When a Name Goes Missing
- Kimi Floyd Reisch
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Years ago, I was doing research and stumbled on the story of the first woman ordained by the United Church of Christ in California, near the beginning of the twentieth century. The headline celebrated her as a pioneer. The article ran for several long columns in the newspaper, documenting her life in what looked, at first glance, like respectful detail.
But as I read, something felt off. The woman whose ordination was being honored was never named. Not once. She was referred to only as “Mrs.” followed by her husband’s name. Her father was named. Her husband was named. Her congregation’s male ministers were named. Even the two men chosen to preach at her ordination were named. But she, the one whose story was supposedly being celebrated, was treated as if she did not exist apart from the men who surrounded her. In the moment meant to honor her, she was missing. Not even a first name.
That discovery stayed with me. It showed me how easily a person’s life can be erased even while being praised. It showed me how a story can be full of words and still empty of truth. It taught me that erasure is not always done with silence. Sometimes it is done with sentences that leave out the person at the center or with admiration that refuses to see.
The more I looked, the more I realized this kind of erasure of women's stories in our historical records wasn’t the exception. It was the pattern. And it wasn’t limited to white women in the church. It was embedded in the way this country learned to speak about Indigenous women, Black women, Brown women, and mixed women even more than white women. Their stories were often told, yet the women themselves were nowhere to be found. As a descendant of some of these women, I find the erasure of their lives offensive.
Think of Nancy Ward, Ghigau of the Cherokee. She held a role with political and spiritual authority older than the United States itself. She shaped alliances, counseled leaders, and fought for her people’s survival. Yet today, she’s mostly remembered as the woman who warned settlers of an impending attack by her people, as if her worth lived only in her usefulness to the colonizers who later forced her from her land. Her leadership becomes a footnote. She becomes a symbol of compliance and assimilation, rather than a woman navigating the impossible decisions of a world collapsing around her.
Or Sacajawea. She’s remembered as the calm, guiding presence of the Lewis and Clark expedition, a young mother carrying her infant across immense landscapes. But the truth is that she was taken as a child, sold, held as a wife in circumstances shaped by slavery, and forced into the expedition as a translator and navigator. The nation prefers the softened tale, the picture of harmony and partnership, because the truth exposes how deeply violence and exploitation sit at the foundation of American expansion. Even on our coins, Sacajawea is more myth than woman. She is a symbol, and few know that her death and burial have been debated for a century or more. Officially, she died at 25 at a trading post in what would become South Dakota, around 1812. This is often confirmed with the notation in the trader's report that her husband lost a wife in childbirth and putrid fever. But Toussaint Charbonneau had multiple wives, and there is a different story told in Wyoming. Sacagawea of the Agaidika Shoshone was known and remembered. She was kidnapped at 12, taken North and lost (sold) in a poker game to Charbonneau. Along the trip with Lewis and Clark, she encountered her older brother. When she was older, she left or was abandoned by her husband and came back to her people after living for a time with the Comanche, and she lived to be 100. She is buried in Wyoming on the reservation under the name Porivo, which translates to Chief Woman.
I see the same rhythm in my own family history, in the story of my ancestor Margaret Brant - a woman born into Mohawk and Lenape lineage, whose children lived at the crossroads of worlds, whose descendants carried stories softened or suppressed to keep them alive. Her life, like Nancy Ward’s and Sacajawea’s, became a place where gendered erasure and Indigenous erasure met, reinforcing each other until the truth was almost unrecognizable. There is an entire branch of her descendants who insist she was born to European parents, even though the parents they name had a much older daughter also named Margaret, but at least a decade older. And her supposed mother would have been sixty when she was born, an incredibly rare occurrence in the world. Even when confronted with the truth revealed in DNA connections, they persist in their delusion which erases so much of her history.
These forms of erasure are not accidental. They are features of a world built on the belief that Indigenous women could not be leaders, strategists, diplomats, visionaries, or forces of political consequence. So the nation rewrote them into versions of womanhood that served the colonizers’ story. And when their bodies, their choices, or their power contradicted the myth, those parts were simply left out—just like the nameless ordained woman whose life was described in detail without ever acknowledging her own personhood.
Let's name it clearly - erasure is an act of violence. It takes a human being with relationships, responsibilities, triumphs, heartache, community, and agency, and it reduces her to a narrative that protects the comfort of others. But memory, once recovered, becomes a form of resistance. Restory-ing and reclaiming those truths once hidden or erased does not create new truths. It reveals what has been there all along.
Lives like these, when fully seen, disrupt the stories this nation tells about itself. They remind us that erasure is not only historical. It is ongoing. Telling their stories with honesty is not only nostalgia. It is an act of repair. To speak their names now is to bring them back into the center of their own stories, and to refuse the versions written for someone else’s comfort.
