“There’s a thousand reasons
I should go about my day
And ignore your whispers
Which I wish would go away.”
“Into the Unknown” by Idina Menzel and Evan Rachel Wood

Yes, the above lyrics are part of a song from Frozen 2. When you’re a father of three elementary age girls and the husband of a daycare provider, you become very well-versed in the entire Disney songbook, and there are few movie franchises that have produced more ear worm songs than the Frozen movies.

Another reason that those lyrics came to mind is that my daughter inspired digging into this topic with a simple question.

All four of my children are registered members of an indigenous tribe, and we’ve been very up front about providing education about the history of indigenous people in this state as well as attempting to involve them in immersion opportunities that allow them to experience Sioux culture, though some of those opportunities have been put on hold recently, due to the pandemic.

Recently, my daughter casually asked me about the repatriation of hundreds of remains of children from former “Indian schools” across the country that were buried at those schools and not returned to their respective tribes. She learned about it in school and had questions about the story.

Her basic questions boiled down to something incredibly simple - Why were they allowed to “steal” indigenous children?

The ensuing discussion was tough.

It is difficult to explain to a 7-year old that it took more than 100 years, and plenty of public pressure, for the time to pass to allow these children to be returned to their homes for proper burial.

Recently, the Seminole tribe made headway in a years-long battle with the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in the Washington, D.C. area.

When native indigenous people were moved from the land, archaeologists did not worry about where burial grounds were or honoring the dead, frequently digging up and claiming indigenous bodies and artifacts that were found buried with those bodies.

Those bodies were not stored carefully and respectfully, the way one would expect the remains of an ancestor would be treated.

No, the Smithsonian had nearly 5,000 “assorted skeletal remains” when a law was passed in 1989 that decreed  those remains should be returned to the tribes where they originated.

The issue with that law, as happens with many such laws relating to indigenous and native people in this country, was that the law allowed the museums to set their own rules about how bodies were to be claimed.

The Smithsonian set up these rules in a way that made it extremely difficult for members of the Seminole tribe to claim ancestors for multiple different reasons that would require their own article to explore.

Just this fall, more than 30 years after the law was written to order the remains returned to the tribes that they were taken from, a court order clarified the law further to force the Smithsonian to change its rules in distributing the more than 2,000 bodies, that are still stored in a warehouse, to the various tribes of North America where they belong.

Repeat: more than 30 years after a law was put into place, that time finally came.

With three daughters who have indigenous blood, the issue of missing indigenous women is a very present concern on my heart. Yes, my daughters are still a decade from heading off to college, but the issue of unreported and under-reported missing and kidnapped indigenous women across the country, especially in the upper Midwest, has been going on for decades.

This was amplified for me recently when news stations and social media went nuts to attempt to figure out the case of Gabby Petito, a young, blonde woman who had a social media following.

This woman, who happened to be in the area where so many indigenous women have been nabbed and never returned, received nationwide coverage, yet hundreds of women the same age as the 22 year-old Petito or significantly younger never even get a case file opened by local police, let alone national coverage from CNN, FoxNews, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc.

How many years will it be until those young women matter the same as a young blonde woman does? Will it be another 50 years before one missing indigenous woman gets the same coverage as a Gabby Petito?

Maybe 100 years?

If it was your ancestor, how long would be long enough to have their body sitting in a warehouse rather than be treated like any other body that is allowed to be given respect in a dedicated area (memorial, cemetery, whatever the choice may be)?

If it was your daughter, how long would be long enough for the response to be equal for a missing indigenous young woman?

I wish those whispers would go away…but I look at their faces every day.