Woman singing in Crow
ominous music
When I was growing up
on the Crow Reservation,
we never locked the doors.
Nobody locked their doors.
But the darkness that has
happened in the last decade...
is this...
energy that's...
like a black cloud, a vapor.
That energy just consumes
you as an individual.
Then, it consumes your family...
until it consumes
your whole tribe.
The last time I saw
her was two days before she went
missing.
She
never made it home.
Not knowing
where she's at,
if she's alive, if she's gone.
Buried,
not found, lost,
m*rder*d, still missing.
We're the silent
population that disappears.
Tense music
We were
supposed to be eliminated.
We weren't supposed to be a
problem to the American life.
We're just supposed to stay in
the back and be a good Indian.
That's what you do
here in Montana.
Multiple families
are grieving over teenage girls.
What the hell is going
on in this community?
Someone
knows what happened.
That someone is still
walking around here.
Dramatic music
sparse tense music
tense ambient music
When I started
walking, I smelled...
like the smell of death.
I know the smell
of death and it...
it's not a good smell.
I hear this little,
small voice say,
"Dad.
Come find me, Dad."
A devastating
ending to the search
for a 14-year-old Montana girl.
Her body was found Friday on the
Northern Cheyenne Reservation
near Lame Deer.
Today, we confirmed that
the body was Henny Scott.
Tender music
Henny was
the middle child.
She really adored
her younger siblings.
And she had all
kinds of friends.
Henny was tomboyish.
She liked to play football, and
she played a lot of basketball.
She was pretty
good in basketball.
The day Henny went missing, she
asked if she could go to open
gym down here at the school.
She was a freshman at the time.
Later on that afternoon,
she called from a residence.
The name had come up on the
caller ID so I knew where she
was calling from.
It's kind of like a party place
where all the teenagers go to
party and hang out.
There's no adult supervision.
So I told her, "You
need to come back home."
And that's the last
time I heard from Henny.
Say hi, Snapchat.
Tense ambient music
The night Henny went missing, I
heard there was a party going on
there.
I know who she was with.
They were known to mess
around with younger girls.
And, of course, she was
the youngest one there.
Nathan had gone
up to the house where she had
called from and asked
them if they had seen her.
One of the kids comes
out, and I said,
"Theo, I wanna know
if you've seen Henny."
And he said,
"No."
He said that she walked
off, and I was like,
"Walked off?
Where did she go?"
He said, "She just walked
down the road and took off."
I was told that
she took off by herself and...
she just left on her own.
Henny wasn't the type of
person just to up and leave.
She would have a good reason to.
When I went and filled out
the missing person's report,
they weren't taking
me seriously.
And when I would see the
cops out in the community,
I asked them, you know,
"Have you seen Henny?"
And it was all the
time the same thing:
"Maybe she found a
new boyfriend" or...
"She's still out partying" or...
"She don't wanna come
home 'cause she's scared."
After the
missing persons report,
we thought that law enforcement
would look for her but,
in actuality, they didn't.
There was no search.
No AMBER Alert.
No nothing.
At school, people were saying
that she was asking for it or
it was her fault.
If you're drunk
and you're outside,
of course something's
gonna happen.
They had put
up missing person flyers up
everywhere.
And still nothing.
We had to do our
own investigation.
And form our own search group.
So we met up.
Ominous music
You could look across.
You could see the house
where Henny had called from.
I was on the bottom
of the ravine,
looking all over,
looking through thickets,
looking through everything,
little sage brushes and...
we didn't find nothing at all.
The FBI
showed up that morning.
I don't know how they found
out about the search because I
didn't contact them,
they didn't contact me.
I'm walking and
I look like this,
and there's people
behind the house.
They told us, "Don't
go back there."
And I'm wondering why.
And then that's when
they had told us that they'd
found Henny.
And I... I asked them,
"Are you sure it's her?"
And they
said, "Yeah, it's her."
eerie ambient music
They found Henny...
about 100, 150 yards
away from that house.
You could see...
the door, that f*cking door
from where she was laid at.
Just a straight shot,
you could see the door.
