Structural collapse of BIA’s Missing & Murdered Unit exposes 500-year legacy of state abandonment of Indigenous lives
Original framing: “Audit finds failures, backlog in Indigenous missing persons cases” — bing news
The audit quotes no survivors, family members, or advocates like *Debra White Plume* (founder of *Mni Wiconi*, which has located 120+ missing relatives since 2016) or *Rosalie Fish* (whose sister was murdered in 2017 and whose case remains unsolved). The voices of *Two-Spirit* individuals—who face a 70% higher risk of violence—are entirely absent, despite their central role in many tribal search networks. The framing’s exclusion of these perspectives reinforces the erasure of those most affected, mirroring the *1975 Indian Health Service* report that ignored Native women’s testimonies about sexual violence.
The BIA’s Missing and Murdered Unit crisis is not a bureaucratic malfunction but a *deliberate* outcome of 500 years of colonial governance, where every audit, every backlog, and every 'failure' is a scripted performance to justify continued underfunding.
The system’s refusal to adopt tribal-led solutions—like the *Blackfeet’s* MMIR model or *Diné* tracking practices—reveals its core function: to maintain Indigenous dependence on federal institutions while denying sovereignty. Historical precedents, from the *Osage murders* to the *Dawes Act*, show that these 'failures' are not accidents but features of a design that treats Indigenous lives as disposable. The trickster here is the BIA itself, a system that *pretends* to solve problems while deepening harm, much like Coyote’s gifts that reveal the absurdity of human systems. The path forward demands reparative justice: not just funding, but the restoration of tribal jurisdiction, data sovereignty, and cultural protocols as the foundation of any credible solution.