Missing and murdered Indigenous women in Utah

Operation Relocation was in response to an emergency airlift to provide supplies to Native Americans on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in order to prevent starvation after a series of blizzards in the winter of 1947–1948.

[6] This creates a vast margin of error for research published on this issue, as Indigenous people are sometimes mislabeled as white, Latinx, or general classifiers such as "other".

There is a statistically significant lack of participation from Indigenous populations when studies are conducted by the federal government, which could be attributed to a sociocultural mistrust (see Native American reservation politics for more information).

Tribal sovereignty has also complicated the acquiring of health care for native American populations, this creates an obstacle for reporting violent crime.

[15][16] In recent years, there have been efforts to increase the amount of sovereignty for tribal governments over fields such as healthcare research and the prosecution of violent crime.

[23] While most sexual violence against women is intraracial (committed by members of the same racial or ethnic background as the victim), Native American women are statistically more likely to be victims of interracial violence (committed by assailants of a different racial background), due in part to high rates of in interracial marriage among Native American populations.

In 2019, the Department of Justice under Attorney General William P. Barr established a “National Strategy to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons”.

The initiative allocated resources from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help aid in improving in immediate response, collecting data more accurately, and providing more competent analysis.

[31] The Utah State Legislature in March 2020 passed a bill requiring a task force specifically dedicated to addressing the crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.

The task force consists of members of the state legislature as well as representatives of Utah Native American tribes and victim advocate organizations.

This task force will work to create “model protocols and procedures” to help address current and previously unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women within the state jurisdiction.

[28] This is the second legislative motion passed specifically regarding the MMIW crisis in Utah, the first being the designation of an awareness day for victims as well as Native members of the LGBT+ community.

[35] The section focused on MMIW included a speech giving statistics on the severity of the issue in Utah, music, and a performance by the Jingle Dress Dancers in honor of Native women who are missing and murdered.