True crime exploration of the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Montana’s Big Horn County through the perspective of family members as they fight for justice through a tangled web of jurisdictions and against corrupt and non-responsive local officials. We break down MURDER IN BIG HORN by Razelle Benally & Matthew Galkin in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: Premieres
Distribution: Streaming on Showtime on February 5, 2023, February 12, 2023, & February 19, 2023, Premium Video on Demand on February 3, 2023, February 12, 2023, & February 19, 2023
From Sundance’s website: Within the past decade, dozens of young Indigenous women and girls from the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Nations have disappeared from Montana’s Big Horn County and its surrounding areas. Understandably, grieving Native families who fear the worst press local law enforcement for answers, but their pleas are most often met with silence or indifference. Arrests in these cases are rare, and convictions are virtually nonexistent. Elsewhere in America, similar stories shock communities and become nationwide news, but when they occur on Native reservations, a circle of bereft family members, friends, and activists are left to fight for justice on their own.
Murder in Big Horn examines the circumstances surrounding many of these cases, told solely through the perspectives of those involved: Native families, Native journalists, and local law enforcement officers. Directors Razelle Benally (Oglala Lakota/Diné) and Matthew Galkin craft a powerful portrait of tribal members and their communities battling an epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) that was set in motion almost 200 years ago.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.498] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright.
[00:00:16.459] Wonder Bright: And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're doing a whole series of the documentaries at Sundance 2023 that we happen to watch. This episode is going to be around Murder in Bighorn, which is a three-part episodic series that's actually going to be premiering on Showtime on February 3rd, 2023, probably after this podcast is already available. You'll be able to watch this as a series on Showtime. I'm just going to read this section of the synopsis to give a bit of context of this series. So within the past decade, dozens of young Indigenous women and girls from the Crow and Northern Cheyenne nations have disappeared from Montana's Bighorn country and its surrounding areas. Understandably, grieving Native families who fear the worst press local law enforcement for answers, but their pleas are most often met with silence or indifference. Arrests in these cases are rare and convictions are virtually non-existent. So it goes through a true crime framing of investigating a number of these different murders that have happened over the last number of years in this area that is this overlapping intersection of native nations and jurisdictions that ends up creating a bit of this no man's land where they have to ask a number of questions whenever they are faced with a murder. One is, who is the victim? Is it Indian or not? Who is the perpetrator? Is it Indian or not? And what did it happen on native land or not? So you have all of these questions that are dictating who has jurisdiction to do what. And if it's just happening outside of those boundaries, then there's essentially a lot of these loopholes where murder and mayhem can take place and there's no accountability. So the filmmakers of this series are Rizal Benally and Matthew Galkin. And in the description, it says that they're crafting a powerful portrait of tribal members and their communities, battling an epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women that was set in motion almost 200 years ago. So it's casting this phenomena that's happening in these local communities, but it's a long legacy from colonialism that started hundreds of years ago, and they're recontextualizing it within the context of this true crime framing of this documentary, but it's also bringing in all these other Native families, Native journalists, and local law enforcement officers as they're telling these stories. So this is Murder in Big Horn. I'd love to get some of your first thoughts on this as a series.
[00:02:38.683] Kent Bye: You know, I'm not really a true crime fan necessarily. And I was really struck when you pointed out that that was sort of what they were drawing on in terms of how they were breaking down the story, because you're totally correct. I mean, just because I'm not a fan of it doesn't mean I haven't been subjected to it. It's like a big thing these days. And you're totally right. That is what they're using to sort of start us off in the series. And the narrative just doesn't go the way that you think it will. It ends up being as you're illustrating in your description just now. a narrative that is tracing this 200-year history that really opens up investigation into issues that you don't expect it to just based on the surface level true crime drama, which is usually like, these questions are ultimately unanswerable. Why does evil happen? That's always sort of like where true crime begins and ends. and it's always sensationalized. And what I really appreciated about this series is that it's not sensationalized. They really bring forth the stories of the women who are murdered or missing, and they bring it forth through the family in ways that do not dehumanize through sensationalism and in ways that actually unpack how those stories were initially propagated by press reports or police reports for that matter, where aspersions were cast on the victims. And, you know, the story is told through this lens of like, you know, you don't really need to worry about it. This is just a thing that happens. When, you know, this is like a historic amount of people that are dying in really familiar patterned ways. And, you know, something that has in common with True Crime series is it does pose mystery and it holds that mystery in tension throughout the whole of the series. And it's going to be difficult for us, I think, to really talk about it without giving spoilers. And I think that we really should try and avoid saying, you know, what happens and how that mystery unfolds, because It's the experience of going through the questions that they ask and the broader context that they explore that I learned some things that I didn't know and I'm really glad to know now.
