For 10 years after 9/11, James Strickland fought for the United States Army, slogging, rifle on shoulder, from battlefield to battlefield.

He took and returned fire, he says, for not just a country, but an idea – that America had God’s special blessing. “I used a gun for a living to enforce that idea,” he says.

As the U.S. endures a wave of gun violence, it sometimes seems to him as if the war has come home. In 2021, active shooter incidents increased 52% over 2020, according to the FBI. This weekend, mass shootings in Pennsylvania and South Carolina added to casualties in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

To Mr. Strickland, the gun is not the problem. Firearms, he says, only enforce ideas. “I don’t see it as a totem,” he says. But he thinks it may be salvation for a society that, at least to him, seems determined to drum Christian faith out of the public square.

In the decade since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, that perspective has helped drive the guns debate toward an almost religious tone – that of a battle between good and evil that goes well beyond good or bad policy. For a small group of Americans and religious leaders, the more access to firearms has become a moral question, the more defending them has become a righteous cause in defense of the freedom to protect America’s virtues.

For gun control advocates, also including religious leaders, meanwhile, the more guns have become an almost consecrated object, the more complicated it’s become to pass legislation that an overwhelming majority of Americans support in the form of red flag laws and universal background checks.

“People don’t actually think that the rifle is sacred, but what the rifle stands for is sacred,” says Wake Forest University sociologist David Yamane, author of “Concealed Carry Revolution.” “When they look at their gun they see freedom, independence, and the righteousness of God in allowing America to be what it is.”

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman/AP/File

Mark Pritchard of Gatesville, Texas, and his son, Devin, bow their heads in prayer at the beginning of the "Protect the Second Amendment" rally at City Hall in Austin, Texas, on June 2, 2018. About 150 people, many of them carrying handguns or rifles, gathered outside City Hall to listen to speakers and voice their support of Second Amendment rights.

In less than a decade, researchers have noted a new depth to the “God and guns” archetype. More and more gun owners are imbuing their rifles with symbolic strength tied to a narrow but powerful strain of Christian and conservative identity. They are displayed reverentially on social media. They are hefted proudly at protests. They are marketed to children. 

“Guns have become more than just a tool,” says Eastern Kentucky University philosopher Michael Austin, author of “God and Guns in America.” 

For example, since January, more than 100 political ads have shown Republican candidates posing with firearms as shorthand for their conservative – and in some cases Christian – credentials. Those two are becoming harder to separate. In the past 20 years, the NRA’s magazine “American Rifleman” has increased its religious appeals, using phrases like “God-given” and “God bless” almost twice as often since the turn of the century. 

For many gun owners, firearms ownership goes beyond self-protection, sport, and discouraging government tyranny, all of which are tied into America’s constitutional covenant of independence and personal liberty. As Florida gun owner Miguel Gonzalez writes in an email: “Guns were part of the DNA of [the] future Nation before the concept existed.” 

The number of single-issue gun voters is relatively small – about 16 million Americans, says Robert Spitzer, professor emeritus of political science at the State University of New York College at Cortland. But almost all of those are ardent supporters of gun rights, he says, and almost all would oppose any gun control laws. 

Objects as political symbols

In the U.S., growing distrust in institutions, including church, is creating personal iterations of faith, belief, and societal order, often attached to symbols like flags, masks, and weapons – often with a particularly political goal.

That situation is highlighting what Professor Yamane calls an “odd unevenness ... a country that is at once very violent and extraordinarily peaceful.”

The rise of the gun as a symbol of Christian identity and conservative identity comes at the intersection of tectonic secular and religious trends. 

2020 marked the first year where a majority of Americans said they no longer belonged to a church, according to Gallup. That 47% was down from about 70% in the decades prior. Meanwhile, an estimated 81.4 million Americans own guns, according to the 2021 National Firearms Survey, with a record 22.8 million guns sold in 2020. 

While hunting has been on a long decline, sport shooting, collecting, and self-defense – boosted by Supreme Court decisions since 2008’s D.C. v. Heller established a constitutional right to private gun ownership – has grown exponentially. 

