American Indian and Alaska Native women are 2.5 times more likely to experience violent crimes than the general population. Murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women between the ages of ten and twenty-four. In 2016, 5,712 cases of missing AI/AN women and girls were reported to the National Crime Information Center. Only 116 of those cases appeared in the Department of Justice’s NamUs database, the primary federal tracking system. The gap between 5,712 and 116 is not a data anomaly. It is the documented product of a jurisdictional structure that divides investigative responsibility between federal, state, tribal, and local law enforcement without functional coordination, reliable data-sharing protocols, or unified tracking infrastructure. Under Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978), tribal courts cannot prosecute non-Native perpetrators on tribal land. Most perpetrators of violence against Native women on tribal land are non-Native. Michigan has twelve federally recognized tribal nations, active tribal communities in the Upper Peninsula, and formed an MMIP Task Force in 2024. The structural problem predates the task force and is not resolved by it.
In 2016, 5,712 cases of missing AI/AN women and girls were reported to NCIC. Only 116 appeared in the DOJ’s NamUs database. This is not underreporting within a single system. It is the product of multiple disconnected systems with no mandatory cross-reporting mechanism.
Under Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978), tribal courts have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Native perpetrators. The majority of perpetrators of violence against Native women on tribal land are non-Native. This creates a direct structural conflict: the law enforcement entity with the closest community relationship cannot prosecute the most common category of offender.
Racial misclassification on death certificates and law enforcement reports is a documented problem in MMIP cases. Native American victims are frequently misidentified as white or as belonging to another racial category. Misclassification removes the case from MMIP-specific tracking, review, and reporting. Cases that do not appear in the data cannot benefit from the data-driven interventions that data is supposed to enable.
Savanna’s Act (2020) and the Not Invisible Act (2020) were both enacted with bipartisan support. Savanna’s Act requires the DOJ to develop and update protocols for MMIP cases and improve access to federal criminal databases. The Not Invisible Act established an advisory committee. Both laws address coordination and protocol. Neither creates the unified tracking infrastructure or resolves the Oliphant jurisdictional gap.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel formed the state’s MMIP Task Force in 2024. Michigan has twelve federally recognized tribal nations. The Task Force’s first meeting was in September 2024. Active advocacy from the Anishinaabek Caucus and tribal leaders across Michigan, including the Gun Lake Tribe and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, has framed the issue as both a public safety crisis and a sovereignty issue.
The Numbers and Why They Cannot Be Trusted
The statistics on missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States begin with a caveat that undermines the statistics themselves. The data that exists is incomplete. The data is incomplete because the systems that generate it are fragmented, because racial misclassification is common, because underreporting is structural rather than incidental, and because the MMIP crisis has not historically been treated as a data priority by the federal agencies that maintain the databases.
The 2016 figure is illustrative: 5,712 cases of missing AI/AN women and girls reported to the National Crime Information Center. One hundred and sixteen cases in NamUs. The gap is not explained by duplicates or methodology alone. It reflects the absence of a mandatory reporting requirement that would move cases from local law enforcement into the federal missing persons tracking system. Cases that local law enforcement does not enter into NamUs do not appear in NamUs. The decision about what gets entered is made at the local or tribal level, by agencies that may lack access to the database, may not have established data-sharing agreements, or may simply not have prioritized the entry.
Racial misclassification compounds the gap. Native American victims are documented to be frequently misidentified as white, Hispanic, or other racial categories on death certificates and law enforcement reports. A misclassified homicide is invisible to MMIP-specific tracking, review, and federal intervention. The case may be investigated as a homicide without its connection to the broader MMIP pattern ever being established. The pattern cannot be recognized when the individual cases that compose it are categorized as something else.
The result is a documented crisis whose true dimensions are not known to anyone, because the infrastructure for knowing does not exist.
The Jurisdictional Framework
The legal structure governing crime on tribal land in Michigan and nationally is not a unified system. It is a layered and frequently contradictory set of authorities derived from treaties, federal statutes, Supreme Court decisions, and state law, each of which governs a different category of offense or a different configuration of victim and perpetrator identity.
The foundational problem is Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, decided by the Supreme Court in 1978. Oliphant held that tribal courts do not have criminal jurisdiction over non-Native defendants. The decision was not grounded in treaty text or statutory authority; the Court read the limitation into the structure of federal Indian law. The practical consequence is that the entity with the closest geographic and community relationship to the crime scene, the tribal government and its law enforcement, cannot prosecute the most common category of perpetrator in violent crimes against Native women on tribal land. Research and advocacy organizations have consistently documented that the majority of perpetrators of violence against Native women on tribal land are non-Native.