[00:05:08.766] Wonder Bright: Yeah, they go through a number of different cases throughout the course of the series, and each of those cases, you get a recounting of when they were last seen, and then also they're missing, and then sometimes they would have searches, and then they would be discovered, and there would be these little anomalies, like if they were actually out on the land for that long, then they would be decomposed in certain ways. And so you get the sense that there's some shenanigans that are going on in terms of there are these murders that are happening, and they're being covered up. And for me, what I found to be both frustrating and I guess in some ways it makes sense for why this ends up being a zone ripe for these different types of murders is because who is accountable and how people remain accountable ends up being across the state and county lines versus if it's on native land, then it's the realm of FBI and then there's the Bureau of Indian Affairs. it gets involved. And so, all these kind of jurisdictional questions ends up making it a little confused. And I think the thing that they came back to again and again in this film was that the local police in the context of the county, which ends up being the primary jurisdiction, sometimes have to defer or ask for the help for some of these other federal institutions to come in. And in the absence of them requesting that help, then it's basically all on them. And if they're corrupt or in cahoots or not actually interested in getting to the bottom of it, it ends up that there's not a lot of justice that is happening on all of these cases. And so it ends up being this no man's land zone where lots of abuse is ripe. And so you have different aspects of sex trafficking and people being trafficked for drugs and people getting abducted and sometimes disappeared forever. with the highways that are moving through there. So I think the larger context of that is trying to reckon all these different jurisdictional issues, but also trying to get to the bottom of this underlying racism from those county officials that are just unwilling to engage or to live to the letter of the law. If someone was murdered in native land, but the body was dumped in the jurisdiction for the county, then it ends up being this responsibility of wherever the body is found and not where the murder happened. And if you don't know where the murder happened, then it just ends up being this place where these type of abuses just run wild. So I think over and over, that was a theme that I saw come up and you kind of go through each case. to try to find out what those anomalies are and why these Native families and the journalists are deeply suspicious of the local law enforcement. And we don't actually get to hear a lot from the local law enforcement aside from one particular person who is no longer working there.
[00:07:56.904] Kent Bye: To clarify that we're talking about a non-Native former member of the Montana State Police.
[00:08:03.857] Wonder Bright: Right, right. So he's a non-native law enforcement who happens to be a voice that is in some ways serving as the proxy for these voices that we're not actually getting a chance to hear directly from the local law enforcement, but is giving us some insight into the thought patterns and processes. And it ends up being this other aspect of introspection, both from the natives and from the outside, kind of those perspectives, all those kind of perspectives blended together throughout the course of this film. So yeah, like you said, there's a lot of elements of mystery that I think are probably best left for people to discover on their own. But as I was watching it, I was just really appreciating why some of the different larger rules and systems that are in place that are leading to some of these abuses and the other dimensions that they're kind of running into all these different dead ends to not actually have them to do anything about it. So I feel like for each of these different episodes, it's exploring those dimensions in new and different ways.
[00:09:07.307] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think one of the compelling ways that they drive the narrative forward is that in keeping with true crime drama, they give you a list of suspects, potential suspects. Like, why are there so many murders in Bighorn? But also, like, why is this so endemic? And so the suspects that get thrown up are, is it somebody who's an outsider who's coming in onto the nations and abducting these women and taking them out of their nation? Are they slave traffickers? Or are they Native members themselves? And where is it coming from? And you mentioned before, in Bighorn, part of the difficulty with that location is that there are intersections of freeways going right through the heart of it. that would make it very easy for slave traffickers to pick up women there and take them off for parts unknown, never to be seen again. So there's mystery upon mystery in terms of who it could possibly be. And in keeping with what you were saying around the way that the families are, you know, suspicious and like, you know, full of conspiracy theories. Well, that's what happens when we have any number of places where this threat could be coming from and where the jurisdictions aren't clear and often are punitive. And as it's revealed, that may be coming from the native crime forces as much as it could be coming from the white non-native crime forces. So there's this real collusion of who could be the suspect and a lot of speculation in the absence of any way of knowing. So the way that they break that open and really examine each potential suspect pool is part of the process of discovery that we go on in this series and they really do it justice.