Henny Scott's remains were
discovered about 200 yards from
the residence where she
was last known alive.
It is reasonable to assume that
Henny died at the location where
she was discovered, and that the
cause of death was hypothermia.
There was nothing to explain
Henny's death either due to
traumatic cause or
preexisting disease.
They determined
Henny died from hypothermia,
from exposure.
But being a hunter, how
come no animals got to her?
No mountain lions.
No coyotes.
No foxes.
They even have dogs here; how
come they didn't get to her?
When Henny was found,
it wasn't her clothes
that she was found in.
She was wearing
somebody else's clothes;
she was wearing sweatpants, and
a t-shirt was found beside her.
Maybe the shirt came off and
they just threw it beside her.
And to me, it made me think
that she was drugged out there.
We finally got to
bring her home,
and we noticed that
her nose was...
a weird shape.
It looked broken.
She had bruises,
she had scratches,
and it looked like she had
a burn on her shin, also.
What happened?
There's something behind the
back of her neck right here.
They still don't
tell us what that is.
Why?
I think that
she did get assaulted.
I don't
know where to turn,
I don't know who to ask.
I know something happened
to her out there.
Sparse ambient music
So this is the
street I grew up on.
My cousins still
live in this area.
All the same people
live here.
Um...
David, Sarah...
My uncle Ben lives down in
that trailer where we lived.
When I was a kid, Ben lived in
this front trailer and we lived
in the back trailer.
And my friend Tasha
lived in this house.
Tasha's mom went
missing when we were...
babies.
This is the most dangerous place
for Native women in the country.
When it comes to the m*rder*d
and missing women epidemic,
this is the hottest zone.
Big Horn County...
Crow Reservation...
the Billings area...
the Northern
Cheyenne Reservation.
There have been stories that go
back generations of women going
missing and then found dead
with little to no explanation.
There are so many different
possibilities for what happened
to these m*rder*d and missing
indigenous women in Big Horn
County.
Is it a hypothermia death?
Is it a beating?
Drug-related?
Trafficking?
We have all the
questions in the world...
and we don't have the answers.
When I graduated
from high school,
the thing that I
wanted to do was leave.
But then, when I
went off to college,
the only thing I wanted
to do was come back.
I decided that this is
definitely where I wanted to be.
Sparse tense music
I wanted my kids to be
connected to the family,
to the community, because
despite all of the bad things
that happen here,
despite missing people,
despite high crime rates,
despite domestic violence,
despite everything...
this is our home.
We want to have the
experience of being Crow...
in Crow country.
But I know how dangerous this
place can be for my daughter.
Just being a female
makes her a target,
just being a female
makes me a target,
makes my mother a target,
makes my grandmother a target.
This crisis that
we're living in,
it affects every woman
on the reservation,
and I don't know how to help
other than the work that I do as
a journalist.
I always knew I was gonna cover
stories about missing people.
And I knew that the majority of
missing person cases in Montana
were gonna be Native people.
As soon as I got this job, one
of the first things that I did
was look up my aunt's case.
In 1977, my dad's
sister went missing,
and was found four days later in
the Big Horn County fairgrounds,
frozen in the snow.
The coverage of that case was...
heartbreaking.
She was...
another dead Indian.
And they didn't offer any
kind of common decency
in writing about her
as a missing person
and in her as a human.
Ominous ambient music
There are cases stretching
back so far that...
it feels like
we're born into it.
It feels like, as Native women,
this is something that's in our
DNA, this is something
that's in our blood.
But that has to change.
And so, one of the reasons
that I do what I do
is because I feel
like, as a journalist,
keeping the community
informed is important,
telling the community's
stories is important.
These cases are not true
crime stories to us.
These cases are our relatives.
And tonight,
we continue our coverage of the
death of Henny Scott.
Northern Cheyenne tribal members
mourn the 14-year-old girl whose
body was found a few weeks after
she was reported missing near
Busby.
Amazing grace...
The Henny Scott
case did mark a turn in how our
local media paid attention to
m*rder*d and missing indigenous
cases.