The arsenal is making the country bristle. In recent years, armed people have shown up to large protests, changing the dynamics of free speech. For the first time in U.S. history, more children die from gun injuries a year than any other cause. 

Meanwhile, many gun owners see rising crime as an effect of liberalized policies around bail and imprisonment, embodied this week in the recall movement of San Francisco’s progressive district attorney.

Michael Arellano/AP/File

The "Oregon for Trump 2020 Labor Day Cruise Rally" at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, Oregon, Sept. 7, 2020. Gun ownership is a question that has dogged Christians for years, but conservative Christians are increasingly answering “yes.”

Is “gun idolatry” a threat?

On the other hand, Bishop Daniel Flores of the Brownsville Diocese in Texas recently wrote on Twitter that Americans “sacralize death’s instruments, and then are surprised that death uses them.” 

The good of the whole community gets left out of the discussion, Bishop Flores told the Catholic website The Pillar, “when we’ve ... elevated the individual right beyond proportion. ... To say something is sacralized is to say it’s almost taken out of any possibility for conversation.”

Some observers on the right also see a threat – not from gun control advocates, but the gun community itself. “The threat is gun idolatry, a form of gun fetish that’s fundamentally aggressive, grotesquely irresponsible, and potentially destabilizing to American democracy,” writes David French, a veteran, lawyer, and evangelical Christian, in The Dispatch.

Social researchers show some causal effect. As Americans segregate along political, racial, and religious lines, more and more faith is being put in the gun. Since the sunsetting of an assault rifle ban in 2004, the number of AR-15 type rifles in American citizens’ hands has soared to 20 million. Marketers have paid heed.

Daniel Defense, the Black Creek, Georgia, company that sold the rifle used on May 24 to kill 19 grade schoolers and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, earlier in May posted a photo of a toddler with an AR-15 on his lap, with the biblical caption, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” 

The National Rifle Association has long understood the power of religious messaging. Indeed, “you would get a far better understanding if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world,” the NRA’s executive vice president, Warren Cassidy, once said.

“They’ve kind of created this monster, as it were, organized around the gun as a political totem,” says Professor Spitzer.

Such attitudes have taken an increasingly deeper hold, especially since 2015, sociologists who study the intersection of the Second Amendment and U.S. society have noted. To be sure, active churchgoers tend to have fewer guns, suggesting that strong communities create a sense of safety and security for members. 

But when they ask about “gun empowerment,” researchers found that the relationship with weapons is rooted in gender, race, religiosity, political views, gun use, and economic distress. And the attachment cannot be explained entirely by regional, religious, or political cultures. It’s a way to reestablish a sense of individual power and moral certitude, which in turn affects opinions about gun action and policy.

“What our data shows is there ... are groups of people who feel extremely attached to their guns,” says Texas sociologist Paul Froese, director of the Baylor Religion Surveys. “Having a gun made them feel more a part of their community – and a more important person in their community. So the gun becomes ... a symbol of manhood, being a good person. In that way, it takes on kind of a mystical, almost sacred quality to it.” 

Around 2015, those attitudes began to meld with what researchers call Christian nationalism, fueled by the candidacy and then presidency of President Donald Trump, who wielded biblical symbols even though he only occasionally attended church.

“[President] Trump ... made it blatantly obvious that this had little to do with being personally religious,” says Indiana University sociologist Andrew Whitehead, co-author of “Taking America Back For God.” Instead, so-called Christian nationalism is “a cultural expression of Christianity fused with American civic identity, [signaling] a comfort with a society that is hierarchical along gender, sexuality, and ethno-racial boundaries."

Ted S. Warren/AP/File

An attendee at a gun rights rally open carries his gun in a holster that reads "We the People" from the Preamble to the United States Constitution, Jan. 18, 2019, at the Capitol in Olympia, Washington.

Many gun owners detect in the “idolatry of the gun” narrative a false note intended to delegitimize the Second Amendment and demonize gun owners ahead of attempts to regulate guns.

Mr. Gonzalez, the Florida gun owner, traces his attachment to firearms to his family’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution, and gun restrictions in his native Venezuela. 

