South Dakota has 105 open missing persons cases. Sixty-six involve Native Americans. Forty-five of those are children.

Native Americans are 9 percent of South Dakota’s population. They are 63 percent of its missing.

For three and a half years, the state’s entire response to this was one woman with a phone number.

Allison Morrisette, Oglala Lakota, grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. She became South Dakota’s first Missing and Murdered Indigenous People liaison in November 2022. She worked out of Rapid City. She knew the prosecutors, the sheriffs, the police chiefs, the people who run domestic violence shelters. For families in far-flung corners of the state who felt disconnected from the criminal justice system — or lost somewhere inside it — Morrisette was the person who picked up.

She left the position this month. She took a job with the Unified Judicial System, working with young offenders. She called serving as MMIP liaison an honor.

“It was far more than a job for me,” she told South Dakota Searchlight. “I hope somebody really good applies for this position, and that it’s not just a job for them.”

Here is how the position came to exist.

In 2021, the South Dakota legislature passed House Bill 1199, creating an Office of Liaison for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons within the Attorney General’s Office. The bill’s prime sponsor was Representative Peri Pourier, Oglala Lakota. The state shares its lands with nine tribal nations. Sixty percent of the missing persons cases on the Attorney General’s website involve Native Americans. The percentages are higher for women and girls.

The legislature created the position. The legislature did not fund it.

The Attorney General at the time was Jason Ravnsborg. He asked for between $60,000 and $70,000 in his budget. He did not fill the position. In September 2020, he had struck and killed a man named Joe Boever with his car on Highway 14 near Highmore. He told the 911 dispatcher he thought he’d hit a deer. He was impeached in June 2022. The MMIP liaison position had been vacant for over a year.

Native Hope, a nonprofit based in Chamberlain, South Dakota, stepped in with a three-year grant: $85,000 per year. A nonprofit funded the position because the state that created it would not.

Mark Vargo, the new Attorney General, hired Morrisette. She started November 28, 2022.

One person. Nine tribal nations. A phone number: 605-295-0003.

In her first year, she told SDPB that every case she worked involved jurisdictional complications across state, county, and tribal levels. She highlighted one county — Pennington — that had an emergency management MOU with the Oglala Sioux Tribe as a model for collaboration. One county out of sixty-six.

“This first year has been me learning the issues and identifying them,” she said. “I think this next year is figuring out how we’re going to eliminate that or work around it.”

She helped organize DNA drives to identify 273 unidentified Indigenous people. She presented statistics statewide. She connected families with investigators, victim-witness assistants, shelters. She built relationships with tribal entities across the state — “sometimes it’s just being able to give them a direct line versus a generic number of somebody to reach.”

A direct line. That’s what the infrastructure was. One person’s phone.

Meanwhile, the federal architecture around her was being dismantled. The Not Invisible Act Commission spent two years producing a 212-page report on MMIP and human trafficking. The Trump administration deleted the report from federal websites, classifying it as DEI material. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Missing and Murdered Unit — 26 offices across 15 states — has investigated 735 cases and solved or closed 264 since 2021. BIA law enforcement funding sits at 14 percent of documented need, a $2.33 billion shortfall. The proposed FY2026 budget cuts DOJ grantmaking by $850 million, consolidates the Office of Tribal Justice into a larger bureau, and reduces the Office on Violence Against Women by $207.5 million.

“It’s become normalized here,” Morrisette said about missing Native Americans in South Dakota.

She’s right. And the normalization has a structure.

The structure looks like this: pass a law, don’t fund it. Let a nonprofit cover it. Let one person carry it. When that person leaves, hope somebody applies.

South Dakota is the state where ICWA was passed in 1978 and compliance arrived 48 years late. Where Congress mandated a feasibility study for an Indigenous medical school in 1975 and a private foundation funded it 51 years later. Where 69 percent of foster children are Native while 9 percent of the population is. The pattern is not neglect. Neglect implies someone forgot. This is architecture. The law exists. The funding doesn’t. The position exists. The person is temporary.

At the MMIP conference in Rapid City in April, Attorney General Marty Jackley said: “We have 105 cases in South Dakota where families are hurting, and they’re looking for answers.”

For three and a half years, one of those answers was Allison Morrisette’s phone number.

The phone number is still listed. The person behind it is not.

// NEON BLOOD