Native women are vanishing across the U.S. Inside an aunt’s desperate search for her niece

GROVE, Okla.  —  

The woman’s oval-shaped face, on a crinkled 8 ½-by-11-inch flier, is easy to miss.

Taped on a wall inside a gas station off Highway 59 — amid a collage of business cards for lawn care and Bible tutoring services — it reads:

Name: Aubrey Dameron
Age: 25 years old
Height: 5’10
Weight: 140 lbs
Last Seen: Grove, Oklahoma 03/09/2019

Since Dameron disappeared from her northeast Oklahoma home nearly a year ago, her aunt, Pam Smith, has plastered dozens of placards around town. She has also organized search teams to scour fields and to drain a pond. And she has repeatedly pleaded for information in Facebook posts.

But so far, nothing.

“We just want to bring her home,” Smith said on a recent morning outside the gas station. “We want answers.”

Dameron, a member of the Cherokee Nation, is one of thousands of indigenous women who have gone missing or were found murdered in recent years.

Last year alone, nearly 5,600 Native American women were reported missing, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. The actual number, activists say, is probably much higher, in part because local authorities sometimes mistakenly list the victims as Latina or white.

In November, President Trump signed an executive order establishing a federal task force to explore what he termed a crisis of violence against indigenous women.

Atty. Gen. William Barr announced that $1.5 million would be targeted to hire missing-persons coordinators in U.S. attorney’s offices that handle large caseloads in Native American areas, including ones in Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma, and to establish better protocols for handling such cases. For years, activists and even state officials have acknowledged an inability of tribal officials and local law enforcement to work together to solve them.