“We do not pray or light candles to any type of weapon just like a biker does not kneel in front of a Harley or a car aficionado genuflects at the sight of an original Shelby Cobra,” writes Mr. Gonzalez, the founder of the tongue-in-cheek-named Gun Free Zone blog. “The ‘article of faith is written’ in the Second Amendment of the Constitution and the ‘gospel’ is the historic precedents here and abroad where unarmed people were massacred by either the government or civilians who had the privilege to be armed.” 

As such, many gun owners say the fear around sacralized weaponry is overblown. The vast majority of people who own guns, who have a concealed carry permit or live in one of 25 states with “constitutional carry” protection, don’t walk around armed. As gun restrictions have lifted over the last two decades, a much-feared everyone-for-themselves Wild West society has not emerged, they say.

“Most people don’t walk into a gun store thinking, ‘This is how I’m going to express myself, how I’m going to demonstrate my freedom, how I’m going to support certain candidates I like,’” says Dan Zimmerman, a Texas gun owner and managing editor of The Truth About Guns blog. “That doesn’t diminish the original intent of the Second Amendment, which was a protection against tyranny ... and plenty of people still view [guns] that way.” 

That viewpoint suggests that the brand of Second Amendment absolutism detected by social scientists isn’t an automatic fait accompli for gun rights.

“We’re looking at really a very complex relationship between different dimensions of religiosity and gun ownership, and it’s not all in one direction,” says Mr. Yamane, at Wake Forest.

Even Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges that religious understanding does have a role to play in that debate. Does America really have a problem with guns? Or is the problem a lack of faith and communal care that leaves vulnerable people isolated, resentful, and prone to violence?

By blaming the sacralizing of weapons, he says, critics “fail to see the irony [created] by assigning an almost evil intent to the inanimate object rather than seeking and healing what ails the soul of those who use the object to commit evil ...,” says Mr. Gonzalez. “It is the equivalent of blaming the cross for the Crucifixion of our Lord.”

Rick Bowmer/AP/File

Marius Annandale kneels while praying during a Second Amendment gun rights rally at the Utah State Capitol, March 27, 2021, in Salt Lake City.

In Congress, a bipartisan working group is crafting a gun control package centered on red flag laws. Those use emergency orders attached to strong due process to let authorities focus on individuals who may be a threat to themselves or others, rather than trying to control larger groups of people. Thousands of guns have been surrendered and often returned under such laws, including in gun-friendly Florida. 

The Supreme Court is expected to release a sweeping ruling on a gun-permitting case out of New York by the end of this month. But that is unlikely to leave gun ownership and gun carry without regulation.

“I would say that [absolutist] view is either nonexistent or extremely uncommon among anyone who has thought about these matters in a serious way,” says Nelson Lund, a professor of constitutional law at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School. 

Yes, rights “to keep [and bear] ... arms are indisputably in the Constitution, [leaving] an awful lot of questions about how far the government can go in putting limits on that right.” 

Still, he says, what observers may call absolutism isn’t really absolute. “When there are these serious political disputes, people are naturally going to come to different conclusions about how to fill in the blanks left by the vagueness of the Second Amendment.” 

Eric Risberg/AP/File

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin poses outside his office in San Francisco on Jan. 30, 2020. The third year into his administration, Mr. Boudin faces a recall election June 7.

It’s been a mixed day for Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s embattled district attorney. One of the nation’s most progressive prosecutors, he’s fighting an unprecedented recall election – a test of criminal justice reform in America’s most liberal city, and, Mr. Boudin argues, an unfair test. 

On one of his recent “merchant walks” in the ethnically diverse Excelsior neighborhood, many shopkeepers happily take a campaign sign for their window. They appreciate his personal attention, fluent Spanish, and efforts to speak Chinese, Russian, and even Farsi. Pedestrians stop him for a photo or to offer encouragement. A passing driver shouts support.

But he also hears from critics. More than one business on his sidewalk tour of taquerias, auto shops, and small retailers has been burgled – a hardware store just the day before. People have witnessed unchecked retail theft at two nearby Walgreens. One of them closed last year. Mr. Boudin backtracks to talk with a man who is hosing down a bright blue Yamaha motorcycle in the driveway at Pro Image Auto Collision on Mission Street. “I understand you support the recall. What’s your concern?” he asks.

