Indian Health Institute identified 506 unique cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls across seventy-one selected cities. The number is likely much higher, but there is no comprehensive data collection system regarding the number of missing and murdered women in Indian country. 

The National Crime Information Center reported that, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the US Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database only logged 116 cases. That is a staggering, paltry number, any way you look at it. It means that in a single year, 5,596 women not only went missing, but they were also allowed to fall through the cracks, disappearing not just from life but from the data as well. If you want more gut-wrenching numbers to illustrate how unacceptable this is, it means that over the course of 365 days, fifteen women went missing every single day, and there is no record of their disappearance in our federal databases. Not only are they gone, but the country has forgotten about them. 

Native women living on tribal lands in America are murdered at an extremely high rate — in some communities, more than ten times the national average. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women.

There is an epidemic of violence and abduction against Indigenous women, a harrowing normality of mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends being gone one day, never to be seen again. There are no resources put to use to find them, no widespread media coverage, and no remembrance of those lives in our data. 

As a white woman, I do not pretend to know or to relate to the Native American experience. In my upcoming novel, HUNTING GROUND, releasing from Polis Books, a woman unravels the secrets surrounding an art collection and discovers the horror Indigenous women face on a daily basis. My book is fiction, but for the women who are living this, it is a heinous, appalling fact. These women should not be invisible. And they should not be forgotten. 

—

HUNTING GROUND releases May 5, 2020, the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls:

HUNTING GROUND

Fifteen years ago, Hector Lewis’s wife and young daughter vanished without a trace. People have long thought he was responsible, but the man he knows is behind their disappearance still walks free. As a police officer, he is sworn to uphold the law. But he has seen how little justice there is in the world. And when a newcomer’s arrival sparks a harrowing series of crimes, Hector finds himself in a race to catch a man he is convinced is a killer. 

Evelyn Hutto knows what it is to be prey. She moved west to start over. But the remote town of Raven’s Gap, Montana, is not as quiet and picturesque as it appears. The wild borderlands of Yellowstone National Park are home to more than one kind of predator. Women are going missing, and Evelyn’s position at the local museum unearths a collection of Native American art steeped in secrets. As she traces the threads of the past and the present, she finds them tied to one man. 

Hector is a man obsessed with finding answers. Evelyn is a woman with secrets of her own. As winter whittles the land to bone and ice, the body count rises, and both become locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a dangerous man. A man who is as cunning as he is charismatic. A man whose new hunting season is only just beginning.

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips