The 10th annual March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives on Superior Street in downtown Duluth, MN. | Photo by Frank Zufall/Wisconsin Examiner

More than 100 people attended the 10th annual Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIW/R) on Friday, Feb. 14 in Duluth, Minnesota.

The event was co-sponsored by the Native Lives Matter Coalition and No More MMIW/R Great Lakes and supported by a dozen-plus entities, including the Wisconsin MMIW/R Task Force and the Minnesota MMIR Office.

Proclamations of support were made by both the cities of Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin and state and tribal representatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota made  presentations.

The opening ceremony began at the American Indian Community Housing Center on 2nd Street followed by a march on a cold winter afternoon down Superior Street ending at the Building for Women on 1st Street.

The opening ceremony was kicked off by Ricky Defoe, a Fond du Lac tribal elder, who offered prayers and comments about the significance of the event for raising awareness.

Rene Ann Goodrich, a Bad River Tribal member from Wisconsin and one of the organizers of the march, thanked those who gathered for supporting the MMIW/R movement and she recognized the families who are seeking healing and justice.

“Visibility is the number one,” Goodrich said of the importance of the march. “Over the past 10 years this has grown into a huge movement across the state, across the nation and is now recognized on the federal level.”

Each attendee was given a small amount of tobacco,  traditionally used as a spiritual  offering.

“This tobacco carries our prayers, carries our hopes, and sends those prayers out to our Creator,” said Goodrich.

Dr. Marsha Lue, Human Rights and Equity Officer for the Duluth mayor’s office, shared a proclamation signed by Mayor Roger Reinert.

The proclamation read, in part, “…whereas US Department of Justice found that Native American women face murder rates more than 10 times the national average. And whereas Minnesota and the MMIR Task Force reports that indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people are far more likely to experience violence, be murdered or go missing compared to other demographic groups in Minnesota … we remain firmly committed to addressing disparities and expanding practices and partnerships that work to close the achievement, opportunity, safety and equity gaps for Native American Alaskan Native and indigenous peoples and communities.”

Superior Mayor Jim Paine also read a proclamation for his city. Paine noted that his wife, Jenny Van Sickle, is the first Native American member on the Superior city council, and that he has three Native American daughters.

“The women of my family are Native American,” he said, “so this problem is incredibly personal to me, and like all of you, it is vital that they grow up in a community that sees them, that protects them, and makes sure that they matter, and the way that we do that is bringing awareness, not just to ourselves, of the problem, but to make sure we spread that awareness to the broader community.”

“We need to tell the story of those that have been lost, or as important as that, we need to bring awareness of who it is we are protecting,” Paine added. “We need to talk about culture. We need to share culture and stories and elevate the people in our community that we are actually protecting. … We have to continue this work every single day, until everybody is brought home and so we have justice for everybody, and until nobody else is missing and murdered again.” 

Desiree Tody, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin and a direct descendent of Chief Buffalo, then spoke.

Tody works for the Center Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse (CASDA) for Ashland and Bayfield counties, including the Red Cliff and Bad River tribes.

She read the names of those who had died in Minnesota in 2024 from domestic violence. (She noted there wasn’t a similar available list for Wisconsin and one of her goals for 2025 is to create it.)

“Every loss, every life lost to domestic violence is preventable,” said Tody. “Many of the offenders were on parole. They had previously been reported or reported for domestic violence, and many of them had orders of protection against them.”

Tody also noted that many of the families are still seeking justice.

She said recognizing warning signs of “abuse and lethality” is the way to begin to prevent violence. “If you see signs in your own relationship or that of a relative, we need to say something,” she said.

Tody recounted an abusive relationship she had experienced and recalled the support she had received from her family and community.

“Without each and every one of these people, I may not have made it out,” she said. “The leading cause of death for our women is homicide. This is a fight to the death and we can win it together. Help in any way you can. That can mean something as simple as giving somebody a couch to sleep on, helping with resources that keep them (a victim) from being able to leave, like giving their kids a ride to school.”

Tonya Kjerland, Tribal Relations Specialist for the Minnesota Department of Health, said in 2024 the Minnesota MMIR office had provided services and resources to 28 families.

“Although Indigenous women account for less than 1% of Minnesota’s population, they account for 10% of the missing females in the state,” she said. Indigenous men are also overrepresented in missing persons and homicide data, she added, quoting statistics from the Bureau of Criminal ApprehensionsMissing Persons Clearinghouse, which reported 716 missing indigenous persons in Minnesota last year,  57% of whom were women.

Kjerland said the public can raise awareness by purchasing a MMIR license plate with proceeds going toward a reward fund.

Family members and friends also shared their stories.

Brian Stillday Jr., a community health educator for the Boise Forte/Red Lake Bands of Lake Superior Chippewa in Minnesota, talked about the 2023 murder of his older brother Corey Whitefeather, Jr. on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota. He said his brother died of knife wounds while attempting to protect his home.

Kayla Jackson, a tribal member from Nevada, said she was working with the Peter Martin family of the Fond du Lac Reservation after Martin disappeared from the reservation in March 2024.

Linda Martin, Peter’s older sister, talked of the family’s ordeal since her brother has gone missing and noted with each passing month it was becoming more difficult to recruit volunteers to look for Peter.

Several noted there is a $5,000 reward for any information on the disappearance of Martin.

Recently, Jackson said, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had become involved in the Martin case.

Jackson encouraged people who might be reluctant to report tips to law enforcement to contact the Martin family directly.

A woman who said she was the younger sister of Sheila St. Clair, a Fond du Lac member who has been missing from Duluth since August 2015, said she often thinks she recognizes her sister in a crowd, but then realizes it’s not her.

“I am so lonesome without my big sister,” she said. “She was such a beautiful woman and a mother and sister.”

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In this 2024 photo, Calvin Gorman, 50, left, walks near Gallup, N.M., on the way from his job in Gallup to his home in Fort Defiance, Ariz., part of the Navajo Nation. American Indians in Western and Midwestern states had the lowest life expectancy of any group in the country in 2021. (Photo by Tim Henderson/Stateline)

There’s growing evidence that some American demographic groups need more help than others to live longer, healthier lives.

American Indians in Western and Midwestern states have the shortest life expectancy as of 2021, 63.6 years. That’s more than 20 years shorter than Asian Americans nationwide, who can expect to live to 84, according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

White residents live shorter lives in Appalachia and some Southern states, as do Black residents in highly segregated cities and in the rural South, the study found.

The data illustrates how Americans’ life expectancy differs based not only on race, but also on geography.

“Not everybody in this country is doing exactly the same even within a racial group, because it also depends on where they live,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, an author of the study and the chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington.

“Eliminating these disparities will require investing in equitable health care, education, and employment, and confronting factors that fuel inequalities, such as systemic racism,” the report, which was published in November, concluded.

Yet the United States is seeing a surge of action this month to pull back on public awareness and stem investments in those areas.

In President Donald Trump’s first two weeks, he has stripped race and ethnicity health information from public websites, blocked public communication by federal health agencies, paused federal research and grant expenditures, and ordered a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the board, all of which can draw attention — and funding — to the needs of specific demographic groups.

The administration has removed information about clinical trial diversity from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration website, and has paused health agencies’ communications with the public and with medical providers, including advisories on communicable diseases, such as the flu, that disproportionately affect underserved communities.

The new administration’s policies are headed the wrong way, said Dr. Donald Warne, a physician and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. “With the stroke of a pen, they’re gonna make it worse.”

One of Trump’s actions on his first day in office was to dismantle equity programs, including reversing a 2021 Biden executive order promoting more federal support for Indigenous education, including tribal colleges and universities.

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The problems Indigenous people face are inextricably linked to “toxic stress” and “just pure racism,” Warne said. “Less access to healthy foods, just chronic stress from racism and marginalization, historical trauma — all of these things lead to poor health outcomes.”

The South Dakota county where Warne grew up as a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe (the county is named after the tribe) has one of the lowest life expectancies in the country, 60.1 years as of 2024, according to localized estimates from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, an initiative of the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute.

‘10 Americas’

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation study parceled the country into what it called “10 Americas,” each with different 2021 life expectancies.

Black Americans were represented by three groups; those in the rural and low-income South had the worst life expectancies (68 years) compared with those living in highly segregated cities (71.5) and other areas (72.3).

Asian Americans nationwide have the longest life expectancy at 84, yet can also suffer from stereotypes and locality based problems that prevent them from getting the best care, said Lan Ðoàn, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Section for Health Equity at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

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Considering Asian Americans as a single entity masks health differences, such as the high incidence of heart disease among South Asians and Filipino Americans, she said, and discourages the necessary study of individual groups.

“It perpetuates the ‘model minority’ myth where Asian people are healthier, wealthier and more successful than other racial groups,” Ðoàn said.

That’s another reason for alarm over the new administration’s attitude about health equity, said Dr. Mary Fleming, an OB-GYN and director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Leadership Development to Advance Equity in Health Care program.

“With DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion programs) under attack, it hinders our ability to name a thing, a thing,” Fleming said. “Racism is still a major contributor to inequitable health outcomes, and without naming it and addressing it, it will make it more difficult to uproot it.”

Among white people and Hispanics, lifespans differ by region, according to the “10 Americas” in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation study. Latinos live shorter lives in the Southwest (76) than elsewhere (79.4), and white people live longer (77.2) if they’re not in Appalachia or the lower Mississippi Valley (71.1), or in rural areas and low-income Northern states (76.7).

