INTERVIEW: Loni Coombs on the new ‘Murdered & Missing in Montana’ documentary on Oxygen
Image courtesy of Oxygen / Provided by network with permission.
The Oxygen network is set to premiere the new documentary Murdered & Missing in Montana Friday, Nov. 12 at 8 p.m. In the film, experts bring awareness to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women campaign (MMIW), with researchers shining the spotlight on three cases in Montana, specifically the deaths of Henny Scott, Kaysera Stops Pretty Places and Selena Not Afraid. The investigations bring the team members to areas in and around the Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations to find answers, seek justice and bring awareness to the shocking (and shockingly underreported) issue of violence against Indigenous girls and women.
One of the prominent voices in the film is Loni Coombs, an investigative journalist and former criminal prosecutor. She teams up with former Montana sheriff Phylliss Firecrow, and together they start asking difficult questions and linking these three cases to the larger issue of MMIW. For Coombs, this film is a passion project, one of immediacy and great concern.
“I was a criminal prosecutor in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office for 18 years, so I have many, many trials under my belt,” Coombs said in a recent phone interview. “I know how cases need to be investigated and what it takes to be able to prosecute a case, so I look at different areas of issues where it looks like cases might not be handled correctly. And I’ll come in and kind of look at them and see what can be done about it, if there’s anything else that can be done about it, to bring awareness to that.”
Coombs said that her initial intent when signing up for this project was to find further details about the three cases that are the subject of the 90-minute documentary, but rather quickly she realized, after talking to the families involved, there’s a lot more to these stories — many more girls and women, many more questions to be asked.
“It really hit me hard that this is a crisis of epic proportions,” she said. “I was just seeing the tip of the iceberg, and the more that I dug in and the more that I saw the statistics and heard firsthand what was happening to these young women, it’s shocking to me that we aren’t aware of it. Here in the United States as a society I think there’s very low visibility on this, and so I’ve become very interested in getting the spotlight on it and in making people aware. I think it demands our attention, and it demands action. I think recently there has been some action on the federal level, but there’s so much more that needs to be done because literally these girls and women are being targeted and are extremely vulnerable, much more so than the rest of the general population.”
The former prosecutor has analyzed many of the statistics behind the MMIW campaign, and they are startling. The general consensus is that this is an epic problem that often fails to capture the public’s attention and the media’s headlines. The MMIW campaign is seeking to change that status quo, and Murdered & Missing in Montana is attempting to do the same.
“Native American girls are the most stalked, raped and murdered of any women of any ethnic group in the United States, and they are 10 times more likely to be killed than the national average,” Coombs said. “That’s not double or three times. We’re talking about 10 times.”
The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women reports that 4 out of 5 Native women are affected by violence today. Perhaps the saddest and starkest statistic that Coombs shared was that a top cause of death for Indigenous girls and women is murder, a thought she struggles to grapple with because safety and good health are often associated with youth.
“So there’s a lot of theories and a lot of probably contributing factors that go into this, but I think really important ones are historically our Indigenous women have not been valued,” she said. “Early on they were considered as property to be bartered, and I think that attitude and that discrimination and that sexism has just filtered down through the years, and I think that generally here in the United States they are a very overlooked group of our society. There is a group of women at an organization called Why We Wear RED, and it’s solely to help promote the understanding of the Indigineous women’s culture, but also to get positive portrayal of Indigenous women out there in the media, in communication.”
Coombs drew parallels to the recent Gabby Petito case and the so-called “missing white woman syndrome.” Throughout her career she has seen media professionals follow the tragic case of a white girl or white woman, and then turn around and skip over the distressing statistics of missing and murdered women of color, including Indigenous women.
“Historically white women have always been big stories in the mainstream media,” the former prosecutor said. “Women of color, and especially Indigenous women, they just don’t get that coverage. … I am sure that most people in the United States cannot even name one case of a missing Native American girl. It just doesn’t get the coverage. Part of that is the media chooses not to because of systemic racism, sexism, discrimination, but also it’s up to law enforcement many times to be the ones to alert the media to the missing person cases. Often they drop the ball. They don’t even make the alert to the media, and then if it does get to the media, if a story is actually covered, often what we see in the pattern of those stories is that the victims are portrayed in a negative light.”
Coombs added: “This is a call to action. Everyone needs to be on board.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Murdered & Missing in Montana, featuring Loni Coombs, will premiere Friday, Nov. 12 at 8 p.m. on Oxygen. Click here for more information.
