Native AmericansWhen a taskforce was put in place to tackle the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people, the testimonies of victims’ families were cut short
Nada Fronk had run away before, but this time was different.
When Nada would go missing, her father, Monte Fronk, would send her photo to the first responders he knew. They were his colleagues, his brotherhood and sisterhood – he knew they would keep an eye out for his daughter.
As the emergency management coordinator for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, Monte had worked in public safety for over 25 years. But this time, his contacts weren’t enough.
“Things went dark,” Monte recalls. At 16, Nada disappeared.
When Monte and Jenn Fronk first met Nada, the nine-year-old had been in foster care for most of her life. Looking to adopt, the couple visited Nada and her sister Lanicia, who was just two. “You go in there with your heart open,” says Monte, a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa.
He remembers visiting the sisters at their foster home. Nada and Lanicia were dressed in ragged clothes. They slept in a closet. The Fronks adopted the girls, both enrolled members of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and brought them home to the tiny lakeside town of Isle, Minnesota.
It wasn’t long before the new parents realized how little they had been told about their eldest. Monte, a tribal EMT, and Jenn, a social worker, began noticing worrying signs. It became clear that Nada had been born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder – a group of conditions that can cause learning and behavioral problems. She displayed poor impulse control, seemed to have the emotional processing of a much younger child and, most alarmingly, would threaten to hang herself. There were times, Monte remembers, when the police were called.
“Her mother Jenn and I had to make a very gut-wrenching decision for the safety of her sister,” says Monte. Though they never surrendered their parental rights, they placed Nada, who was 10, in out-of-home care but they struggled to find an appropriate facility. Nada bounced from placement to placement.
In her teens, she began to run away. “When the services did not meet her needs, she was just so frustrated she just would want to run from that,” Monte explains.
Just for a few days, at first. But the stretches grew longer and longer.
In 2013, Nada disappeared. “And that,” says Monte, “was the beginning of a very frightful journey for her.”
Months passed, and still Monte’s contacts turned up nothing. Nada’s social worker made little effort to find her, he says. Monte felt the case was being overlooked because this was “just a Native family”.
No one knows how many Indigenous people have gone missing or been murdered in the US. The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates there are about 4,200 unsolved cases alone, but actual numbers may be much higher. Advocates say that the epidemic stretches back to colonization, with systemic racism continuing to drive rates of victimization.
Underreporting, racial misclassification and the lack of a single federal database mean that available figures tell an incomplete story. For survivors and families, justice can be elusive. Many cases are caught in a jurisdictional maze of local, tribal, state and federal authorities, making it hard to know who bears responsibility for an investigation.
Were it not for the profession he was in, Monte wouldn’t have known where to turn. He emailed Nicole Matthews, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition, whom he’d met years earlier. She put a call out. And that’s how Monte connected with another Minnesotan parent of a missing child, Patty Wetterling.
Wetterling’s 11-year-old son Jacob had been abducted 24 years earlier. Wetterling, who is non-Indigenous, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, a non-profit focused on child safety. She’s helped countless families of missing children, but she still remembers Monte clearly.
To Monte, Wetterling was a lifeline. She would call constantly, he remembers, “to say, ‘how are you doing? How are you holding up?’”
Wetterling and her team got to work. She knew that sometimes, missing children come home. Their stories were keeping her going.
She kept a scrapbook filled with tales of miraculous rescues and joyful reunions – newspaper clippings of recovered children from across the country. The book became something of a talisman for a searching parent. It was “one of the things that carried me”, says Wetterling. She shared that hope with Monte.
While there was hope, there was also terror. One night, Monte was watching the news. The frozen body of a young woman had been discovered in the trunk of a car in an impound yard. It sounded like Nada. “I knew one of the responders from that agency, and basically called them and said: ‘Listen, my daughter is missing.’”
Monte sent Nada’s photo to the authorities and waited to find out if he’d be called to identify her body. It wasn’t her.
The relief didn’t last. One day, Monte remembers, authorities began seeing photos of Nada circulating on adult websites. His daughter was being advertised to customers paying for sex. It was clear, he says, that Nada was being sex trafficked.
The proliferation of online platforms – like the now-shuttered Backpage – has made it incredibly easy to shop for victims, states Tonya Price, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations and an expert in juvenile sex trafficking in Minnesota. According to Price, purchasing underage sex is as easy as shopping on Amazon Prime.
While seeing his daughter being sold online horrified Monte, it was proof of life. She was out there, somewhere.
Suddenly, the ads stopped. Both Wetterling and Monte knew what that could mean.
