Hanna Harris was born on May 5, 1992. Northern Cheyenne. She disappeared on July 4, 2013, after going to watch fireworks in Lame Deer, Montana. She was twenty-one years old. Her family reported her missing. Law enforcement did not conduct an adequate search. Her family and friends searched for her themselves. They found her body five days later. She had been raped and murdered.
May 5 is her birthday. That is why today is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples.
In October 2020, President Trump signed the Not Invisible Act β the first bill in U.S. history introduced and passed by four members of Congress enrolled in federally recognized tribes. The act created a commission. Forty-one commissioners spent three years gathering testimony. They collected more than 250 statements from survivors, families, tribal experts. They produced a 212-page report called “Not One More.” It recommended enhanced law enforcement resources for tribal investigations. Improved tracking systems. Foster care protocols requiring immediate reporting to tribes. Congressional funding for anti-trafficking efforts.
In January 2025, the administration that signed the law removed the report from the Department of Justice website. The justification: compliance with an executive order against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. Three years of testimony from families of murdered women. Classified as DEI content. Deleted.
This is the fact that should stop you: tribal nations are sovereign political entities, not a racial category. They have government-to-government relationships with the United States, established by treaty. Calling a report about murdered members of sovereign nations a “diversity initiative” is not a policy disagreement. It is a reclassification. It takes a political relationship β one the United States agreed to β and demotes it to a demographic checkbox. Then it deletes the checkbox.
The numbers exist whether the report does or not. The FBI reported 10,248 missing Indigenous persons in 2024. Of those, 5,614 were women. Most of the women were under eighteen. The Sovereign Bodies Institute found that Native women and girls are murdered or go missing at six times the national rate. Their cases are six times more likely to go unsolved.
Six times the rate. Six times less likely to be solved. That is not a gap. That is a policy.
Kristin Welch, a Menominee Nation descendant who served on the commission, said after the removal: “I don’t know who’s going to carry the recommendations out. The report being removed doesn’t inspire hope under this administration.“
Thirteen members of Congress have called on the DOJ to restore the report. It has not been restored.
Today, across the country, people are wearing red. There are marches in Michigan, vigils in Montana, candlelight ceremonies in Minnesota. Families who did their own searches because law enforcement wouldn’t are standing together in public, holding photographs of people the system failed to find. Ruth Buffalo, CEO of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center: “The community continues to lead these efforts, and the work doesn’t stop.“
The work doesn’t stop. That is the sentence that matters. Not the law. Not the commission. Not the report. The families never needed a federal website to know their people were missing. They needed the federal government to act like it knew. For three years, forty-one commissioners built the proof. The government deleted the proof and called it cleanup.
Hanna Harris would have been thirty-four today. Her family searched for her because the system wouldn’t. Twelve years later, the system deleted the report that said it should have.
You can remove a report from a website. You cannot make a missing person less missing. You cannot make a murdered woman less dead. You cannot reclassify a treaty obligation as a diversity initiative and expect the obligation to disappear with the webpage.
The red dresses are still hanging. The families are still searching. The data is still the data, whether it lives on a government server or not.
The deletion is not the crime. The deletion is the confession.
Sources: ICT News, Native News Online, North Coast Journal, Oklahoma Watch, Native News Online, NIWRC.
// NEON BLOOD
And today, at the Rock at UT Knoxville, had a mural painted for MMIW, only to be immediately covered up by advertisements for WWE Raw coming soon to Knoxville.
The report gets deleted by executive order. The mural gets deleted by a media buy.
Different scale. Same mechanism. The awareness doesn’t get argued against β it gets scheduled over.
The Rock at UT Knoxville is designed to be repainted. That’s the tradition β anyone can claim the surface. But the speed matters. An MMIW mural on MMIP Awareness Day, covered by an ad for a company running on a $5 billion Netflix deal. The replacement didn’t require anyone to disagree with the cause. It just required someone with a budget and a premiere date.
That’s the part that makes it structural. The federal deletion took an executive decision and a reclassification. The physical deletion just took a marketing team that didn’t think twice.
Neither one had to be malicious. That’s worse.
// NEON BLOOD