She had her name in the
headlines in a way that cases
like this don't get.
They were hitting the heart
really because Henny was 14.
She was...
so damn young.
And that made
people feel like...
"That could've been my kid."
Family and
friends of Henny's went to the
believed site where
her body was found.
They mourn and remember the
bright young girl they love.
And it was a
victory and, at the same time,
a huge tragedy, because it took
a 14-year-old girl dying...
A child.
And people had to see
that to pay attention,
to think, "Oh my God,
what's going on over there?"
The family is
praying for justice for Henny
and other missing indigenous
women from the reservation.
We're dealing with these
at an alarming rate that...
there's gotta be
something done...
Justice, you know?
Tender ambient music
A lot of these m*rder*d and
missing persons cases shows the
lack of response
from law enforcement.
There's a lack of a sense of
even responsibility to the
Natives in this community.
Sparse tense music
In the case of Henny Scott,
because her body was found
within the exterior
boundaries of the reservation,
the BIA... Bureau of Indian
Affairs... law enforcement
office is in charge
of investigating.
They have authority
on reservation land.
They dropped the
ball in so many ways.
We found out that when we filed
the missing persons report in
Crow, her report just sat on a
desk because the individual was
out on vacation, and so nobody
had been looking for her.
And then, we filled out another
missing persons report with the
Lame Deer BIA, but it was
like hitting a brick wall.
By the time the BIA police in
Lame Deer actually got the alert
out that this girl was missing,
this 14-year-old girl was
missing, it was two full weeks.
And then, the FBI got involved.
I don't know
if the FBI investigated it.
They said they did.
To this day, I've
never seen nothing.
We got no communication
from them... at all.
From the beginning of the
investigation to the end.
Why didn't the
BIA investigate it properly?
Why didn't the FBI
investigate it properly?
You know, what really
happened that night?
And why did it happen?
We tried to let the
justice system work for us.
But I honestly believe
that, being Native,
that the system failed us.
Not only us, but a lot
of families around here.
Well, there's a concern and
call for action following the
death of a 14-year-old
Lame Deer girl.
On Tuesday, US Senator Jon
Tester released a letter to FBI
Director Christopher Wray and
Acting BIA Director Darryl
LaCounte.
In it, Tester says the response
to Henny Scott's disappearance
was inadequate, and
she isn't the first.
Tester says these delayed,
ineffective responses on Indian
reservations are a trend, and
there needs to be a much higher
standard to protect
citizens in Indian country.
uplifting tender music
Big Horn County sits right
on the south end of the
Montana/Wyoming border, and it
goes all the way to just outside
of Billings.
It encompasses part of the
Northern Cheyenne Reservation
and most of the
Crow Reservation.
There's a difference between
saying "Crow country" and
"the Crow Reservation."
The Crow Reservation
has 2.2 million acres
that's all within Montana.
But "Crow country" is from the
three forks of the Missouri,
to the Milk River,
to the Black Hills,
to the Horse Creek in Wyoming.
That's the way Crow
people will see it.
In the late 1860s, Crows
became reservation people.
It changed our identity and
the way we view the world.
Ominous ambient music
They call it "living within the
lines"... these arbitrary lines
that are placed on the
boundaries of the reservation by
the US government.
Annuities were passed out to
tribal people as part of an
agreement for moving
to the reservation.
Army bases were
built outside of Indian
reservations.
Those army bases weren't put
there to keep tribal people
safe.
Because of colonization
and the Western land grab,
tribal people were essentially
prisoners on those reservations.
So now, you get a
group of people who were free...
Hunt where they wanna hunt,
go where they wanna go...
And now are stuck and
confined to the reservation.
It's an ugly period of high
levels of dysfunction...
the mistreatment of each other.
And the Federal government is a
lot of the reason why we are the
way we are...
It's the conflict
between our belief system
and their belief system.
When the Federal
government implemented the
reservation system, it was
designed for us to fail
and not thrive, so that
we would move away,
forget who we are,
and assimilate.
Then, you throw alcohol into it.