As time passed, it looked increasingly unlikely that Nada was still alive. Then Monte’s phone rang. St Paul police had a lead on a runaway, who turned out to be Nada. They tracked her to a nearby house and brought her to the station.
Nada wasn’t talking. It would be months before her family learned what she’d lived through.
According to Alison Feigh, who worked on Nada’s case alongside Wetterling, “the end of the story isn’t always when the child is recovered. That’s the middle of the story – or the beginning of a new chapter.”
In the years following Nada’s disappearance, Monte never spoke publicly about what happened. Talking about it felt like reliving it. But in mid-2020, he decided to share his story with a federal taskforce investigating cases like Nada’s.
When Operation Lady Justice (OLJ) was announced in November 2019, Indigenous communities had been fighting for decades for the federal government to take action. Few advocates would have guessed that President Trump would be the one to do so, signing an executive order a couple of days after Thanksgiving.
The taskforce was established to address an epidemic of sexual violence and homicide known as missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP), which disproportionately affects women and girls.
From the start, the initiative was criticized for failing to include survivors, family members, grassroots organizers and tribal leaders.
Still, many greeted the development with cautious optimism, including Monte.
In May 2020, Kellyanne Conway delivered the opening remarks at the first public listening session for OLJ. “We look very forward, um, to hearing your input,” said the presidential adviser.
But in a session that lasted over two hours, Indigenous members of the public spoke for less than 10 minutes. The consultation covered a region which includes at least 62,000 tribal members.
At public listening sessions throughout 2020, the taskforce did a lot of talking, but very little listening. Members and government officials spoke, on average, about 60% of the time – with no small part spent introducing themselves and thanking Trump.
Listening sessions aren’t easy to do well, says Kevin Washburn, assistant secretary for Indian affairs under President Obama and a member of the Chickasaw Nation. Meaningful consultation takes hard work. However, if the taskforce has been running a “sort of a dog and pony show” instead of truly listening, “that’s not good”.
In several sessions, victims’ families pleaded for help and directed specific questions to the taskforce, only to be met with silence.
Monte spoke at a virtual listening session in June 2020. He wanted to help families still searching.
When his name was called, he looked into his webcam and began to speak: “I am a Native father of a teenage daughter who was trafficked.”
As soon as he began, a timer started ticking down on his screen. He spoke quickly, his pace increasing as the timer ticked on.
He hadn’t expected there would be a time limit, but still he talked with passion and determination, steadying himself whenever his voice began to tremble. He couldn’t see the faces of the federal taskforce, but he knew they were there.
Monte told them that his daughter Nada disappeared as a teenager, but not about the night he thought he lost her. He spoke of how Nada had been sex trafficked, but didn’t have time to explain how he found out. He told them that unlike so many other Indigenous people, his daughter came home.
And then, mid-sentence, his mic was muted.
A few months after Nada was found, she made a decision. Officer Randy Moyer was stationed at her school, Bemidji High. Kids would knock on his door, open up to him.
Nada started talking, but not long after she began, Moyer stopped the conversation. He knew he had a traumatized student in front of him; he’d need a forensic interview with an expert trained in speaking to juvenile survivors of sex crimes.
The Bemidji police set it up. Detective Daniel Seaberg observed via CCTV. “It was very traumatic, some of the things that she was sharing,” he recalls.
Afterwards, Monte received a copy of the report. “It was the most graphically degrading thing you could ever read as a parent,” he remembers, trying hard to steady his voice as he fights back tears.
With his consent, the Guardian has seen the report. Nada spoke of the time she was missing. She revealed that she had been physically and sexually assaulted, sexually exploited and trafficked.
According to Monte, the man who trafficked Nada was her birth mother’s pimp, who sold mother and daughter as a double act.
Seaberg says he referred the case to an officer at the St Paul police, who spoke with Monte. But the trail goes cold here: St Paul has no record of any investigation. The Guardian checked with multiple police departments and county attorneys’ offices. None were aware of any investigation into the sex crimes Nada described.
Despite the horrors she endured, Monte is grateful his daughter lived to speak of them. “To have a child who was being trafficked, presumed dead, but found alive is really a rarity. Because the stories I hear from Indian Country is, they’re never found alive or even found at all.”
A couple of months after Nada’s interview, she ran away again. This time, it took a few weeks to find her.
Alison Feigh, the director of the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, believes there are many misconceptions about kids who run away repeatedly. “What can actually happen,” she says, “is the child can be brought home by police through the front door, and the pull and the fear that child has of their pimp has them running out the back door 15 minutes later. And then we start all over again.”
Monte had been talking to the taskforce for five and a half minutes when he was muted.