When the perpetrator is non-Native, federal jurisdiction typically applies for major crimes on tribal land under the Major Crimes Act. The FBI is the investigating agency. U.S. Attorneys prosecute. The distance between the community where the crime occurred and the federal investigators and prosecutors responsible for the case is not merely geographic. It is cultural, linguistic, and institutional. Federal agents who are not embedded in tribal communities and do not have established relationships with those communities are less likely to receive information, less likely to understand community dynamics, and less likely to investigate effectively.
Michigan is not a Public Law 280 state, meaning the state of Michigan does not have general criminal jurisdiction over crimes on tribal land that it would have in a PL 280 jurisdiction. The federal government retains primary authority over major crimes. State law enforcement has limited roles. Tribal law enforcement can investigate but cannot prosecute non-Native perpetrators. The result is a jurisdiction matrix in which responsibility is theoretically assigned but practically fragmented, and the fragmentation benefits perpetrators who know how to move across the boundaries.
Tribal courts: Criminal jurisdiction over tribal members for offenses committed on tribal land. No jurisdiction over non-Native defendants under Oliphant (1978).
Federal government / FBI: Primary jurisdiction for major crimes under the Major Crimes Act when the defendant is non-Native. U.S. Attorneys for the Eastern and Western Districts of Michigan handle federal prosecutions.
State of Michigan: Limited jurisdiction on tribal land. Michigan is not a PL 280 state. State law enforcement can investigate but does not have general criminal jurisdiction over major crimes on tribal land.
The gap: The majority of perpetrators of violence against Native women on tribal land are non-Native, which means the most common offender category falls in the jurisdictional space between tribal and federal authority, where response time is slowest and community relationships are weakest.
Federal records on MMIP cases, tribal-federal law enforcement agreements, and FBI investigative activity on tribal land are accessible through FOIA requests to federal agencies. This playbook covers how to request them, how to structure requests for maximum return, and what to do when the response is inadequate.
Michigan’s Tribal Nations and the Upper Peninsula
Michigan has twelve federally recognized tribal nations with land and community presence across the state. In the Upper Peninsula, the Anishinaabek communities, including Ojibwe and Odawa nations, have geographic concentration in rural areas where the nearest FBI field presence and the nearest state law enforcement resources can both be hours away. The geographic remoteness compounds the jurisdictional complexity: an effective response to violence in a rural Upper Peninsula tribal community requires coordination across multiple agencies, each with its own reporting structure, database access, and institutional culture.
The Anishinaabek Caucus has been among the active Michigan advocacy organizations documenting MMIP cases and pushing for policy change at both the state and federal levels. Northern Michigan University’s Center for Native American Studies and its faculty have engaged the issue in the Marquette area and the surrounding region. Virginia Sprague-Vanderband of the Gun Lake Tribal Council and representatives of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi have both been active participants in Michigan’s 2024 MMIP Task Force.
The Task Force, announced by Attorney General Nessel in November 2024 and holding its first meeting in September 2024, brings together tribal leaders, state and federal prosecutors, law enforcement officers, victim advocates, and human services specialists. Its stated goals include improving the investigation and prosecution of MMIP cases, bridging gaps in law enforcement systems, and developing culturally honoring approaches to prevention and response. These are the right goals. They are also goals that preceding federal legislation, including Savanna’s Act (2020) and the Not Invisible Act (2020), stated in largely similar terms.
What Savanna’s Act and the Not Invisible Act Did and Did Not Do
Savanna’s Act, signed into law in October 2020, directed the Department of Justice to review, revise, and develop law enforcement and justice protocols specifically for MMIP cases. It required the DOJ to improve access to federal criminal databases for tribal law enforcement, improve the online data entry format for MMIP-specific tracking, and develop guidelines for U.S. Attorneys in handling MMIP cases. It was named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a twenty-two-year-old Spirit Lake Tribal member killed in North Dakota in 2017.
The Not Invisible Act, also signed in 2020, established a cross-jurisdictional advisory committee composed of law enforcement, tribal leaders, federal partners, service providers, family members of MMIP victims, and survivors. The committee’s mandate was to make recommendations to the Department of the Interior and the DOJ on addressing MMIP.
