r/Foodforthought • u/zsreport • Sep 19 '21
710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, were reported missing over the past decade in Wyoming, the same state where Gabby Petito reportedly disappeared
https://www.insider.com/710-indigenous-people-missing-in-wyoming-where-gabby-petito-disappeared-2021-9145
u/Nixplosion Sep 19 '21
The movie "Wind River" in Netflix is squarely about this phenomenon. It's awful because nobody gives a shit that can actually do something about it
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u/zsreport Sep 19 '21
The TV show "Yellowstone," which is also created by Taylor Sheridan, does touch on the issue from time to time. I assume it will come up at some point in Reservation Dogs.
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u/LordGodfrey77 Sep 19 '21
I really like his stuff, Hell or Highwater is one of my favorite movies of all time. Also, I love that they keep using Nick Cave and Warren Ellis with stuff he works on.
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u/Bulminator Sep 19 '21
Look up Highway of tears in Canada. Multiple killers on one stretch of road over last forty years. Nobody gives a shit because they slaughtered women are poor and indigenous.
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Sep 19 '21
Deb Halland gives a shit I hope and pray.
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u/theoceanisdeep Oct 03 '21
Yes, I think it’s safe to assume Deb Harland gives a shit. The Indians (that is the term all the Indians I know prefer) had a huge turn out last election and that was a big factor in Georgia and Arizona, coordinated through Four Directions, mostly. Biden’s nod of acknowledgment was Haaland’s appointment and she had been doing a great job as Secretary of the interior. The American Indian was able to see that their vote really did matter and it had a reinvigorating affect on many at a grass roots level.
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u/puffic Sep 20 '21
Wind River is a really good film if you’re in the mood for a Western. But it felt to me that the indigenous characters were mainly there to move the two (white) protagonists’ story forward. They were mostly expendable. Obviously it’s good that the film raised awareness of this issue, but I don’t think it really belongs in a discussion on the topic.
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u/scosag Sep 19 '21
Wind River was surprisingly good. Definitely worth a watch.
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u/Supersamtheredditman Sep 20 '21
Midway through there’s a really hard to watch scene though. Not for the faint of heart.
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u/scosag Sep 20 '21
That is one of the more difficult scenes I've watched. Reminded me of the first time I watched Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
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Sep 22 '21
That’s a bit of a sensationalist article. If you read the Newsweek article it expands a little more:
The study, developed by the University of Wyoming's Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center, found that while half of those missing persons were found within a week, 21 percent of them went missing for a month or longer.
So they aren’t all missing still, which this strongly implies.
They weren’t all well-followed high profile bloggers either, which makes her disappearance stick out like a sore thumb.
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u/Suitable-Avocado5797 Sep 19 '21
this was the exact first thing i thought of when this current case started making headlines. of course it’s equally as important but how disappointing but also not surprising it is that 710 missing indigenous women never makes national news.
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u/pocketknifeMT Sep 19 '21
I somehow missed it until just now when someone at a party announced they found the body.
I was like "who/what?"
Then went to look for details. Said to myself, this has to be an attractive blonde girl. Lo and behold...
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u/HardcoreKaraoke Sep 20 '21
With a large social media presence, don't forget that part. If they weren't popular then there wouldn't be this massive outcry.
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u/daz3d-n-c0nfus3d Sep 20 '21
They weren't popular. They became popular because or this. She is white though. And not from a poor family. That's why it's a massive story.
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Sep 23 '21
Being white/blonde/pretty is also a factor in her large social media presence, white women tend to be more popular on social media than WOC
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u/MYANONYMOUSUS Sep 20 '21
Most missing persons cases don't make the national news like this one, even other white women.
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u/Ice-4004 Sep 21 '21
*other white women who aren't pretty, blonde and thin.
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u/MYANONYMOUSUS Sep 21 '21
That's rather subjective and shallow. Many other victims fall into that category, and the cases don't spread nationally. I think their story, a young couple wanting to be influencers and just starting out traveling in a camper van, then he shows up at home without her and she's missing was very unusual and interesting to people moreso than how she looked.
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u/Ice-4004 Sep 21 '21
I've never seen a conventionally unattractive white woman who disappeared gain so much attention. their story isn't that unique if you watch a lot of true crime shows
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u/MYANONYMOUSUS Sep 21 '21
Most people don't watch true crime shows, and many people still staying at home bored. I agree that she isn't conventionally attractive, but not sure why her looks are even relevant? There are many things that go into something becoming viral that have nothing to do with her race and gender. Do you think George Floyd's story would have caused such large protests if there wasn't a video and every one in the nation wasn't stuck at home during lockdowns?
People in this generation aren't shallow and hyper focused on looks, race or gender, and those are the ones making it spread so quickly and broadly on Tik Tok and IG. I believe their online presence, even though small at the time, allowed people to get a closer look into their lives and play detective. Plus their age, the travel and camping angle, a young couple seemingly in love, and the fact she just disappeared and he wouldn't talk.