The worker says the district attorney has had “all these years” to change the city – and Mr. Boudin interrupts, talking over him. “How many years have I had?” he quizzes. The shop worker keeps speaking, driving to the point that people who commit crimes need to be held accountable. “I agree,” says Mr. Boudin, pointing out that he’s been in office less than 2 1/2 years, and was almost immediately shut down by the pandemic. Despite that, he tells the man he has been able to increase the rates that charges have been brought in cases of homicides, sexual assaults, and drug sales, compared with his predecessor.

The employee continues hosing down the bike, unconvinced. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  

This “seeing is believing” is Mr. Boudin’s challenge, and to some extent, a challenge for Democrats in a midterm year when crime and violence have edged up to rank third among the list of Americans’ top concerns – behind inflation and the economy, according to a March survey by Gallup. Political and criminal justice experts warn not to extrapolate a national trend from a single locale. And yet, Mr. Boudin is not the only progressive prosecutor under attack, with George Gascon in Los Angeles and Alvin Bragg in Manhattan having to backpedal on some reforms. Mr. Gascon is also being hounded by a second attempt at a recall. Even when reformist prosecutors have voter support, some state legislatures are trying to clip their wings. That’s the case in Pennsylvania, after Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner won reelection last year.  

“Voters fundamentally understand that the reason they elect DAs is to put the bad guys behind bars,” says veteran Democratic strategist Garry South, in Los Angeles. If Mr. Boudin is recalled – and several polls point to that likelihood – “it sends a message to Democrats that even in a very liberal bastion like San Francisco, prosecutors have to do their job, and they have to be perceived as doing their job. If they just come off as reformers of the criminal justice system, that’s not what they’re hired to do.”

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin talks with business owners and residents in San Francisco on May 17, 2022. Mr. Boudin is one of a number of progressive prosecutors across the U.S. who are under fire for their attempts at criminal justice reform.

A reformer whose parents were incarcerated

When Mr. Boudin ran for district attorney in 2019, he emphasized his upbringing as a child of incarcerated parents. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were members of the militant, leftist Weather Underground. After a 1981 botched armored truck heist, they were convicted of felony murder for their supporting roles. His mother was released in 2003. She died in May. His father was released late last year.

The toddler was raised by adoptive parents in Chicago, who had also been members of the radical group. He grew up to graduate from Yale Law School and eventually became a public defender in San Francisco – driven by his personal experiences with the criminal justice system. But he switched roles to pursue the top prosecutor job, running on a reform platform to end racist, mass incarceration. 

Mr. Boudin is part of a wave of similarly minded district attorneys in Seattle, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere who were elected over the past five years or so. Their movement seeks to prevent certain offenders from repeatedly churning through the system by, for example, diverting them to mental health, drug misuse, or education programs. They seek accountability of rogue police officers and greater post-conviction justice. They support better victims’ services and treating juvenile suspects as juveniles – not as adults. 

A lightning rod for the city’s ills

In a city with a history of progressive prosecutors, Mr. Boudin barely won his race, besting his opponent by 1.6 percentage points.

Now it’s not his background, but his performance that’s up for discussion. The debate boils down to a charge that he’s too lenient with criminals, but the reality is more complex. In a city where two-thirds of voters recently polled say they feel less safe than in 2019, and 57% want to recall Mr. Boudin, the DA has become a lightning rod for everything that ails San Francisco, from homelessness and rampant open-air drug use and overdoses, to auto burglaries, hate crimes, and spectacular smash-and-grab retail theft. 

Homicides in the city were up during the pandemic, from a half-century low. In the first five months of 2022, they’re slightly down, while assaults and rape are up, and larceny and theft up substantially.

“There are so many moving parts” behind crime trends and the recall, says Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. The pandemic interrupted lives and included a period of “wild fluctuations” in crime that affected people’s feelings about public safety, he says. 