So you have this whole time from
the early 1900s where alcohol's
placed into this... an
already-stripped people.
These warriors are
now emasculated.
For one, they hold
no position anymore;
the government does.
So the government now appoints
who's gonna be the headmen of
the tribe.
So you have a defeated people
that now are having kids,
and those kids are raised
by defeated people.
When you take an entire society
and you strip them of any
self-worth and
confidence they have...
it becomes very fragile.
That early reservation
period is...
it's a dangerous time, 'cause
it laid the blueprint for
everything that puts
us where we are today.
Ethereal ambient music
On May the 5th,
2022, in Hardin, Montana,
at the courthouse, there's
a gathering for MMIW,
missing/m*rder*d
indigenous women,
and they're not being
investigated and there's still a
lot of missing indigenous
women on our reservations.
A lot of perpetrators do come
to our Native communities
because they do know that there
are these gaps in jurisdiction
and the likelihood of being
held accountable is minimal.
When you throw a
crime into this area,
it's a nightmare because Big
Horn County has all of these
jurisdictions.
The Big Horn County Sheriff's
Office has authority
on county land off
the reservation.
For a crime that's
committed on tribal lands,
Federal law
enforcement, the FBI,
and the Bureau of Indian
Affairs have jurisdiction.
BIA law officers would be
the ones who would show up
immediately at a crime scene,
and then FBI would be called in
to do the investigation.
But the BIA cannot exercise
criminal jurisdiction over
non-Indians when they commit
crimes on tribal lands.
And so, when we live on our
tribal lands in our homes,
our own government can't protect
us from basically any crime
committed by a non-Indian.
Ominous music
And so, to figure
out who has jurisdiction at any
given time, you have to know who
is the victim... are they Indian
or not? who is the
perpetrator... are they Indian
or not? where did the crime
occur... on Indian land or not?
When it comes to violence
against Native women,
when it comes to missing
and m*rder*d situations,
often times, we don't know
where she went missing,
we don't know who
the perpetrator is.
And so, I think often times,
law enforcement are gonna say,
"Well, we don't
have jurisdiction,"
or "We don't know if
we have jurisdiction,
so take it over there."
So it just falls
through the cracks,
and we end up really being
almost a lawless community.
The FBI has clear
jurisdiction on tribal lands,
but the FBI gets involved in
cases of national importance.
They get involved
when they're told to.
Often times, what they will
say is that they want the local
jurisdiction to invite them in,
and they're waiting for that to
happen.
The jurisdictional
issues, I think,
are one of the main reasons why
Big Horn County has one of the
highest rates of m*rder*d and
missing indigenous women and
girls in the United
States today.
Sparse ominous music
In late
August of 2019,
a body was found off the
reservation in the city limits
of Hardin, which is under the
jurisdiction of the Big Horn
County Sheriff's Office.
The body was in a backyard
along Mitchell Avenue.
Mitchell Avenue is
a very busy street.
It is one of the main
thoroughfares in town.
As a man was jogging
down the road,
he passes a pile of
debris in someone's yard.
He said he had seen crows.
He did a double-take and
went back and realized...
there was a body.
It was 18-year-old Kaysera
Stops Pretty Places.
Tender music
Kaysera was
a fun-spirited young lady.
She was a loving person.
I mean, she was...
her siblings' protectors.
She was also that little mama.
And she was the
one they looked up to to be
their stability.
The situation that they
were being raised in was...
not a healthy, you
know, stable life.
Her parents drank a lot.
At times, they did meth.
But their substance
of choice is alcohol.
She really hated that,
and so she was...
getting really angry about
it and upset when she started
maturing.
And then she became
more forceful.
She was the
sister you didn't wanna piss off
either.
She was like
Kaysera; she would...
just fight you and get
it done and over with.
But she was always
there for her friends.
The Crow tribe has
their annual Crow Fair.
It's always that
third week of August,
and Kaysera's birthday
is always right in there.
Crow Fair is a pow wow, and
it's on the Crow Reservation.
There's parades, there's rodeo.
We camp for those few days.
