Montana, Summer 2017. A 20-year-old woman disappears from the massive Blackfeet reservation in the northwest corner of the state.
In June 2017, Ashley Heavyrunner Loring was seen on video at a family party on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. That same day she exchanged text messages with her older sister, Kimberly, who was in Morocco, visiting her fiancé. That was the last Loring’s family heard from her. After a week went by, the family reported her missing to authorities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but they were met with indifference. Even when witnesses came forward claiming to have seen a woman running from a vehicle and a sweatshirt similar to Loring’s was found in a nearby dump, law enforcement did not seem to take her disappearance seriously—a situation far too common with Native women, who disappear and are murdered at much higher rates than women of other backgrounds.
Kimberly Heavyrunner Loring took it upon herself to search for Ashley, scouring the rugged terrain of the reservation and searching for clues, asking questions in communities deeply affected by domestic violence and drug and alcohol abuse. In December 2018, Kimberly was invited to speak at a United States Senate committee meeting in DC about the disturbing number of unsolved disappearances in Native communities, raising nationwide awareness not just of her sister’s case but of the larger crisis of missing Indigenous women.
Anaïs Renevier explores the case, digging into the details of Ashley Heavyrunner Loring’s disappearance as well as the tragic circumstances that have created a “black hole” into which so many Native women disappear.
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