An earlier Stateline story reported that policy, poverty, rural isolation and bad habits are shortening lives in West Virginia compared with New York. Even though the states had very similar life expectancies in 1990, West Virginia is projected to be at the bottom of the rankings by 2050, while New York is projected to be at the top.

Hyperlocal health problems

More research at a very local level is needed to find the policies and practices needed to start bridging longevity gaps, said Mokdad, the study author.

Since poverty seems to dictate so much of life expectancy, it’s fruitful to look at places where lifespans have grown in recent decades despite high poverty, Mokdad said. For example, lifespans have increased in the Bronx, New York, and Monongalia County, West Virginia, despite high poverty. By contrast, they have dipped in relatively high-income areas such as Clark County, Indiana, and Henry County, Georgia.

Clark County, on the Kentucky border, has a mix of urban and rural health issues that belie the relatively high income of some residents near Louisville, said Dr. Eric Yazel, health officer for the county and an emergency care physician.

Part of the county is also very rural, in a part of Indiana where there was an HIV outbreak among intravenous drug users in 2014.

“In a single county we see public health issues that are both rural and urban,” Yazel said. “As with a lot of areas along the Ohio River Valley, we were hit hard by the opioid epidemic and now have seen a resurgence of methamphetamine, which likely contributed to the [life expectancy] decreases.”

Nationally, a spike in overdoses has begun to ease in recent years, but only among white people. Overdose death rates among Black and Native people have grown.

Indigenous people also were the hardest hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, with expected lifespans dropping almost seven years between 2019 and 2021.

Calvin Gorman, 50, said several friends his age in Arizona’s Navajo Nation died needlessly in the pandemic. He blames it on alcohol and pandemic isolation.

“They said to just stay inside. Just stay inside. Some of them took some bottles into the house and they never came out again. I heard they died in there,” said Gorman, who commutes on foot and by hitchhiking from his home in Fort Defiance, Arizona, to a job at a gas station in Gallup, New Mexico.

Warne, the Oglala Lakota physician from South Dakota, said alcohol and substance use may have been one factor in Native deaths during the pandemic, as people “self-medicated” to deal with stress. But overall, he said, the main drivers of early deaths in Native communities are high rates of infant mortality, road accidents and suicides.

Warne now lives and practices medicine in North Dakota.

“There’s a huge challenge for people who grow up in these settings, but many of us do move forward,” Warne said. “A lot of us wind up working in other places instead of in our home, because there just aren’t the opportunities. We should be looking at economic development as a public health intervention.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

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The family of Kenneth Taylor says the city of Black River Falls and its police department brushed off their concerns when he was reported missing and in the years since his death. (Graphic by Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner, Photos courtesy of City of Black River Falls, U.S. Geological Survey, Joy Taylor)

On the night of Sept. 9, 2022, 20-year-old Kenneth Taylor called his aunt, Cheyenne Taylor, asking if she could drive three hours south from Hayward to Black River Falls to pick him up — something she says happened regularly. 

Cheyenne’s boyfriend answered the phone and he said they could come down to get him in the morning from the motel where he was staying. Kenneth, a member of the St. Croix Chippewa tribe, had spent the night hanging out with his girlfriend, who told police they’d been drinking. That night, he posted on Facebook asking for help with his depression.

The couple left Hayward around 8 a.m. but, Cheyenne says, as they got on I-94 near Eau Claire, she got a “sick feeling” in her stomach because her nephew wasn’t answering his phone. 

Cheyenne spent much of the day driving the unfamiliar streets of Black River Falls looking for him. Soon, other members of the family got involved in the search. 

During the first day Kenneth was missing, multiple family members turned to the police for help. But Cheyenne and Kenneth’s stepmother, Joy Taylor, say they were told by an officer that “maybe he didn’t want to be found,” and that as an adult he had the right to choose to disappear.

As the family got more desperate, a police report notes that officers weren’t concerned. 

“Kenneth was not entered as missing due to there being little to no evidence to support that he was in immediate danger to himself at that point in time,” the report, filed by Black River Falls Police Officer Charles Smart, states. 

Eventually, the family turned to resources offered by the state’s missing and murdered indigenous people (MMIP) task force. With that help, Kenneth was finally officially reported missing and search and rescue teams were on the ground in Black River Falls by the morning of Sept. 11 — two days after his aunt last heard from him. 

Around 4:30 p.m. on the same day the search began, Kenneth was found dead, hanging from a tree by his backpack strap in a small patch of woods in Black River Falls. 

