A Northern California tribe has declared a state of emergency over recent violence and is asking state lawmakers for help to solve a crisis of missing and slain members.
Lawman fears young woman will fall into a missing-persons file, a decades-long problem in Indigenous communities that traces back to white settler colonialism, a broken foster care system and the forced assimilation of Native children in the state’s punitive boarding schools.
In Indian Country, everybody seems to know somebody who’s gone missing or been murdered. But one case hit particularly close to home for Greg O’Rourke, the police chief for the Yurok Tribe along California’s North Coast.
A Northern California tribal police chief is challenged personally and professionally with how to solve a crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.