LINCOLN — Lestina Saul-Merdassi still remembers the question she asked herself when her cousin went missing.

Will someone in power try to find him? Will anyone? 

Her cousin, Merle Saul, went missing from Grand Island in 2015. He’s one of an estimated 4,200 unsolved cases of missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives nationally, as reported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

“I feel like he was basically written off as a transient, written off because he suffered from alcohol-related issues,” said Saul-Merdassi, an Omaha resident and member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate Tribe, during a 2023 legislative hearing. “People did not take into consideration that he is a United States veteran, and he risked his life in the Vietnam War for this country.” 

In 2019, the Nebraska Legislature sought to better understand the reason behind the disproportionate number of missing Indigenous women and children in the state. Lawmakers directed the Nebraska State Patrol to investigate and produce recommendations to address the issue. 

Five years later, few of those recommendations have been implemented. And the number of reported cases of missing Indigenous people in Nebraska has jumped from 23 in 2020 to 43 in 2024. 

Law enforcement, state officials and activists offered a range of explanations for the rise in reported cases and seeming inaction on the report’s recommendations.

Better counting and awareness could be behind part of the increase in known cases, the patrol said.

Leadership changes, the COVID-19 pandemic, historical distrust, and coordination challenges among law enforcement agencies have complicated progress, the report’s authors said. 

“Progress is not as fast as I would always like it to be, but I do believe that we are making progress,” said Judi gaiashkibos, a member of the Ponca Tribe and director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, which worked with the patrol on the report.

The report, released in 2020, put Nebraska at the forefront of states on the issue of missing Indigenous people. At the time it was only the second state in the country to mandate a report investigating these disparities. 

It uncovered some surprises – including that rates of missing African American and Indigenous boys and men outpaced the rate of missing Indigenous women. Other states undertook similar investigations, some using research methods first developed and used in the Nebraska report. 

Many of those other states have acted on their recommendations. Nebraska, for the most part, has not.

“When I look at the finished project and everything that I learned from it, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of, but at the same time, it’s also one of my biggest failures because we didn’t see it through,” said former Capt. Matt Sutter, who led the report for the patrol.

A need for action 

When lawmakers passed their bill in 2019 (Legislative Bill 154), Indigenous women and girls in Nebraska were reported missing at one of the highest rates in the country.

A 2018 analysis by the Urban Indian Health Institute indicated that 10% of Indigenous missing persons cases reported across 71 cities in the U.S. originated from Omaha and Lincoln.

“We needed somebody to do something,” recalled Omaha Tribe member Renee Sans Souci, one of the founding members of Native Women’s Task Force of Nebraska, a grassroots group dedicated to raising awareness about the issue.

The investigation required by the Legislature involved a series of well-attended listening sessions in Omaha, Santee, Macy, and Winnebago. Tribal and non-tribal residents attended, as did law enforcement and other organizations.

“We were there. And we were listening,” said patrol investigator Tyler Kroenke, who was then the lieutenant of a patrol area in northeast Nebraska that overlaps with reservation land. 

The resulting report identified three primary issues: jurisdictional uncertainty; lack of communication between law enforcement agencies; and racial misclassification of missing people.

And it identified contributing factors: poverty, high rates of domestic abuse, high levels of substance abuse and geographic isolation in some Native communities. 

Sans Souci already knew this. 

Months before the report was released, Sans Souci’s niece, Ashlea Aldrich, 29, was found dead in a field near her boyfriend’s house, according to local news reports. The family told the Sioux City Journal that they had made dozens of calls to tribal police over the years with concerns about possible domestic violence against Aldrich, but said nothing was done. 

The death certificate obtained by the Journal listed her immediate cause of death as “hypothermia complicating acute alcohol toxicity” and characterized her death as an “accident.” Aldrich’s family disagrees.

“We have to be our own detectives, our own attorneys, and often it’s the families who have to search for their missing loved ones,” Sans Souci said. “My sister has to live with that every day.”

Four years after Aldrich’s death, activists said uncertainty and a lack of trust persist. 

“I believe some of that could go back to colonization and the U.S. Calvary, and how they violated our people, our women and our rights,” Saul-Merdassi said.