[00:11:00.218] Wonder Bright: Yeah, there was one moment when one of the native journalists that was reflecting on this issue actually went on a national level in the course that they're showing some of these different cases and they're showing media and celebrities and different people that are really rallying around it. But despite all that attention, one of the journalists' comment is with these missing and murdered indigenous women, At the end of the day, there's still no justice. It's still happening and it's still within the context of the Biden administration. They had created this Operation Lady Justice Task Force, which had created this missing and murdered unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But we come to find out that even with that, it still requires this deference from the local law officials to allow them to come in and their work. So even with these new task force, it still is hindered by these jurisdiction bureaucratic and potentially corrupt local law enforcement officials that are not leaning on those new task force that are made available. So we're kind of left with, these people are still left to fend for themselves, but we do explore all these multiple different dimensions of whether it's coming from the outside or whether it's coming from the inside. And Yeah, I think it's a type of mystery where by the end of it, we are taking on a journey. But yeah, I guess there's a sense of still wanting to have a deeper justice. And I think this is an ongoing issue that maybe is more complicated than a film like this can sort of solve and just having these three episodes because it's been happening for hundreds of years. And it's actually a thing that's deeper ingrained into the history of how Native women have been treated in this country. Yeah.
[00:12:44.049] Kent Bye: Yeah, I certainly I just want to note that I don't think the filmmakers had the intention of solving it in this three part series. My experience was they were really exploring the issues that they hadn't seen explored publicly before. Perhaps I know that I hadn't. And they went pretty deep with it. And they examined it in a fulsome way that I felt did justice to the questions they had, even if we can't get justice for the victims.
[00:13:18.087] Wonder Bright: Yeah. Yeah. So I guess as we think about this piece, what are you bearing witness to?
[00:13:24.753] Kent Bye: Well, I want to say their names, the women whose stories they follow in this film. We have Henny Scott, Shakiya Harding, Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, Selena Not Afraid. I'm very worried that there's probably more by now because Selena Not Afraid's case happened in 2020. And of course, it's been three years now. I'm grateful to the makers of this docuseries for bringing their stories to light and letting these young women live through the telling of their story with their families.
[00:14:13.691] Wonder Bright: I want to also bear witness to the filmmakers Rizal Benali, who's Ogala, Lakota, and Diné, and also Matthew Galkin, who I think were able to really do justice to covering this as a story and to investigate all the different aspects of complexity of this as an issue. and that there's something about using the true crime genre, that they're using that structure to Trojan horse all these other deeper historical issues of colonization and that this is an epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women that goes back 200 years. And I think they're able to really set that deeper context, especially in the later episodes where they start to draw these more historical parallels and Yeah, just the way that they're able to tell the story of what's happening with these murdered and missing Indigenous women. So any final thoughts?
[00:15:06.833] Kent Bye: When I looked it up online, I couldn't find more names, but I would be surprised if there hadn't been more because the young women that I just mentioned and their cases all occurred within two years. So for those that have not been named.
[00:15:27.212] Wonder Bright: Yeah. And the credits, they do list a number of other women that were missing and murdered indigenous women from that region as credits. And I think there was also one of the sisters, Beverly, was another woman that was named throughout the course of the piece as well. So yeah, that was Murder and Bighorn as a three-part series by Rizal Benalli and Matthew Galkin that premiered at Sundance 2023 as a part of the documentary premieres. It's actually showing already on Showtime streaming on February 3rd, 2023. So you'll be able to check this one out. And yeah, thanks again for listening to Story All the Way Down. If you'd like more information for how you can support the podcast, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com and get more information on these episodes and what we're up to. And yeah, thanks for joining us.
