Slain woman’s mother shines light on crisis
LAME DEER, Mont. – When a police officer walked into the Cheyenne Depot, a convenience store on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeast Montana, Malinda Harris Limberhand knew this was her chance.
It was July 4, 2013, and Malinda hadn’t heard from her 21-year-old daughter, Hanna Harris, since she’d left to watch fireworks the previous night. Malinda babied her “Hanna Bear” or “Hanna Banana,” but her youngest daughter was now a mother herself. Hanna’s son, Jeremiah, was 10 months old and wasn’t taking his bottle. He was hungry, and Malinda was worried. It wasn’t like Hanna not to come home to breastfeed him.
Leaving the counter where she worked, Malinda approached the Bureau of Indian Affairs officer. “My daughter is missing,” she said. “When can I file a report?”
She said the officer told her she’d have to wait 72 hours.
Seventy-two hours! Malinda thought. That’s too long. I need to find Hanna now.
Malinda didn’t know at the time that the officer was wrong. And she didn’t know then that thousands of Indigenous women go missing and are murdered at disproportionately high rates compared with other ethnic groups. The FBI’s National Crime Information Center reported 5,203 missing Indigenous girls and women in 2021, disappearing at a rate equal to more than two and a half times their estimated share of the U.S. population. The real rate is likely higher; the total was deemed an undercount in an October report to Congress because of a lack of comprehensive federal data.
Nobody knows how many missing or murdered Indigenous women there are, but it’s enough for President Joe Biden to describe it as an “epidemic” and for Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland to label it a crisis while calling for more federal action.
In seeking explanations for the problem, activists point to centuries of colonial trauma and prejudicial or ineffective government policies. These entrenched within Indigenous communities higher rates of poverty, substance and domestic abuse, and other social ills that contribute to Inneeded. digenous women having a lower life expectancy rate than other groups.
A historical distrust of police doesn’t make it any easier to solve cases that may not even be reported. Nor does chronic underfunding for tribal police forces or a quagmire of conflicting jurisdictions for agencies responding to calls in and around tribal lands.
Malinda didn’t know any of that at the time she spoke to the officer at the Cheyenne Depot.
Growing up on “the rez,” Malinda had always felt safe. Now, she felt certain that something was wrong.
So she ignored the officer’s advice and began asking questions herself, on Facebook and of the customers who came to the store, a popular gathering point in Lame Deer, a tight-knit community of fewer than 2,000.
The next day, she filed a missing person report despite what she’d been told. Yet she didn’t stop her own inquiries.
Over the next few days, Malinda drove to nearby towns asking people if they’d seen Hanna. She helped organize three searches. She obtained security camera footage from two places where people said Hanna had been. She even drove a suspect to the police station for an interview with investigators.
“We took on the role of being the investigating police officer,” she said, crediting the dozens of community members who turned out to scour the banks of a creek and surrounding hills where Hanna’s car had been found.
Malinda and her friends were determined to undertake the investigation themselves until she had the answers she
Even if they weren’t the answers she wanted.
Patchwork of laws
Malinda had been told wrong. Bureau of Indian Affairs protocols for cases involving a missing Indigenous woman inside Indian Country say officers should accept a missing persons report at any time, regardless of whether the woman has been missing for only a short time. BIA officials did not respond to requests for interviews about the incident nine years ago.
Even if Malinda had gotten immediate assistance, she faced a quandary unlike any other in American law enforcement. Crimes that occur on or near a reservation are subject to a patchwork of laws establishing criminal jurisdiction among federal, state and tribal law enforcement agencies. Who’s in charge of an investigation depends on the severity and location of the crime, and even whether victims or perpetrators are Native.
In Montana, generally, the investigation into a murder of a Native woman by a Native man on tribal lands falls to the FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs or tribal police. If the accused is a non-Native, federal law enforcement alone would have jurisdiction. If the crime occurred off the reservation, responsibility would likely fall to a county sheriff’s department.
As if that weren’t confusing enough, jurisdiction on tribal lands isn’t the same in every state or reservation. The knot of policies becomes even harder to untangle when
the location of the crime is uncertain or the identity of the perpetrator is unknown.
Mother’s search produces leads
When Hanna was still missing on July 5, the day of her sister Rosie’s wedding reception, Rosie pushed her mother to file the missing person report. Again, Malinda said she was brushed off by officers. Although they took the report, they told her they were busy because of the holiday weekend and told her Hanna was probably drinking with friends and scared to come home. They told Malinda to come back Monday if Hanna still hadn’t returned, she said.
Her own investigative efforts had started producing results. A customer at the Cheyenne Depot told her about seeing Hanna’s car at Muddy Creek. She used Facebook to call for volunteers to search the area the next day.
Dozens showed up. The volunteers joined her in walking along both sides of Muddy Creek for miles, but they found nothing. Malinda’s attention turned to a new tip.
People on Facebook had messaged her that Hanna had been seen at the fireworks July 3 with Gina Rowland and Garrett Wadda. Both were about 40 at the time, and Hanna had gone to school with the couple’s children. Malinda spotted Rowland’s car outside the Lame Deer Trading Post IGA grocery store.
She drove Rowland to the Bureau of Indian Affairs police station herself.
According to police reports, officers said they learned through a series of interviews with Rowland and Wadda that the couple had been drinking with Hanna the night of the fireworks. The three of them went to the Jimtown Bar & Casino, just outside the reservation, which is dry. Later, they stopped at the Cheyenne Depot and finally at the home of Wadda’s aunt. The couple told officers they didn’t know what happened to Hanna after they went to bed.