A lot of my family
come to visit,
and so it's time
for us to, like,
catch up, dance at the pow wow.
And so Kaysera
asked permission to stay a few
more days with her aunt
Percelia in Hardin.
Happy birthday,
dear Kaysera...
The night that
Kaysera disappeared was August
24th.
She'd just turned 18,
and she went out to
celebrate her birthday.
Kaysera had her friends
Isabella and Nakia with her.
And they all got all
dressed up and...
I think Kaysera changed
like three times that night,
so she was really
excited for that.
Tense ambient music
Kaysera never made it home.
When the girls woke up, I
asked where Kaysera was.
And they both looked
at each other like,
"We thought she already...
came home."
And I was like, "Well,
she's not home."
I started reaching out,
sending Kaysera messages,
trying to call her and
some of her friends and her
sister-cousins,
asking them to look.
Everyone started getting
more alarmed by Tuesday.
When a young Native
woman goes missing in Big Horn
County, your mind
immediately starts racing.
They might be trafficked, they
might be getting beaten to
death, they might be
being used as a drug mule.
And the scariest part is the
not knowing what's happening.
I was just like,
"We need to go to
the police station."
So we went.
And I felt like the officer,
Jeramie Middlestead,
didn't really take
take me as serious.
Like, I wasn't given
a form to fill out,
he just jotted down the
information on his little tablet
that he carries in his pocket.
There was no posters up, there
was nothing put out there that
she was missing.
They weren't professional
about the whole situation.
And then, five days after
Kaysera went missing,
I got a message through one of
my co-workers who lived on Range
View that they found
a young female...
behind the house on
Mitchell and Range View.
But if it wasn't for my
co-worker messaging me,
I don't think any of
us would have known.
The Sheriff's Office
didn't notify us to say,
"Hey, we did find a body.
It may be her, it
may not be her;
we don't know."
They didn't say anything.
She was taken to
the State Crime Lab in Billings,
Montana.
And she was not identified
until September 11th.
They had to go into dental
records to identify her
officially.
Then, after that was when she
was finally returned to Hardin.
From August 29th all the
way to September 11th?
That is a long time.
We waited and waited for the Big
Horn County Sheriff's Office to
really even announce
that a case was opened,
that it was pending, that...
new details are emerging,
that anything was happening.
As far as we knew, after
Kaysera's body was identified...
nothing else happened
with her case.
We were going
every day to try to meet with
the Sheriff's Department.
We made every effort.
Every day, we
travelled 110 miles
back and forth trying to meet
with any official we could.
And all the doors
were closed to us.
I got involved with Kaysera's
case a couple weeks after she
was m*rder*d, and
I just got a call,
and it was from one of Kaysera's
family members and they just
said, "Can you help us?"
Speaking as a lawyer and
looking at the legal framework,
it's very clear that what
happened in August was a
complete disregard for not only
the rights of Kaysera but the
rights of all Native women when
local law enforcement failed to
investigate her death and to
take all steps necessary to look
for her before finding
her on August 29th.
The family needed help with a
Sheriff's Office that wouldn't
even meet with them
or talk to them,
and an FBI agency who
would not talk to them.
They just needed help getting
someone to talk to them.
Where she was found was
within State jurisdiction,
but the local law
enforcement, Big Horn County,
for a long time... ever since
this was first reported to them
at the end of August... has
failed to just take very basic
steps to conduct an
investigation looking into the
causes surrounding her death.
There are so many things about
her case that are inexplicable.
They also had her cell phone.
It is very easy, as an
investigative agency,
to figure out who someone is
based on the phone on the dead
body when you find them.
For two weeks, the
family sat there and waited for
results to see if it
was her body or not.
Why didn't they let
the family know?
Are they trying to
cover something up?
Did they just have a complete
disregard for the family?
What's the reason for the
lack of transparency there?
The family has several different
theories about what happened.
One of their theories
is that weeks before,
during the annual Crow
Fair pow wow celebration,
Kaysera posted on her social
media pages a fight that
happened where police were
called in and they started
beating on one of the young
boys who instigated the fight.