Nationally in 2020, residential burglaries plunged by more than half but homicides rose by nearly 30%, and hate crimes against Asians surged by 76%, according to the FBI. Gun sales flourished and so did gun deaths. To control contagion, homeless shelters reduced their populations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encouraged encampments; jails and prisons released certain inmates early, and courts operated at far below capacity.  

Given the many factors influencing crime, Mr. Loftstrom says that “there’s a limitation [to the effect] a district attorney can have on crime rates.”

“We cannot do it alone”

When Mr. Boudin is campaigning, he works the personal angle – if a shopkeeper is Taiwanese, he mentions a glorious trip surfing on the Taiwanese coast. He expresses empathy for a difficult last two years, and hands out his business card for people to email him directly. But many people want to know what he’s doing about crime, about cleaning up the city. That’s when he delves into the workings of government: He’s not the sanitation department, the mayor, the board of supervisors, or the police. That he can only prosecute the cases that police send him.

“We cannot do it alone,” he told the Monitor about lessons learned in his brief tenure. “We have to work with other agencies.” When asked what he’s most proud of, he says, “I’m most proud of how we handled the pandemic.”

Since taking office in 2020, he as well as his supporters say, the DA ended cash bail, reduced the jail population, added Chinese speakers to victims services, charged police officers for abuse of force, went after ghost guns, and set up an Innocence Commission to review wrongful convictions. Joaquin Ciria – in prison for 32 years for a murder he did not commit – was the first person exonerated after a review by the commission. He was released in April.  

Mr. Boudin and his campaign point to misinformation and fearmongering from the recall side, which they describe as an aggressive drive by Republicans and the police union. They are pushing “a false narrative of rising crime and an ineffectual DA. That’s not true,” says John Avalos, former representative for the Excelsior neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors – which overwhelmingly supports Mr. Boudin. “We know he’s done what he’s promised.” 

The initial recall effort was started by Richie Greenburg, who ran as a Republican for mayor in 2019. It’s since been taken on by some high-profile Democrats, including a former San Francisco Democratic Party chair, Mary Jung. Republicans are contributing to the recall, but its organizers say 83% of donors are Democrats or people not identified with a party.  

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Brooke Jenkins, a former assistant district attorney for San Francisco, speaks at a literature drop-off rally in the city's Portola neighborhood, May 21, 2022. She quit her job last year to help lead the recall effort against her former boss, District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

“Balance. That’s my word.”

Democratic leaders who support the recall say they still advocate criminal justice reform. Just not Boudin-style.

“One of the main issues is that Chesa has taken a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Brooke Jenkins, a former homicide prosecutor who quit last year to join the recall campaign. She says she is among 40 colleagues who have left the office under Mr. Boudin. “Balance. That’s my word.”

In an interview before setting off with volunteers for a literature drop, she says Mr. Boudin started off with several blanket policies: never charge juveniles as adults, never use gang charges, never use prior serious and violent felonies as a punishment enhancement, never use cash bail. While she supports “the spirit” of such changes, the problem is that “you never leave yourself the room for exceptional circumstances.”

Ms. Jenkins mentions a homicide case in which there was video evidence, but the exact identity of the shooters was indiscernible. Prosecutors could have persisted with gang conspiracy charges used specifically for these kinds of cases, but didn’t because of the policy, she says. Over the next 11 months, two of them shot people. “Chesa’s alternative [to incarceration] is release, release, release.”

If Mr. Boudin is recalled, Ms. Jenkins and others hope the mayor will appoint someone with experience as a prosecutor. Mr. Boudin still has his public defender’s hat on, she says.  

Mr. South, the Democratic strategist, reaches back in history, to the failed campaign of President George H.W. Bush in 1992. A recession had not yet officially started, but people felt economic pain. “People felt it, but he kept saying, ‘Look at the statistics.’” Whether it’s a district attorney like Mr. Boudin or LA’s Mr. Gascon, if the perception is that crime is out of control, homelessness is taking over the sidewalks, and people are stealing catalytic converters, “it doesn’t matter what the statistics are.”

Eugenia Charles-Newton could still be missing. 

Instead, she’s sitting at her desk in the chamber of the Navajo Nation Council. On a hot March afternoon, the chamber is cool and silent – as silent as she had been for decades.