Malinda drove to the bar where Hanna had been seen July 3. She asked to see security camera footage. She also obtained footage from the convenience store. One video showed Hanna with Rowland and Wadda buying alcohol and leaving together. In the other, Hanna paid for gas before returning to her car, with Rowland in the passenger seat and Wadda in back.
By July 8, five days after Hanna was last seen, tribal officers had notified the
FBI of the case. Following a new tip, another search was planned at the Lame Deer rodeo grounds. But after a storm rolled in, officials called off the search, though some of the volunteers remained behind.
Investigators asked Malinda to identify a Nike shoe that had been found, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Hanna’s sister Rosie had to go look at it.
There was no mistaking the black and white high-top basketball shoe. It was Hanna’s.
Poverty and colonialism
Activists and many scholars say it’s impossible to separate the problem from centuries of suffering inflicted by the settlement of North America.
Native tribes were decimated by diseases introduced by colonizers and impoverished by policies that interned them onto reservations. Later, children were shipped to boarding schools and forced to abandon their language and culture. In the 1950s, a federal relocation program encouraged Native Americans to leave reservations for cities, while simultaneously trying to terminate recognition of tribes, with pledges of support that, like previous promises, weren’t fulfilled.
The consequences of generational poverty and all its trappings can be gleaned from a consultant’s report on policing in the Navajo Nation, the largest of the 574 federally recognized Indian nations in the U.S.
The report connects poverty to “the effects of colonialism,” which it says “are still experienced as drivers of critical problems in the Navajo Nation. Today, gender violence, alcohol and drug abuse, inadequate housing, needs of the mentally ill, availability of firearms, drive demand on the police.”
The same conditions apply on many, if not most, tribal lands along with Indigenous communities far removed from reservations, activists say. They lay at the root of the crisis by exposing
Indigenous women to disproportionate levels of violence, including domestic abuse and human trafficking.
For more than a hundred years, tribal communities have sought to restore their autonomy over crimes committed on their lands; in the view of many Native advocates, the missing and murdered Indigenous women movement is an indication that more progress is needed.
New federal laws and actions have attempted to address the problem.
Savanna’s Act – named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, who was killed in 2017 in North Dakota – requires the Department of Justice to enhance training, coordination and data collection in cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women. The Not Invisible Act aims to increase intergovernmental coordination. In 2019, President Donald Trump created Operation Lady Justice, a task force dedicated to missing and murdered Indigenous people.
But experts, advocates and family members say these initiatives don’t go far enough. And though the laws are on the books, an October report from the General Accounting Office noted how federal officials failed to meet deadlines imposed by the new laws for things like public education on data gathering, outreach to tribal stakeholders and the development of guidelines for responding to such cases.
Indigenous activists also were encouraged by Biden’s appointment of Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and first Native American to oversee the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
‘We did the best we could’
The night of July 8, Malinda gathered her extended family for a “callback ceremony.” They laid out Hanna’s clothes on the floor, singing and praying to return her spirit to her body.
After midnight, an officer came to the house. Malinda doesn’t remember much of what he told her. According to police reports, Hanna’s body was found at the rodeo grounds in Lame Deer positioned face down, her pants unzipped, her underwear pushed down and her shirt and bra pushed up. Her body was too badly decomposed to determine whether a sexual assault had occurred or what caused her death.
No arrests were made. Rowland and Wadda had left Montana for the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. In the end, the case was solved not by investigative work but by a drunken confession. In January 2014, six months after Hanna’s disappearance, Rowland went drinking with her former sister-in-law and told her what happened. That woman called the FBI, and Malinda soon got word that Rowland and Wadda had been arrested on murder charges.
Police reports spelled out what Rowland told her sister-in-law. She and Wadda had been drinking with Hanna that night in a trailer. Rowland said she woke up to screaming and found Wadda forcing himself on Hanna while she screamed that she was being raped. Rowland said Hanna hit her when she tried to help. Rowland and Wadda beat Hanna until she was unconscious. Rowland dragged Hanna’s body outside and Wadda drove her to the rodeo grounds.
In October 2014, Rowland pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Authorities told Malinda they had insufficient evidence to prove the rape that Rowland alleged. Wadda pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact, admitting he moved Hanna’s body. He was sentenced in 2015 to 10 years in prison. He was released from federal prison in January.
She finds solace in knowing Hanna’s case is unusual because the perpetrators were convicted and it led to change and greater awareness of the problem.
Hanna’s birthday, May 5, is now a national day of awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous people. Every year on her daughter’s birthday, Malinda travels to Helena, Montana, to join other family members of missing or murdered Indigenous people in advocating for better communication among law enforcement agencies and more resources for tribal police to boost staffing and improve low retention rates.
Hanna’s grave sits on a hill near her mother’s house. Her tombstone is dark gray and shaped like a big heart. Jeremiah, her son, is now a shy 9-year-old. His laugh reminds Malinda of Hanna, but his growth remains a symbol of time passing without her.
Though Jeremiah knows Malinda, 51, is his grandmother, he calls her Mom.
She won’t let herself second guess her efforts in the days after Hanna disappeared. She doesn’t wonder if Rowland and Wadda would have faced longer prison sentences if law enforcement had been involved sooner, or if she and the volunteers searching for Hanna had known how to preserve crime scene evidence in their desperation for answers.
She can’t let herself think about those things, telling herself over and over, “We did the best we could with what we had.”
“We just had nothing.”