The reason Kaysera did that was
the boy that was beaten by the
police was her brother.
According to the police report,
Kaysera's brother Esaias was
acting aggressively and
was resisting arrest.
One of the officers that was
accused of beating him was a
deputy with the Big Horn
County Sheriff's Office.
The family alleges that one of
the reasons that the Big Horn
County Sheriff's Office treated
Kaysera's case the way that they
did was because they were
embroiled in that altercation
with her brother.
There is a lot of very
suspicious things about
Kaysera's case and the
way it was handled.
The thing to know about Hardin
is that it is a border town.
The reservation arcs around
a little bit and envelops the
town.
In fact, where Kaysera's body
was found is right next to the
border of the Crow Reservation.
Hardin has a high population of
Native people from the Crow and
Northern Cheyenne Reservations.
Also, a majority
white population,
so it makes for some
difficult dynamics.
There's a lot of
non-Natives who have a lot of
prejudice against Native people.
And there's a significant
devaluation of Native lives in
these communities.
And so, what ends
up happening is
you have a border town where
violence against Native people
is just an accepted incorporated
part of the culture,
and no one in law enforcement
bats an eye at it.
The relationship
between law enforcement and the
Native community in Big
Horn County is pretty tense.
There's been complaints about
our Sheriff's Office for years.
There's an attitude.
It's evident, it's... it's...
tangible.
When a tribal member goes
missing off the reservation,
County has to use their
resources to either solve cases
or fight crime...
for "non-residents."
And it really comes into play
when we start looking at cases
here in town.
The Sheriff's Office refused to
meet with Kaysera's family for
several weeks, and
finally met and said,
"Well, we just think she walked
over to this suburban yard and
just died and laid there for
five days until we found her
body on August 29th,"
which is crazy.
If you go to that intersection,
there's a car driving by every
30 seconds.
The odds of her body laying
there for five days is pretty
much zero.
There's no way that...
no one would have seen her body.
It's very clear that this is a
homicide and there's foul play
involved.
When the body of Kaysera
Stops Pretty Places was first
discovered, the remains
were decomposed,
meaning that there
was significant...
change after death.
We looked at everything
pretty exhaustively.
We don't have a cause of death
that we can state confidently,
and that's because of
the decomposition change.
So there are certainly
possibilities that exist as a
cause that I'm not at
liberty to discuss,
however some of those...
would fall under the realm,
in terms of the manner,
as being classified as homicide.
After her
body was identified,
they brought the remains back to
Big Horn County to the coroner,
Terry Bullis, who happens to
be the only mortician in town.
Terry Bullis is a non-Native
white man business owner who
owns a funeral home
in Big Horn County,
and he also, for a
significant period of time,
was the county coroner
for Big Horn County.
He cremated Kaysera's body.
The family claims that he
cremated her body against the
family's wishes.
And as their attorney, I filed
a complaint against him to have
his mortuary license removed.
And the Montana commissioner
decided not to do it.
The Montana Funeral
Service Board found that in the
Kaysera case, Terry Bullis
didn't do anything unlawful,
but he didn't ask for
authorization in the best way
possible.
Tense music
But if Terry Bullis
cremates your loved one,
that's a pretty big
slap in the face,
because Crow people don't
believe in cremating the body.
If you're cremated, you're not
gonna move into the next life.
I mean, imagine if you don't
believe in cremation as a form
of burial and you're forced
to do that for your loved one.
That is horrifically traumatic.
I think the reason there has
not been justice in this case is
that Kaysera is a Native girl.
Little
information surrounds the
passing of Kaysera
Stops Pretty Places.
She was reported missing by her
family August 27th and her body
was found two days
later, August 29th.
According to coordinators
of the march,
she is the 27th missing or
m*rder*d indigenous woman or
girl in Big Horn County.
Say her name!
Kaysera!
Say her name!
Kaysera!
I went
to the justice march.
Everyone dressed in red.
They marched from the site
where her body was found,
down Mitchell Avenue, and they
stopped in front of the Big Horn
County courthouse.