He is one of many family members and advocates whose voices were literally silenced or cut short during Operation Lady Justice listening sessions. It’s not the first time those affected have gone unheard; the defining symbol of the MMIP movement is a red handprint covering a woman’s mouth.
“If I was cut off from my story,” he says, “how many other fellow Native families were also cut off trying to tell theirs?”
An analysis of all publicly available listening sessions shows that in 2020, at least eight speakers were muted. One was silenced right after she uttered the words: “We can improve the response to missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives if we listen to what our tribes need.”
In all eight cases, the muting process was attributed to an automated software feature, which participants were told would kick in at the three-minute mark. Yet speakers were silenced at various points in time. In most cases, including Monte’s, there is no indication in official transcripts that a speaker was muted. No taskforce member was cut off.
Among the silenced was Carolyn DeFord. Her mother Leona Kinsey, a Puyallup tribal member, vanished from La Grande, Oregon, in 1999. DeFord, also Puyallup, has spent most of her adult life searching for answers. Like so many families, she’s had to go to extraordinary lengths to seek justice.
According to DeFord, a few years after her mother disappeared, local police received a tip that Kinsey’s body had been dumped in a nearby pond. DeFord kept calling, asking when they would search the pond. “Someday”, they told her. Years passed and DeFord confronted an officer on her mother’s case. She asked him how deep the pond was. He told her it was knee deep, maybe waist deep in parts.
This was the moment, DeFord says, she was done “being a good little Indian”. She called everyone she could to push for the pond to be searched. Nine years after they received the tip, police finally conducted the search. DeFord’s mother is still missing.
At the first listening session DeFord spoke at, she was muted. At another, she yielded her time to a respected elder, who was told to wrap up despite being the only remaining speaker at a session that was scheduled to last an hour and a half but finished after 30 minutes.
For DeFord, the experience “was really retraumatizing”. When you invite survivors and relatives to testify, she says, you need to understand that “you’re asking to open a wound”.
The taskforce seemed to heed the criticism. By August 2020, no speakers were muted, there was no three-minute cut-off and new software was introduced. Still, short time limits persisted at most sessions and several people were interrupted and asked to finish.
To Monte, cutting off Indigenous people is culturally inappropriate. “We’re storytellers,” he says. DeFord agrees. “If we had invited them to our house to listen to our stories, it might’ve been different,” she says, “but we didn’t. They invited us to theirs.”
“Grace, if you are on the call, you may offer your testimony.” The operator at an August 2020 listening session calls Grace Bulltail’s name, but she’s not there to hear it.
Bulltail is sitting by the side of a busy road in Hardin, Montana, in 32C (90F) heat. She’ll remain here for six days in protest for her niece, Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, a member of the Crow Tribe.
The traffic is constant, but no one in this border town stops to see what is happening.
It has been a year since the 18-year-old’s body was found, lying in a suburban yard just beyond the fence line from where her aunt sits.
Bulltail, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is here to demand justice for the kind-hearted young woman she helped raise. According to Bulltail, also a member of the Crow Tribe, her family was notified of Stops Pretty Places’ death almost two weeks after her body was found. They waited 16 weeks for an autopsy report and were never interviewed by law enforcement. They have been left to navigate the justice system on their own, she says.
The Big Horn county sheriff, Lawrence Big Hair, did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for information on the case.
On her second day sitting vigil for her niece, the academic tried to call into a listening session, but without wifi, she couldn’t log on.
Throughout 2020, tribal leaders told OLJ members that the digital divide was preventing many from being heard – Indian Country often doesn’t get good reception. Holding virtual hearings during a pandemic was always going to be a challenge, but the inaccessibility of the OLJ sessions showed that the taskforce didn’t understand the needs of the communities it was designed to serve.
Technical issues, crackly audio and long pauses disrupted testimony at several sessions.
Despite everything, many were determined to try to reach the taskforce. In September 2020, DeFord used Facebook to encourage people to testify. “Now’s the time to be heard … good, bad, straight up pissed off – I get it,” she wrote. Yes, the initiative was deeply flawed, but please, log on, write, do what you can, she pleaded.
“We need to bury them in testimonies.”
Eventually, Nada stopped running. She turned 18 and began living independently, moving forward with her life. By her early 20s, she had gone back to school, got her high school diploma, landed a sales job and was dreaming of a career where she could help other survivors.
For her 20th birthday, Nada and Monte went for dinner to a Brazilian steakhouse. It was the first time Nada could afford to pay for her dad. She worked overtime for a week to make sure she had enough.
There was something she needed to say.
“Dad, when I look back at my life, the only reason I am alive is because of you,” she told him.