It’s been about six months since she began talking publicly about her disappearance more than 20 years ago, when she was just a teenager. It hasn’t gotten any easier.

“It felt like, like it wasn’t real,” she recalls, falteringly. “But it was. I mean, it was real.”

The first thing she remembers noticing, after regaining consciousness, was how cold the ground was. It didn’t make sense. After all, it felt as if only moments before she had been at a flea market on a bright, hot summer day. Now, darkness surrounded her. She could kind of make out a roof overhead. She wondered if she was dreaming.

She felt groggy. She couldn’t move. She slipped in and out of consciousness, the passage of time marked by the cycle of sunlight and cold night air seeping through cracks in the wall.

She had been held for several days, she discovered later. During that time, she said at a meeting of the Navajo Nation Council last September, she had been beaten and raped repeatedly by a man from the reservation. 

“And ... nobody came looking for me,” she is saying now. “Nobody came out.”

She pauses to lift her glasses and wipe tears from her eyes. Her phone vibrates on the table, but she ignores it. She is silent for almost a minute.

“It wasn’t that my family didn’t love me; it was because the police told them it was going to be OK,” she says. “They believed what the police would tell them. And [the police] never came out, they never ...” Her voice trails off.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A billboard in Gallup, New Mexico, sponsored by a nonprofit, highlights the problem of Native women who have disappeared or been killed on tribal lands.

The story that Ms. Charles-Newton recounts illustrates a searing problem that has wracked Native families from Canada to the United States for decades – the killing or disappearance of Indigenous people.

To this day, Native people – particularly Native women – go missing and are killed at far higher rates than other ethnic groups, and their cases are often never solved. 

No one single cause lies behind the crisis. Law enforcement agencies are understaffed. Government assistance has been limited, and jurisdictional issues over who handles cases slow and complicate investigations. Social and cultural impediments add to the problems, as do widespread poverty, unemployment, and substance abuse on Native lands.

Yet today the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples (MMIP) movement is attracting new attention. Federal and state governments are pouring more resources into solving and preventing cases, while grassroots campaigns – often pioneered by victims and their families, and fueled by social media – are bringing concerted action in communities across tribal lands. 

That includes here in Navajo Nation, an area larger than Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire combined – vast swaths of which are uninhabited. People here have gone missing simply trying to walk home at night.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Many Navajo homes lie in remote parts of the reservation and often don’t have electricity.

With the rising voices of activists like Ms. Charles-Newton, people are hoping that happens with less frequency. She has become one of the tribe’s leading advocates, trying to raise awareness about the number of Navajo people who have disappeared or been killed, a cause aided by her position as one of 24 district delegates on the tribal council. 

“In my heart I want to believe that nobody is ever going to have to go through what I went through, that one day it’s just all going to stop,” says Ms. Charles-Newton. “I know that it’s going to be a long time before something like that happens. But at the same time, I think that there are some who have convinced me that as long as we keep working together, and as long as we keep talking about these things, change will happen.”

A few dozen people gathered in a parking lot near a warehouse loading dock in a high-crime neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia, on Valentine’s Day in 1992.

The parking lot was where, weeks earlier, authorities had found the body of Cheryl Ann Joe. Her mother helped organize the gathering in honor of her daughter, and it would later become an annual march to bring attention to the disappearance or killing of Indigenous women and girls. It is considered the inception of the official MMIP movement.

In the U.S., Native American women are killed at almost three times the rate of white women, and up to 10 times the national average in some areas, according to a 2021 research summary by the National Congress of American Indians. As of 2020, the average time missing for a Native person in Arizona was 21 years, according to the organization. In Montana, Native people make up more than 25% of missing people despite representing only 6.6% of the state population.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Demonstrators display placards at a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in October 2021 that draw attention to Indigenous women who are missing or have been killed.

But limited data and reporting problems continue to obscure the full scope of the MMIP crisis, experts say. Many disappearances aren’t reported – indeed, federal law doesn’t require tribal law enforcement agencies to report disappearances of people under age 21, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) – and Native women are often misclassified under other racial categories.