And there is another truth: Once we start erasing some, it becomes easier to erase or remove others.
There is an epidemic of murder and disappearances among Black and American Indian women in this nation. The numbers are staggering, and the silence around them is part of the same pattern I’ve been naming.
Black women have an overall homicide rate of roughly 4.4 per 100,000, while American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) women track just behind at 4.3 per 100,000. Both figures are nearly three times higher than the homicide rate for White women (1.5 per 100,000).
State-level task force studies reveal that only 30% of Indigenous homicide victims and 18% of missing Indigenous women receive any newspaper or media coverage. In stark contrast, 51% of cases involving White women are covered by the media.
Analysis of missing person print coverage found that Black women account for only 9% of news articles despite making up over one-third of all missing women. White women comprise roughly 50% of all articles.
When Indigenous and Black women do get covered, their articles are four times shorter on average than those of White women. The articles also rely heavily on detached, clinical, or negative character framing. White women are frequently given deeply humanizing, front-page biographies.
Federal tracking shows massive entry gaps. For instance, in a single tracking year, out of 5,712 reports of missing Indigenous women and girls made to local law enforcement, only 116 cases were successfully entered into the federal National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).
Black girls are disproportionately classified by police as "runaways" or "voluntary disappearances" at much higher rates than White girls. This classification legally prevents or delays the issuance of Amber Alerts and critical early-stage investigative spending.
Data highlights that 21% of missing Black and Indigenous people remain missing for 30 days or longer, whereas only 11% of White missing person cases remain unresolved for that length of time.
This is not just a matter of whose names are remembered, but whose lives are valued and protected, and whose disappearances are allowed to remain invisible. Erasure is not only historical - it is still happening now. And the work of repair begins with refusing to look away.
Questions for Reflection
Whose names or stories have you noticed missing in the histories you were taught?
Have you ever witnessed someone being erased or reduced to a symbol, even in moments meant to honor them? What did you notice about their identity?
How does your community remember (or forget) its women, especially women at the intersections of race, nation, and story? Are there others who are equally forgotten or remembered? How does disability, sexuality, gender, or mental health impact the likelihood of being forgotten?
What might it look like to bring those names and stories back to the center?
Further Reading
Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England
This book powerfully documents how settler colonial narratives systematically erased Indigenous presence and agency from local histories, often by “firsting” (claiming settlers as the first real inhabitants) and “lasting” (declaring Indigenous people as the last of their kind). O’Brien’s research helps readers see how stories are written to erase, and why naming people and their roles matters.
Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States
Simpson’s work explores the ways in which Mohawk people, and especially Mohawk women, navigate, resist, and interrupt the boundaries imposed by settler colonial power. This book is vital for understanding how Indigenous women’s leadership, agency, and story are continually marginalized or misunderstood, and how reclaiming narrative is an act of sovereignty and survival.
bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
bell hooks brings a deeply personal and political lens to the question of whose voices are heard, whose are silenced, and how Black women are often erased even in spaces that claim to honor them. Her essays on speaking, memory, and resistance to erasure are directly relevant to your reflections on both gender and racialized storytelling.
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions
Allen’s foundational work re-centers Indigenous women’s roles, leadership, and spiritual authority in Native traditions while challenging both settler and patriarchal re-writings of history. Her scholarship and storytelling are crucial for anyone seeking to repair the erasure of Indigenous women, especially in faith, tradition, and community memory.
"Murder in Big Horn"
(Showtime/Paramount+, 2023)
This three-part documentary series focuses on the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous girls and young women in Big Horn County, Montana, on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations. It centers Indigenous families, journalists, and advocates as they search for answers amid law enforcement neglect, systemic racism, and a national crisis of erasure. The film powerfully ties the realities of present-day violence to the ongoing legacy of colonialism and the silence surrounding these stories. Big Horn County, Montana is the northern side of the county in Wyoming where I grew up.
“Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland”
(HBO, 2018)
This documentary investigates the death of Sandra Bland, a Black woman found dead in a Texas jail after a traffic stop, and explores the systemic issues of racial profiling, police violence, and the erasure of Black women’s stories in both media and justice systems.
“Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo”
(CBC, 2018, podcast and documentary)
While “Finding Cleo” began as a podcast, it was also adapted into a CBC documentary segment. It tells the story of Cleo Nicotine Semaganis, a Cree girl taken from her family during Canada’s “Sixties Scoop,” and investigates the broader crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The series lays bare the systemic failures and ongoing erasure faced by Indigenous families seeking justice.
"Black and Missing"
(HBO, 2021)
"Black and Missing" is a four-part HBO documentary series following the founders of the Black and Missing Foundation, who work to spotlight the often-overlooked cases of missing Black children and adults in the U.S. It examines why Black missing persons are so frequently classified as runaways, why their cases receive less media attention, and how families fight for justice and visibility.
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