Petito in spotlight while other women vanish

Gabby Petito, a 22-year-old Florida woman who disappeared while traveling across the country with her boyfriend, has dominated the airwaves and internet in recent days as the entire nation has tried to figure out whodunit. Her story has captivated us as we have wrung our hands in pity and thought how horrible a tragedy it was that she was found dead near Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and that we need to find justice for this woman.

Those are noble feelings to have. There’s just one problem. Petito is far from being the only missing woman to have been found murdered, but yet everyone’s attention is on her horrible fate and whether the perpetrator will be found and punished. Does anyone realize how many women have disappeared, either to be found dead in some God-forsaken place or to never be found? If you don’t believe me, just stroll up to your neighborhood Native American reservation and ask people there about their absent friends and neighbors.

Last year, the Menominee reservation highlighted some of its missing and murdered people. Among them was Katelyn Kelley, who was the same age as Petito when she disappeared in 2020. Her body was found on the reservation in March, but her killer has not been brought to justice. It has been over a year, but there has been no justice for her family. They are left with questions like, who would do something so horrible? Why would someone want to kill her? Who is so cold-hearted to take a life and leave Kelley to rot in the middle of nowhere?

Kelley’s family has been dealing with the darkness for over a year now. The family of Lisa Ninham, another missing Menominee woman, has been seeking answers for 40 years. Rewards have been set up in exchange for information leading to the people who orchestrated these heinous crimes, but answers are not forthcoming. Why? It might have something to do with the fact that these people don’t show up on the radar when we think of what America looks like.

Despite the fact that we have a roughly estimated thousands of missing and murdered women in the Native American community alone, when we see that someone has disappeared on the national news, their skin is usually white. What would happen if all the major networks splashed the details of Katelyn Kelley or Lisa Ninham on their news feeds and broadcast news programs? Would folks be just as eager to hunt down their killers as they are to find the person who murdered Petito?

The plethora of missing and murdered Indigenous women used to be America’s best-kept secret, but there are signs the tides are turning. The state of Wisconsin announced it was forming a task force to investigate this issue last year, and another such program was formed at the federal level. While solutions cannot come overnight, we need to push both of these agencies hard to seek out solutions, to make it possible that Kelley’s case or Ninham’s case receives the same full-court press that the Petito case has received.

The debate on all who are are missing has even reached the federal Cabinet positions. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo Laguna Tribe, commented recently about the need to shine the light on missing and murdered Indigenous women, saying, “I see my mother. I see my aunties or my nieces or even my own child. So I feel that every woman and every person who is in this victimized place deserves attention and deserves to be cared about.”

Obviously, journalists need to shoulder some of the blame for this phenomenon. We’re so eager to showcase some fresh-faced white woman when we’re writing about crime in our communities that we forget there are others with darker skin complexions, darker hair and darker life stories who have met horrible fates. That’s wrong, and we need to do better.

However, the tides are shifting on this blemish in our society, as well. Dateline NBC recently featured a number of unsolved cases involving Native American women who have disappeared. Women like Olivia Lone Bear, a 32-year-old mother of five from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, who last was seen in October 2017. Women like Cecelia Barber Finona, a 59-year-old Navajo woman who vanished from her home in May 2019 in Farmington, New Mexico.

Police are still searching for Kimberly Iron, a 21-year-old member of the Crow Indian Reservation. If the national news had latched on to Iron’s story when a missing persons report was filed in October of last year, would we have found this woman by now? Would the person who made her disappear be facing a prison sentence by now?

The segment by Dateline NBC and the task forces at the state and federal levels are a good start at shining a light on this dark corner of our societal makeup, but there’s more than needs to be done.

Law enforcement officials need to apply the same pressure on all murder and kidnapping cases, not just the ones where the victim is fair-skinned.

News outlets need to give equal time to reporting all the women who have been murdered or just disappeared, whether it’s Gabby Petito or Katelyn Kelley.

We must end the cycle.

Above all, we need to bring our friends and neighbors home. Regardless of what their skin color is, what their nationality is or even what side of the tracks they lived on, we need to bring them home.

Lee Pulaski is the city editor for the Shawano Leader. Readers can contact him at lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com.