‘Bring Her Home’ Threatens to Discredit and Divide Missing-and-Murdered Indian Movement

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Rebecca Stewart

Telephone: 513-479-3335

‘Bring Her Home’ Threatens to Discredit and Divide Missing-and-Murdered Indian Movement

WASHINGTON / March 21, 2022 – The Missing and Murdered Indian Persons movement has registered many accomplishments in recent years in a determined effort to address the high rates of American Indians who are reported as missing or murdered. Unfortunately, a recent PBS film, Bring Her Home, distorts the facts and threatens to discredit the work of the Missing and Murdered Indian Persons effort.

Co-produced by the PBS affiliate in Minnesota, Bring Her Home recounts the efforts of three Indian women to bring visibility to the long-ignored problem of missing and murdered Indians. But the program is flawed by its systematic exclusion of the greater problem of missing and murdered Indian men.

The FBI “Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics” reports that 61% of all missing American Indians are males (1). And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, reveals that men represent 75% of all Indian victims of homicide (2).

The plight of missing and murdered Indian men and boys has been highlighted in numerous articles and editorials. Indian Country News (3) and Voice of America News (4) have published full-length articles on the topic. A recent article in the Santa Fe New Mexican highlighted the decision to include males in the deliberations of a state Task Force (5).

Earlier this month, in testimony before a House hearing, former federal Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney revealed, “It was also during those sessions we heard Tribal and community leaders stress that this crisis also affected Native American men and boys, which is why our efforts focused on the larger Native American community.” (6) [emphasis in the original]

A listing of other similar articles is available online (7).

The flaw with Bring Her Home is not that missing and murdered men are afforded less attention. The problem is that Bring Her Home categorically removes all mention of the existence of missing and murdered men. This omission echoes some of the worst civil right abuses that have been visited on American Indians over the years. Bring Her Home represents a reprehensible violation of the civil rights of Indian men.

By suppressing key facts, creating false stereotypes, and preying on viewers’ emotions, Bring Her Home threatens to pit Indian women against Indian men, weakening the kinship networks that unite Native American communities. Bring Her Home (8) does a disservice to the movement to curb the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indian Persons, which is struggling to gain credibility, respectability, and political support.

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