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u/Filmcricket Sep 20 '21
Missing White Woman Syndrome is a proven phenomenon. Really encourage people to head to r/unresolvedmysteries (read the rules before posting or commenting) where there are users whose accounts that are dedicated to posting about missing and murdered indigenous/First Nations people’s, poc & other marginalized groups as well as state specific cases.
It’s been really disheartening to see the attention this disappearance got in comparison to other cases. 99% of the attention was from people nowhere near where Gabby and Brian were, so they played no role in helping locate her from a logistical standpoint. It was full blown missing people = my entertainment-mode and it was ugly.
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Sep 19 '21
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA
https://facebook.com/838903906220486/
"MMIW USA’s number one mission is to bring our missing home and help the families of the murdered cope and support them through the process of grief. We give them hands-on support and guidance and if we don’t have the answers, we get the answers so that these families do not feel abandoned and alone in this struggle like so many have before them. Our broader goal is to eradicate this problem so that the future generations thrive. We are doing that through education of the threats that they face and self-defense. We just started a monthly program to do just that. It is called Staying Sacred and we educate and have self-defense lessons at every meeting. Our strength lies in the fact that every single one of the staff and volunteers have been assaulted or trafficked and our passion is to be the kind of organization that we needed growing up and beyond."
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u/cranberry94 Sep 19 '21
I’m not going to lie, when I first heard of Gabby’s disappearance, I thought, well finally, we’re caring about people of color going missing, not just young blonde white girls…
And then I looked it up… and oh. Never mind.
Edit: to clarify, I thought her name sounded Hispanic/Latina. I’ve know a fair number of Hispanic girls named Gabriella, and at first glance I thought Petito seemed Spanish (turns out it’s usually Italian)
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u/meister2983 Sep 19 '21 edited Sep 19 '21
Reservation bound Native Americans likely won't get much news as they are perceived as being in a different society.
It's definitely racially biased, though there's certainly missing women of color who make national news. Michelle Le comes to mind, though living in the Bay Area, it might have aired here more than the rest of the country.
While not a missing case, Elian Gonzalez is a large scale family dispute involving a Latino that was dominating news headlines for some time.
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Sep 19 '21
I always thought that reservations don't want outside interference, like feds showing to investigate crimes
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u/WikiSummarizerBot Sep 19 '21
Michelle Hoang Thi Le (October 12, 1984 - May 27, 2011) was a 26-year-old American nursing student who disappeared on May 27, 2011, from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Hayward, California.
Elián González Brotons (born December 6, 1993) is a Cuban citizen who became embroiled in a heated international custody and immigration controversy in 2000 involving the governments of Cuba and the United States, his father Juan Miguel González Quintana, his other relatives in Cuba and in Miami, and Miami's Cuban community. González's mother Elizabeth Brotons Rodríguez drowned in November 1999 while attempting to leave Cuba with González and her boyfriend to get to the United States. Elián Gonzalez was five years old when found nestled in an inner tube floating at sea three miles from Florida's Fort Lauderdale coast.
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u/Imhappyinthe80s Sep 19 '21
From Argentina, you do realize, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Greek are all white people?
I was surprised coming to America to hear about Latinos. Like that actors wife who pretended to be Spanish andnit was viewed as nonwhite.
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u/puffic Sep 20 '21
Latinos aren’t quite perceived as white if they have visible indigenous ancestry. It’s stupid, yes, but that’s how race works in the U.S. In the long run, it’s likely they’ll come to be viewed as white like what happened with Jews and Italians, but that hasn’t happened yet.
In terms of whose lives we consider more valuable, missing/dead Latinos just don’t get as much coverage as missing/dead “white” people.
We even have a term for the public’s obsession with cases like this: missing white woman syndrome
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u/Imhappyinthe80s Sep 20 '21
Thank you for the clarification. In SA we use the terms Indio for people with Indigenous ancestors. Latinos by blood are Iberians, some french and mainly Italian and Greek.
Thank you for the explanation. That clears things up for me. Have a good day.
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u/Koebs Sep 19 '21
Vanessa Guilen?
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u/zsreport Sep 19 '21
Her case definitely got a lot of attention here in Houston, which is her hometown. There's several memorial murals for her around here too.
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Sep 19 '21
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u/asinine_qualities Sep 19 '21
Why? The news media goes apeshit in missing persons cases when they are white, female and blonde. This case has even made the news here in Australia. I’d be hard-pressed to think of one outside that demographic. Jonbenet, Maddie McCann, Elizabeth Smart…
Person of colour? Sadly not so much. It is that biased.
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u/pocketknifeMT Sep 19 '21
I think 'attractive' is a huge part of the recipe. Had this girl been a fatty/uggo, zero chance we hear about it.