The vast majority of MMIP cases fall under the jurisdiction of federal law enforcement, in particular the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). But they’ve long done a poor job investigating these cases due to a combination of underfunding, limited resources, jurisdictional confusion, and racial bias, say advocacy groups and the GAO report. 

The FBI only investigates disappearances when foul play is involved, for example, while the BIA can investigate any disappearance with tribal police. If a Native person goes missing off tribal land, however, then state or local law enforcement must take up the case. (In nine states, state authorities also have jurisdiction over crimes committed on tribal land.)

This has often left families of missing Native people unsure of whom to call – if they choose to call anyone. And there has historically been little public pressure to change the process, since cases often receive scant attention from police, media, lawmakers, and even local communities.

The GAO report, released last year, offers a snapshot of the various issues. In 2020, four of seven BIA offices surveyed had vacancies for one-third to one-half of the agents who could work MMIP cases, according to the study. Federal agents often didn’t communicate adequately with victims’ families and were frequently indifferent about investigations. Tribal officials attributed this in part to “historic and systemic racism and prejudice” against Native people, particularly women.

Some of that may soon change. In 2020, Congress passed two bipartisan laws focused on improving the federal response to crimes against Indigenous women, including improving coordination between different law enforcement agencies. The legislation built on the work of Operation Lady Justice, a federal task force on missing and murdered Native peoples created by President Donald Trump in 2019. The BIA has also created a Missing and Murdered Unit, with offices around the country, to investigate active and cold MMIP cases.

But on the ground, families, victims, and activists complain that they’ve seen little progress so far. Some say the federal and state governments are talking to each other more about the issue, which is good, but they are not necessarily talking to them. 

“Families have been largely left out of that,” says Angel Charley, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, an advocacy group based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “These are two different systems, and they still feel very separate from each other.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Meskee Yatsayte co-founded Missing and Murdered Diné Relatives and works on a New Mexico task force that deals with missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Meskee Yatsayte is part of the grassroots system – a network of people in Indian Country who are taking their own initiative to help find missing people. She keeps a bag of “search stuff” in her truck. Stored under a seat, the pack includes hiking boots, flashlights, a reflective vest, a first-aid kit, a few cameras, and a drone.

On this day, she is standing in front of the county courthouse in Gallup, New Mexico. Sunglasses rest on her forehead. A turquoise necklace dangles from her neck. Her wide smile and laid-back demeanor belie a woman who has been immersed for nine years in the MMIP crisis, an experience that has molded her into a veteran civilian investigator.

Since 2013, her work has followed several tracks. She helps operate a Facebook page called Navajo Nation Missing Persons Updates, posting flyers she receives from relatives of missing individuals and developments in cases. (“HAVE YOU SEEN WAYLON TOM?” begins one recent post. “FOUND: Jamie Yazzie,” reads another.) She raises awareness through another group she co-founded, Missing and Murdered Diné Relatives. She helps report new missing people to NamUs, a national clearinghouse for missing and unidentified people. She also works on the New Mexico Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives task force.

And she searches for missing people herself. She has come to know the streets and storm drains of Gallup, as well as the rugged plains, dry gullies, and steep ridges of the reservation where a missing person might be. Every search is laborious, heart-wrenching – and often dangerous. But like many grassroots advocates tackling the MMIP crisis, Ms. Yatsayte has a personal connection to it.

On May 1, 2020, her uncle decided to walk 4 miles into Gallup and get a bottle of Gatorade, as he often did. It turns out that was the day New Mexico shut down access to the town because of the pandemic.

No one is sure what happened next, but he never came back. It was night by the time Ms. Yatsayte heard, and the temperature had dropped below freezing.

“My little sensors just went off,” she says. “Something was wrong.”

She searched all night, finding nothing. A month went by – still nothing. The police had set up barricades around town the day he went missing, so he might have taken a longer route. 

Using a four-wheeler, Ms. Yatsayte checked some hogbacks off the highway. She eventually found him in a dip underneath a tree, where he had died. He was 2 1/2 miles from home. “I made sure that my family didn’t see,” she says. “That was one thing I was so protective of. For me, I can handle things like that.”  

