Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Montana: A Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight

The Numbers Nobody Wanted to Count

For years, nobody was keeping track.

Native American women were going missing and turning up dead across Montana — on reservations, in cities, along rural highways — and the cases were being logged in different systems, by different agencies, without anyone looking at the full picture.

When researchers and advocates finally began compiling the data, what they found was stark: Native women in Montana were going missing at a rate that dwarfed any other demographic group. And a disproportionate number of those cases were going unsolved.

This is the story of a crisis that took decades to name.

The Scale of the Problem

Montana is home to twelve federally recognized Native American tribes and seven reservations. Native people make up roughly 6.7% of Montana's population — but they account for a dramatically higher percentage of the state's missing persons cases.

A 2019 study by the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Montana had the fourth-highest number of MMIW cases of any state in the country. Many of those cases had received little to no media coverage.

The reasons are complex and interrelated: jurisdictional confusion between tribal, state, and federal law enforcement; chronic underfunding of tribal police; historical distrust between Native communities and law enforcement; and what advocates describe as an entrenched pattern of media outlets deprioritizing cases involving Indigenous victims.

Jermain Charlo: A Name and a Face on the Crisis

When Jermain Charlo disappeared from Missoula in June 2018, her case became one of the most visible illustrations of the MMIW problem in Montana.

Charlo was 25 years old, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. She attended a party near downtown Missoula on June 15, 2018, and was last seen in the early morning hours of June 16. She left alone. She never arrived home.

The Missoula Police Department investigated. The case was classified as a suspected homicide. No arrests were made.

Jermain's family — led by her cousin Kelli Tanner — refused to let the case go quietly. They organized marches. They spoke to reporters. They pushed tribal, state, and federal officials to dedicate more resources to MMIW cases.

"She's not a statistic," Tanner told media outlets. "She's my family."

The Institutional Response

Montana has taken some steps to address the crisis. In 2019, Governor Steve Bullock established the Montana Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force to coordinate between agencies and improve data collection.

The following year, the task force released a report documenting the scope of the problem and making recommendations: better data systems, dedicated investigators, improved family notification protocols, and more resources for tribal law enforcement.

Progress has been slow.

The federal government passed Savanna's Act in 2020, requiring the Department of Justice to develop better protocols for responding to cases involving missing and murdered Native people. Implementation has been uneven.

The Cold Cases That Preceded the Headlines

Long before MMIW became a national conversation, individual cases were piling up in Montana's cold case files.

Women found alongside highways. Women who walked away from parties and were never seen again. Women whose cases were assigned to overworked investigators and then quietly shelved when leads dried up.

Some of their names are known. Many are not. Dozens of cases involving Native women in Montana remain open.

What Families Want

Advocates are consistent in what they say families want: not just awareness, but accountability. Not marches alone, but arrests. Not task forces alone, but convictions.

They want to know what happened to their daughters and sisters and mothers. They want law enforcement to treat those women's lives as worthy of the same resources devoted to other victims.

"We just want answers," said one family member whose relative has been missing for more than a decade. "That's all. Just answers."

Montana Blotter is committed to covering public safety records across all 56 Montana counties. If you have information about a missing or murdered Indigenous person in Montana, contact the Montana Department of Justice's Missing Persons Clearinghouse at 406-444-3874 or the FBI's Salt Lake City field office, which handles Montana cases, at 801-579-1400.