Both laws addressed coordination, data collection, and protocol development. Neither resolved the Oliphant jurisdictional gap. Neither created a unified federal database that automatically captures MMIP cases across all reporting jurisdictions. Neither established a mandatory reporting requirement that would close the gap between the 5,712 NCIC entries and the 116 NamUs entries documented in 2016. Both laws were meaningful legislative actions. Neither law created the structural change that would require the jurisdictional matrix to function as a unified, accountable system.
What the Data Cannot Show and What It Can
The data on MMIP cases in Michigan specifically is thin. Michigan does not publish a statewide MMIP database with case-level information. The Michigan MMIP Task Force formed in 2024 has not yet produced a public case inventory or statistical report. What the national data shows about Michigan can be inferred from general AI/AN violence statistics, which are generated at the national level and do not disaggregate by state in publicly available formats.
What can be shown is the structural framework, and the structural framework is the primary source of the crisis. The data is thin because the systems that generate data are fragmented. The cases are hard to track because the tracking infrastructure is not unified. The investigations are slow because the jurisdictional authority is divided among agencies that do not routinely coordinate. The perpetrators benefit from a framework that was designed around other priorities and that has not been substantively reformed since Oliphant was decided in 1978.
The women who are missing are not data problems. They are people whose families are waiting for answers that the jurisdictional framework was not built to provide.
Michigan formed an MMIP Task Force in 2024. Savanna’s Act passed in 2020. The Not Invisible Act passed in 2020. The DOJ has issued guidelines. The FBI has assigned liaison positions. And tribal courts still cannot prosecute non-Native perpetrators under a Supreme Court decision from 1978 that was not grounded in treaty text. The most common category of perpetrator in violence against Native women on tribal land remains outside the jurisdictional reach of the entity with the closest community relationship and the best access to information. Everything built since 1978 to address MMIP has been built around that gap rather than through it.
What is the MMIW crisis?
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), also referred to as MMIP or MMIWG, refers to the disproportionate rates of violence, murder, and disappearance experienced by Native American and Alaska Native women. More than 84 percent of AI/AN women have experienced violence in their lifetimes. Murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women ages 10 to 24. The crisis is structurally enabled by a jurisdictional framework that divides investigative authority without functional coordination.
Why is jurisdiction such a problem in MMIW cases?
Under Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978), tribal courts cannot prosecute non-Native perpetrators on tribal land. The majority of perpetrators of violence against Native women on tribal land are non-Native. This means the entity closest to the community cannot prosecute the most common category of offender. Responsibility falls to the FBI and federal prosecutors, who are geographically and culturally more distant and who must coordinate with tribal, state, and local law enforcement without unified data-sharing systems.
What has Michigan done to address MMIW?
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the MMIP Task Force in November 2024, with the first meeting held in September 2024. The Task Force includes tribal leaders, state and federal prosecutors, law enforcement, victim advocates, and human services specialists from Michigan’s twelve federally recognized tribal nations. The Task Force’s stated focus is improving investigation, bridging law enforcement gaps, and developing culturally informed prevention and response strategies.
What is the data gap in MMIW cases?
In 2016, 5,712 cases of missing AI/AN women and girls were reported to NCIC. Only 116 appeared in the DOJ’s NamUs database. The gap reflects the absence of mandatory cross-reporting, racial misclassification in reporting, chronic underreporting in communities with low law enforcement trust, and fragmented data systems with no unified infrastructure. The data cannot show the full scope of the crisis because the infrastructure for capturing it does not function as a unified system.
Bluebook: Williams, Rita. The Jurisdiction That Doesn’t Connect: Michigan’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, the Federal Framework That Fragments the Response, and What the Data Cannot Show, Clutch Justice (July 22, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/07/22/michigan-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-mmip-jurisdiction-gap/.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, July 22). The jurisdiction that doesn’t connect: Michigan’s missing and murdered indigenous people, the federal framework that fragments the response, and what the data cannot show. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/07/22/michigan-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-mmip-jurisdiction-gap/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “The Jurisdiction That Doesn’t Connect: Michigan’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, the Federal Framework That Fragments the Response, and What the Data Cannot Show.” Clutch Justice, 22 July 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/07/22/michigan-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-mmip-jurisdiction-gap/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “The Jurisdiction That Doesn’t Connect: Michigan’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, the Federal Framework That Fragments the Response, and What the Data Cannot Show.” Clutch Justice, July 22, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/07/22/michigan-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-mmip-jurisdiction-gap/.
A Case Analysis Session maps the specific FOIA strategy for a federal or tribal law enforcement file, identifies which agencies hold relevant records, and produces a written roadmap for getting the documentation your situation requires.