This moment remains the proudest of Monte’s life.
That night, Nada came home to her partner feeling lighter, happier.
Nada had met her boyfriend Shan Bay Vang, who goes by “Bay”, at work. She always hated her crooked smile, but he loved it. She didn’t trust most people, but she trusted him. He made her feel safe.
Bay and Nada lived together, got engaged and fantasized about the lives that lay before them. But things were far from easy. The many traumas of Nada’s youth stayed with her. At times she’d get angry, or drink too much. The consequences of her fetal alcohol syndrome meant that relationships would always be a struggle.
After six years together, they split. Later, Bay would say he wished he’d been there to protect her from what followed.
When the listening sessions continued under the Biden administration with the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in US history, Deb Haaland, as co-chair, there was hope that things would be different. Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and a respected leader on MMIP issues, launched the Missing and Murdered Unit (MMU) to investigate cases.
On 7 May 2021, a revamped OLJ taskforce held its first listening session. “Rest assured, we are going to listen to everybody,” attendees were told. There were no time limits and no technical hiccups.
But just two days earlier, on National Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day, Indigenous advocacy groups had released a statement to “speak against the trauma Operation Lady Justice has caused”. They criticized the failure to let families “have their voices heard”. There was no response from the Biden administration.
As groundbreaking as Haaland’s appointment was, too many bridges had already been burned. The taskforce would need to reckon with the failings of its first year and the treatment of those who came to share their stories.
Monte felt hopeful that would happen, but he had no plans to address the taskforce again. There were other families that needed to be heard. Nada’s story, it seemed, was long over.
It was just before dawn on 26 May 2021 when shots rang out at the Golden Gates apartment complex in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The rounds hit several apartments and no one could tell where they were coming from. Bullets tore through the floor of one unit, the ceiling of another.
Police arrived and began evacuating the building, but there was no response from apartment 103. The door was barricaded. Officers slid a snake camera under the crack of the door. Two bodies lay inside, a man and a woman.
A Swat team broke down the door and found Nada Fronk, 24, shot to death in a murder-suicide by her boyfriend, Cordell Alexander Page Jr, 23.
Monte worked late that day. He’d been called to a house fire and didn’t hear his phone. Then he saw a text from his younger daughter: “Dad, you have to call home. It’s an emergency.”
When his ex-wife Jenn picked up the phone, she was wailing. He asked her, “Is our daughter dead?” but he knew the answer.
After Nada’s death, her family and community came together to prepare her for the “journey of the path of souls” – a four-day Ojibwe funeral. Monte lit a spirit fire in his yard and kept it alight for four days.
On the first night, Jenn and Monte boiled cedar wood, collected the water in a small bowl and tenderly washed their daughter’s body.
It’s a purification process few families participate in, says spiritual leader Baabiitaw Boyd (Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe), who led Nada’s funeral. It can be too painful. But it was something Jenn wanted to do for her daughter.
As Jenn and Monte gently wiped down Nada’s body, they looked at each other and, almost in unison, said that they knew that this could happen one day. That they’d lose her.
For Monte, being able to give his daughter an Ojibwe funeral has been crucial to his healing. Spiritually, culturally, everything that needed to be done was done, says Monte.
He knows that for so many families, there is no body to wash or bury, no answers to be found.
After Nada’s death, a number of people told Monte: “well, at least you know what happened to her.” A part of him agrees.
“They did receive some sort of closure,” says advocate Nicole Matthews, “but who would want that, that closure?”
Monte was not going to let his strong, compassionate daughter become another statistic. “That’s how I see my role as her father, to honor her.” Nada had wanted to be of service to Indigenous youth. He would make sure that still happened. “Her story needs to be told.”
He decided to address the taskforce once more. He checked the website, monitored his emails. Monte waited for a listening session that never came.
Under President Biden, the taskforce held only three public listening sessions: one for grassroots organizations, one for LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit communities and one on data. There were plans for “closed sessions with families”, but no details provided.
He heard nothing further.
While Monte waited for a chance to speak to the taskforce, Bulltail had given up trying. “I mean, I just don’t know what the point is,” she said. Her family repeatedly wrote to the taskforce and never heard back.
Big Horn county attorney Jay Harris (Crow Tribe) says that while Stops Pretty Places’ death is considered suspicious, no cause has been found. Harris told the Guardian that local law enforcement continues to investigate with assistance from Haaland’s Missing and Murdered Unit. However the family’s lawyer, Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee Nation), says that the federal unit is not providing assistance, despite the family’s repeated pleas. A spokesperson for the Bureau of Indian Affairs confirmed that the MMU is not pursuing the case.