They were rallying
people, they were...
crying out for this justice.
I still can't
believe that this happened.
We love our daughter so much.
They're our family members...
and we need to find out
what happened to them.
We all still had
Henny Scott in the back of our
minds.
We all still had our
sisters, our mothers,
our aunts, our grandmothers
in the back of our minds.
Somebody knows something!
People wanted to
know what happened to this girl.
What is the County gonna
do to protect young women?
tense ambient music
With regard to the death of
Kaysera Stops Pretty Places...
this one is one of those cases
where it deserves a complete,
thorough investigation,
because the findings in this
case don't exclude homicide.
I don't have a cause
of death for Kaysera.
What the hell is
going on in this community that
allows it to be so
easy to disappear...
over and over and over?
Girls missing for two weeks,
girls missing for five days,
girls missing for seven days.
Girl gets found.
Unexplained injuries,
unexplained disappearance.
No questions are answered.
"Hypothermia."
"Undetermined."
Every single time.
Really, what the f*ck?
What the f*ck is going on?
Sparse tense music
Living on the reservation is
like a perfect storm, right?
That state that
Natives were put in
when they were put
on reservations,
that emotional state...
it is alive and well
on reservations today,
because of the poverty,
because of the joblessness,
because of the drug
addictions, the alcohol abuse.
And on top of all
of that dysfunction,
put in a major highway
with truckers going
God-knows-where,
with traffic from across this
country going God-knows-where,
put in close
proximity to Canada,
where we have opioids
and meth coming in...
Washington and Oregon, where
we have drug cartels coming in.
And drug cartels, they're
not just trafficking drugs,
they're trafficking people.
All of that is
concentrated in this area.
Sex trafficking is, um,
something that we have to look
at with regard to missing
and m*rder*d Indian women.
Native
American woman and girls are
just over three percent of the
population here in Montana.
They make up 30 to 40 percent
of trafficking victims.
And that's where we
come into non-Native people
coming in and seeing an
opportunity to be predatory.
The idea that white men in
particular are the villain,
I think, is... is pretty
pervasive in our community.
Pioneers or people moving
westward were not the most moral
or ethical people, and Native
people were the target of a lot
of that.
There is this idea that
there's this white boogeyman,
that there's someone from the
outside that's coming in to harm
us, that people from outside our
community can come in and take
what they want; they
can take the resources,
they can take our women,
and nothing will happen.
And it's this feeling of Native
women's lives are disposable.
As a Crow woman, that nurturing
and protecting is engrained in
who I am, and it's exacerbated
when we add in a m*rder*d and
missing persons crisis
in Big Horn County.
Not enough people are worrying,
and not enough people are taking
action.
In covering Kaysera,
it was hard.
The Sheriff's Office has
been quiet about this case...
Abnormally quiet.
There are so many questions
surrounding the cause of her
death.
I wanna know who else was there
the night that she died and what
they know.
I wanna know if they were
questioned by Big Horn County.
And I wanna know why
she was in that yard.
I find it odd that she
just laid down and died.
It makes no sense to me.
Ominous music
My job is to inform the
community of what's going on,
and to try my best to...
maybe not bring justice, but
to at least give them answers.
That's my goal.
I'm still trying
to get information.
And then, all of a sudden,
we're into the new year.
First day of the new year,
we... we have a missing girl.
And...
it was a... a girl I knew.
Very well.
It was Selena Not
Afraid, 16 years old.
She was last seen on
eastbound Interstate 90.
A missing
endangered person advisory has
been issued for a 16-year-old
girl in Big Horn County.
It blew my mind
that she was gone that fast.
Disappeared.
Into thin air.
There is the frenzy to find her.
I've never seen a reaction
like that to a missing person.
They had everything out there.
You name it, they had it.
If anybody has a
chance of surviving...
it's Selena Not Afraid.
Tense music
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01x01 - 101
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The series follows missing and m*rder*d Indigenous women in rural Montana, with families and journalists sharing their stories.
The series follows missing and m*rder*d Indigenous women in rural Montana, with families and journalists sharing their stories.