South Dakota stepping up hunt for missing, murdered Native women

AG's Office vetted dozens of applicants

Allison Morrisette is South Dakota’s first-ever missing and murdered Indigenous persons coordinator.

More Native American women and girls go missing in South Dakota than almost anywhere else in the country. And tribal and nontribal law enforcement often struggle to locate them and bring their abductors, traffickers and murderers to justice.

South Dakota is among 10 U.S. states that had the highest number of missing and murdered cases involving Indigenous people in 2021, according to the National Criminal Justice Training Center. That’s in part why the Attorney General’s Office this week hired the state’s first-ever missing and murdered Indigenous persons coordinator, Allison Morrisette.

Morrisette’s upbringing in the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe, her ties to the state’s Native American community and years of experience in the criminal justice arena give her a unique perspective. She expects it will lend itself well to helping South Dakota and its nine Indian tribes get a handle on a backlog of unsolved missing and murdered cases.

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