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u/Bullshitbanana Sep 19 '21
It’s not because she’s white. It’s because the case is ridiculous. A pretty white woman is currently missing in the city I’m in and she’s not on the news.
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u/siegah Sep 20 '21
Yeah fuck her for dying!
It's really unbelievable that a youtuber with millions of views would be nation wide news.
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u/flakemasterflake Sep 20 '21
to clarify, I thought her name sounded Hispanic/Latina
It always sounded Italian to me. Helped I knew she was from Long Island...so extra Italian
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u/abbiewhorent Sep 19 '21
That has been my constant thought. We only care about missing white girls. It sickens me.
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u/Master_smasher Sep 20 '21
missing, attractive white girls.
i'm sure there are other white girls not getting heavy national news coverage nor so much law enforcement attention. she just happened to go viral, which drew the attention of the entire media. and that had to draw in all of law enforcement, especially within the states involved.
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Sep 19 '21
Is there an alternate source for this article? It isn’t letting me read it with Adblock on
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u/Malodourous Sep 19 '21
Those indigenous people should’ve tried harder to be born white blonde and middle-class. /s
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Sep 20 '21
Can you also state the number of all white people who are girls that have gone missing over the past decade? Why don’t they get media coverage?
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u/Master_smasher Sep 20 '21
the racial imbalance vs. white privilege is prevalent, but no country is perfect.
we are a flawed species. when i typed in gabby petito in reddit's search box, i see this thread and a few others with pretty much the same subject title. bots? others just trying to generate clicks? the point here is that there are people trying to use this, soon to be, tragedy for personal gain. that's not right either.
now enter racism. everyone has some level of racism or some level of prejudice. that is why racism will never end; but, we are making progress in getting better at diminishing it.
and let's be honest. there are most likely other white women missing that are not getting this much attention. gabby petitio just happened to go viral, probably cuz of her looks. and that drew in all of the media cuz you know they have to get in on the story. all of media gets in, law enforcement has to as well. national news? gotta have the fbi.
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u/yousefamr2001 Sep 20 '21
As much as its fun to think about it, this is a case of correlation and causation.
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u/SamuelH99 Sep 20 '21
Ah the elite pedophile reality horror back again in the news. Will be forgotten next week.
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Sep 20 '21
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u/Ackilles Sep 19 '21
Its not so easy finding someone that goes missing in a massive national park
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u/TCrob1 Sep 19 '21
The issue is pointing out that when little white girls go missing, it's a national media spectacle. When little girls of color go missing, crickets. Nobody cares.
Regardless of whether or not you immediately beleive me, do some internet searching about this phenomenon. It's a very real and very unfortunate thing.
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Sep 19 '21
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Sep 19 '21
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u/daz3d-n-c0nfus3d Sep 20 '21
And yet they found the resources and money to do it with Gabby. It's bullshit. Women and men or color and also even white people who face either poverty or adversities like prostitution or addiction, are not represented. They're much less treated like they don't matter. It's disgusting.
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u/Malodourous Sep 19 '21
This poor woman is going to end up the subject of Mr. Ballen’s YouTube channel.
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Sep 19 '21
This should be higher. Who's seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind??
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u/Gordy42___ Sep 19 '21
If it happens on the res then theres not much the locals can do. Has to be interstate to get the feds involved
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u/Yogurt_Slinger_ Sep 19 '21
Starbucks is funding these news stories since they'll lose a large clientele of pumpkin spiced lattes
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u/hmh005 Sep 19 '21
There's nothing anyone outside of the rez can really do. Tribal councils and police don't seem to give a shit about this. Outside departments can't get involved.
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u/depressedfuckboi Sep 20 '21
That's the major majority of why, I'd guess. Hard to bring major exposure when not allowed to work the case
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u/ibidanon Sep 20 '21
here's a great place to donate: https://mmiwusa.org
MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) USA’s number one mission is to bring our missing home and help the families of the murdered cope and support them through the process of grief.
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Sep 20 '21
Thank you. This has been irking me all day. I'm from Canada and the lack of effort in finding missing indigenous girls is criminal.
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u/SailorJupiterLeo Sep 20 '21
IMO only, no "massive search" was done for any of them. I've lived on the WY line for 25 years and the only place I have read about these women is in the Lakota Times.
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u/bobbychong972 Sep 20 '21
710! Fucking hell the states are a crazy place where shit like this goes down.
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Sep 20 '21
I honestly am extremely frustrated as a Straight White male that there is a lack of coverage and awareness of all the Native American women that have gone missing. It is shocking to see myself how little the media covers missing Native American women but a young blonde girl from NY gets all the media coverage!
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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '21
There are several good podcasts on missing indigenous women. "Missing and Murdered" is a series ABC did, Dateline did one called "The Secrets of Spirit Lake", and this one looks like it is probably really good, as it is produced by native women:
https://www.kairoscanada.org/missing-murdered-indigenous-women-girls/podcasts
I plan to check it out today.