In August 2021, Bulltail was in Hardin for the second anniversary of her niece’s death, in what has become an annual #JusticeforKaysera campaign. On the last day, 11 September, a 22-year-old white woman, Gabby Petito, was reported missing.
It’s been said that Indigenous women disappear “not once but three times – in life, in the media and in the data”. In contrast to Stops Pretty Places, Petito’s disappearance and death received constant media attention. Monte couldn’t help but notice the disparity in the way Nada’s death was reported.
“In my daughter’s case, 24 years of life equals less than 12 minutes of news time.”
When OLJ ended on 26 November 2021, no one seemed to notice. There was no statement from the administration, no mainstream media coverage. The final report to Biden, due in late November 2021, still hasn’t been released. (The Department of Justice did not respond to multiple inquiries from the Guardian about the status of the final report.) Less than two weeks before the initiative ended, Biden signed a new executive order to address violence against Indigenous people. It did not include a single reference to OLJ.
It’s difficult to know what conclusions the taskforce drew from two years of consultation. The Guardian sought interviews with the secretary of the interior, Deb Haaland, and with Marcia Good, the executive director of the taskforce throughout its run. Neither was available.
“I can’t say that nothing has come of it,” says DeFord, who sees the program a little differently now. “I think, bare minimum, it opened some agencies’ eyes.” Bulltail is less optimistic. “It’s just been a false hope,” she says.
While the first major federal effort to address this nationwide crisis faded into obscurity, the government turned its attention elsewhere. It began implementing Savanna’s Act and the Not Invisible Act, but missed key deadlines. In March, the Violence Against Women Act, which lapsed under Trump, was reauthorized. Advocates hailed the inclusion of new protections for Indigenous women.
DeFord, Bulltail and Monte find it difficult to keep track. Too often, families are invited to testify at the last minute, says Bulltail. It can feel as if agencies are “just trotting out these families, asking of their time, making false promises to them”.
Nevertheless, a shift has started. Monte, DeFord and Bulltail have each been invited to serve on a new initiative. In Monte’s home state, a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office has been created – the first in the country. The lieutenant governor’s office says he will be involved. DeFord is now a member of Washington state’s task force, while Bulltail has been appointed to the long-awaited Not Invisible Act Commission.
Despite the roles Bulltail and DeFord now hold, their loved ones’ cases remain open. The MMU has begun looking into the disappearance of DeFord’s mother. For her, finally, it feels like there’s some momentum. La Grande police are also pursuing all available leads, says Lt Jason Hays. He’s hopeful that his department will solve the case one day.
Almost a year later, those who came to share their stories are left wondering if anyone will ever listen. Bulltail, DeFord and Monte have all been searching for justice. It looks different now to each of them.
Nothing is going to stop Bulltail from finding out how her beloved niece ended up dead in a suburban yard. “I’m extremely persistent,” says Bulltail. “I made it from the reservation to get a PhD.”
For her, justice would mean authorities treat her niece as a murder victim and properly investigate her death, and that those who failed to do so are held to account.
“We really have to put up a fight that is incredibly taxing,” says Bulltail. “You know, especially being as brokenhearted as we are.”
In the 22 years since DeFord’s mother vanished, she’s never stopped searching for her. But some days, she’s not sure if finding her will make any difference. DeFord has long believed her mother’s body lies in the woods that surround La Grande, Oregon. If police uncover any remains now, DeFord worries that they will just sit in an evidence locker.
There are some days, she says, when she thinks it might be better for her mother to be left undisturbed in the wilderness she loved.
In the days after Nada was killed, Monte went to her apartment to pack up her things. Nada’s clothing was blood-soaked, he recalls. He could see bullet holes all around her home. After he carefully sorted his daughter’s belongings into boxes, he made a phone call to the mother of the man who had killed his daughter.
“We have both lost our children,” he said. The two parents had never met and it would be the only time they spoke.
“I just want you to know, we’ve got all of Cordell’s things packed up,” he told her. “When you’re ready, you’re allowed to go in there and get those.”
“Thank you for doing that,” she said, clearly moved.
To Monte, there’s no animosity, no answers to be sought and no one to be prosecuted. “It’s done,” he says. Almost 11 months after Nada was murdered, her case was finally closed.
When Monte tells his daughter’s story now, it brings with it a kind of healing. When he is truly listened to, his heart feels a little lighter.
Parts of this reporting were supported by UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center
Help for domestic and sexual violence for Native peoples can be found at Strong Heart Helpline – 1-844-7 NATIVE. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children can be found here. The Waking Women Healing Institute provides support to Indigenous women and survivors of violence.
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