An indigenous mother goes missing in North Dakota. Why did it take a volunteer group to bring her home?
A car wreck found at the bottom of a lake brought the search formissing young mother to an end. But why was it a volunteer team behind the discovery, and not the police?
"I don't know what it was - I was drawn to that place," she recalled later."I actually stood in that bay last fall."Nine months earlier, in the autumn of 2017, a young mother of five named Olivia Kerri Lone Bear vanished from New Town, a tiny oil-boom city on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The 32-year-old was last seen on 24 October, at the wheel of a teal-coloured Chevy Silverado pick-up truck that she often borrowed from a friend.
But once the tundra-like North Dakota winter set in, all search efforts - aside from keeping the phone line open - had to be suspended until spring. The lake froze over, sealing itself under a thick crust of ice. On 31 July, officers from Williams County, Mountrail County, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and North Dakota Game and Fish converged on the site. Yellowbird-Chase and her volunteers watched from the marina across the bay through binoculars. They watched as the dive team sailed out to the spot, and the divers plunged in. They watched as a tow truck backed up to the water's edge and officers fetched an extra-long tow strap.
Over the years, Yellowbird-Chase - a steely, plainspoken 50-year-old, and an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation - has assisted in dozens of missing persons cases. She is a part of a growing community of mostly-female amateur sleuths and activists who say cases of missing indigenous men and women are routinely under-prioritised and under-investigated by authorities.
"When Congress and the administration [US Government] ask why the crime rate is so high in Indian country, they need look no further than the archaic system in place," the commission's report said. Certain exceptions exist - for example, the reauthorisation of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 gave tribal officers and prosecutors authority to arrest and charge non-Natives for domestic violence crimes.
"I have had cases in Alaska that I have talked to no less than a half-dozen agencies that have all said, 'It ain't one of mine,'" said Janet Franson, a retired Florida homicide detective who founded the group Lost and Missing in Indian Country four years ago. Many advocates take their work offline as well, liaising between victims' families and law enforcement. That can include helping families to submit their DNA to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System , or the FBI's Combined DNA Index System , which can compare profiles to those of unidentified human remains.
"I was disillusioned by all this chaos that came with the case, the aftermath," she said not long after the discovery. On the day that Yellowbird-Chase went looking for signs of a missing man in the wreckage of a house in Fort Totten, on the Spirit Lake Reservation, the sun rose in the sky over North Dakota like a bloody orange eye.
A few days after his last contact, police found the family's minivan, specially outfitted for their son's wheelchair, at the end of a remote dirt road beside a marshy slough with the keys in the ignition. From there, the trail went cold.Yellowbird-Chase sang a prayer song quietly to herself as the car flew around the curved shoreline of Devils Lake toward Fort Totten.
Chasing down leads - no matter how outlandish or speculative - is time-consuming but necessary to Yellowbird-Chase. When someone told Bruce's 62-year-old mother that he'd been"fed to the pigs", Yellowbird-Chase went looking for pig farms.Since she's not an officer of the law bound by jurisdiction, Yellowbird-Chase traverses on and off the reservation, speaking to whomever she pleases.
As a young mother, Yellowbird-Chase was in and out of homelessness, violent relationships and an addiction to"everything" - crack cocaine and alcohol, principally. When her oldest daughter was 12 years old, she ran away from home, and Yellowbird-Chase did not go after her, a dereliction of duty that plagued their relationship for years.She eventually found purpose by becoming a legal advocate for the Three Affiliated Tribes, handling civil, criminal and family cases.
She started buying more gear, and taking longer leaves from work to go on searches. Over time, she shifted her attention to mostly cases of missing indigenous men and women. She began gaining a reputation, and became a speaker at missing persons conferences and MMIW events. In 2015, the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition gave the Sahnish Scouts the"Arc of Justice" award for their work. They inspired a sister group called the Gitchigumi Scouts in Minnesota.
Patnaude frequently posted on Facebook begging for additional volunteers, but aside from Yellowbird-Chase, she almost never heard back. The news filled Yellowbird-Chase with exasperation. It was a scenario she'd seen before, when psychics sent a family into a tailspin. A scammer had also been texting Patnaude, promising her footage of Bruce's disappearance in exchange for $3,000. When she failed to come up with the money, the man turned on her, sneering that she must have wanted Bruce to disappear.
"We had been pushing for a water search even as far as November 1, that was one of the very first things that as a group we had asked law enforcement," said Matthew Lone Bear, Olivia's brother and the family's spokesman throughout the search."They don't ever jump in in time, they don't ever put their resources towards it."
As the weather got colder, the number of volunteers dwindled and the family's fragile relationship with law enforcement deteriorated. Matthew claimed that officers weren't showing up to collect tips that had come in to their search headquarters. The FBI wouldn't step in because there was no evidence of an abduction or other major crime.
Cracks formed within the volunteer search effort as well. There were disagreements about strategy and access to resources. Rumours of misspent funds. Unscrupulous characters popped up in the camp, disparaging the family's efforts. Yellowbird-Chase said she couldn't have misappropriated funds because she never had access to PayPal accounts where money was collected for Olivia's search, and any crowdfunding she did was for the Sahnish Scouts. But she acknowledged that there were clashes with Matthew over the direction the investigation was going, over things like access to the search headquarters, to supplies and hotel rooms.
"I think we've really been conditioned to take crumbs," said Lucchesi of the Sovereign Bodies Institute."Tribes should have jurisdiction over any of their treaty territory." The case of Olivia Lone Bear remains unsolved. The investigation is ongoing, but little new information has been released to the family, even eight months after her body was discovered.
Now, two years later, Suna Felix Guy - one of the three men involved in the murder - was about to be sentenced. Guy phoned an investigator with the Mandan Police Department and volunteered to bring authorities to the body. Guy, Guy's parents, Yellowbird-Chase, and agents from the FBI all met up at a house on the reservation, and Guy told them that on the day of the murder, he had driven with the victim to meet up with two men named Dakota Charboneau and Daylin St Pierre.
Investigators on the case felt Yellowbird-Chase's contact with Guy while the case was still open was inappropriate. The relationship put her in intense conflict with members of her own family. Nevertheless, she agreed to speak on his behalf at sentencing.'This is why people don't look for our murdered and missing'
Ultimately, the judge sided with the prosecution. Guy was sentenced to 15 years in prison and the judge ordered him placed into custody immediately. He seemed confused and angry, whispering loudly as a pair of US Marshals slowly moved towards him from the back of the courtroom with a pair of handcuffs.
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