For family members and advocates for missing and murdered indigenous people, the official response in Kenneth’s case once he went missing and during the investigation into his death exemplify the ways in which a bureaucratic system dismisses the concerns of Native American families even as Wisconsin works to improve its response to these types of cases. 

“Families are in a process of grief, taking care of their loved ones, in a state of traumatic shock, they are navigating through a system that is not being supportive of their needs,” says Rene Ann Goodrich, a Bad River tribal member who serves on the Wisconsin MMIW Task Force.

In the years since Kenneth’s death, his family has tried to process the grief and trauma while continuing to search for answers about what happened — without much help from local officials. 

Several members of the family remain unconvinced that Kenneth’s death was a suicide, saying they believe there was “foul play” involved. Other family members believe the coroner wasn’t entirely thorough in her assessment of the scene where his body was found. They also have questions about the results of the autopsy, which was conducted by a lab in Minnesota. Aside from their questions about the conclusions made in Kenneth’s case, family members told the Wisconsin Examiner they feel as if they’ve been “brushed off” by city officials. 

Contemporaneous notes taken by MMIP advocates and complaints filed by family members alleging their rights as victims have been violated highlight the family’s numerous unsuccessful attempts to speak with Black River Falls officials. The state Department of Justice dismissed the family’s complaints against the city because Kenneth’s death was ruled a suicide and therefore his relatives do not qualify as crime victims. 

“Throughout the death of my son, Black River Falls Police Department has shown little regard for what happened to my son based on the investigation and unwillingness to speak with the family,” Kenneth Taylor Sr. wrote in a 2023 letter to the Wisconsin Crime Victims’ Rights Board. “[We] have tried constantly to get answers and meetings. There are many discrepancies in the information the family has received from involved agencies.” 

According to several members of the Taylor family, they were told by multiple Black River Falls law enforcement and city officials that they’d been advised by the city attorney not to speak with them. 

“No one would ever talk to us,” Joy Taylor says. “They would cancel the appointments. I even went as far as calling the mayor, and he stated that no one was going to talk to me about this case, that they have been advised not to talk to anyone. Why, on a suicide case, would you not talk to someone if it was so cut and dried? Why wouldn’t you talk to me?”

Black River Falls officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story. 

Goodrich, who still has questions about her own daughter’s death, says it’s difficult for families when their relative’s cause of death is identified as a suicide or overdose because from law enforcement’s perspective, that ends the case. Yet families still have questions about what led up to their loved one’s death. 

“Families need to feel that they are included and at that table in the investigative process, and right now they are not feeling that support,” Goodrich says. “It doesn’t help assure families that justice will be served when they’re told ‘Well, we can’t talk to you anymore, we can’t share any more information with you, you’re going to have to talk to the county attorney.’ That is closing conversations and the door to families as they are sharing their valid concerns and information. Families really don’t need that type of grief as they’re trying to navigate the system and make sense of what happened. This contributes to and creates more trauma.”

Goodrich adds that what will help state and local governments in Wisconsin better handle MMIP cases is the creation of a new statewide office to help train local law enforcement and coordinate investigations.

Kristen Welch, a member of Wisconsin’s Task Force for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women who worked with the Taylor family, says the government response to Kenneth’s case fits a pattern. 

“It’s a patterned response. So what they experienced, like the delay in filing the initial report, is very common,” Welch says, adding that some of that treatment stems from bias against Native Americans but also from a lack of training and standardized practices across law enforcement agencies. “[This] sort of really rude treatment, those are all common responses for family members that are just trying to get case information. I don’t know why they feel that that’s OK, and they could really solve a lot of their own problems if they just sat down with this family, answered questions and shared the case information with them. I think a lot of the frustration would have been put to ease, but it again, is a training and protocol issue within their departments.”

Welch says that in hearings on MMIP issues that have been held across the state and country, this was a common theme. 

“That was like the common pattern — treatment of response — and at the federal level too,” she says. “So that was from Alaska all the way to the Midwest. We held hearings, and you heard the same story from our family members, the mistreatment and just lack of compassion and respect for families who are going through an incredible trauma and carry that, and just want someone to show them a little compassion.”

In the years since Kenneth’s death, the family had used the tree where he was found as a makeshift memorial, bringing food, flowers and tobacco to the site. But this year, the whole area was clear cut, adding to the family’s distress. 

“It was like where his soul left his body pretty much,” Kenneth’s aunt, Cheyenne, says. “And then they went and cut it down. Why?”

But Cheyenne says she’s trying to keep moving forward for her own children, while trying to remember how cheerful and outgoing Kenneth was and how much he loved his kids — one of whom never got to meet him. 

“It took me this long to finally accept that he’s gone and he’s not coming back,” she says. “He was always there for me, just like I was for him. And there was nothing in this world I would never do for him. And he knew it.”

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