She wishes she had checked those hogbacks sooner. But she is at least appreciative that the family had some closure. 

“We were able to bring our loved one home,” she says. “There are just so many that [are] still searching. They have absolutely no answers, even after decades.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Family, friends, and advocates for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women march in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in October 2021, in part to draw attention to the disappearance of Pepita Redhair.

Last October, some 70 people marched through Albuquerque’s Old Town neighborhood. Passing boutiques selling Native American jewelry and artwork, the crowd chanted “no more stolen lives!” and “justice for Pepita!” 

The rally came amid a nationwide outcry over the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a Florida woman who had gone missing two months earlier while traveling cross-country with her boyfriend. But the small event in Albuquerque centered on a different woman, Pepita Redhair, from Crownpoint, New Mexico, who had disappeared 19 months before.

Ms. Redhair’s mother spoke at the march, as did other relatives of missing and murdered Navajo people. Ms. Charles-Newton
shared the story of her harrowing disappearance, too. “The same stories they share whenever a white woman goes missing, we have the same hurt,” the Navajo council delegate said. “We want the same justice.”

There wasn’t always such solidarity with and sympathy for victims and families of missing and murdered Native people. Just raising awareness and speaking out about the issue can be dangerous, since some people resist having cases investigated.

Ms. Yatsayte says she received her first threat in 2015 and stayed anonymous until 2017. Once, she and others were notifying people about a missing woman who was a victim of domestic violence. A man warned them to get the woman’s information off social media “or he would find us.”

“Families are finally feeling comfortable to come out and start talking. ... It’s just amazing how many of these families pull together and work together to make a difference,” says Ms. Yatsayte.

It can be taboo to talk about death and dead people in Navajo culture, too. Yet as the MMIP crisis becomes more visible, some of the stigmas surrounding the issue are starting to erode.

“Our younger generation is more open-minded, but still we carry that tradition with us, because that’s what we were taught by our elders,” she says. “We do have to respect that when someone voices that [more traditional] opinion.” 

Screen grab from Facebook

Meskee Yatsayte operates a Facebook page called Navajo Nation Missing Persons Updates, which posts flyers she receives from relatives of people who have disappeared, as well as developments in cases.

Impediments remain in tackling the issue, though, one of which is law enforcement. 

“Jurisdictional issues are a problem for us Native Americans – they’re a huge problem,” said Jerome Lucero, governor of Pueblo of Zia, a reservation 40 miles north of Albuquerque, at the Pepita Redhair rally. “That’s why it’s so hard for us to get justice.”

In addition to not having jurisdiction over killings and some kidnappings on Native lands, tribal authorities also have limited jurisdiction to detain non-Native people suspected of a crime. And even if they did have more authority, officers like Mr. Lucero, who is a member of the Zia tribe’s police department, say they barely have the resources to handle their current workload.

He has one officer for 124,000 acres of land – an area larger than New Orleans. The Navajo Nation, the second-largest tribe in the country, doesn’t have it any easier. As of October 2020, the Navajo Nation Police Department had just 264 personnel, of which 135 were patrol officers, for a reservation the size of West Virginia.

Some police stations don’t have jails, and the department has had to relocate two stations recently due to hazardous and unsanitary conditions. In 2020, Ms. Charles-Newton tried to get federal funding so the tribe could set up its own medical-examiners office and help ease some of the burdens. According to tribal police, Navajo criminal investigators spend as much as 40% of their time serving as coroners.

Phillip Francisco, who stepped down in January as chief of the Navajo Nation Police Department, says he understands the frustrations of families of missing and murdered Navajo people. “They need a resolution, but sometimes there’s just nothing there,” he says. “Sometimes investigators have exhausted every single lead, and unless something else comes up there’s really nothing they can do.”

Yet he believes the crisis transcends law enforcement. “To take care of this problem of missing people, we have to take care of the problem at the root, which is jobs, upbringing, domestic violence,” he says. “That will help prevent people going missing in the first place.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The Navajo Nation Council Chamber and other tribal offices are located in Window Rock, Arizona.

Today there are 17 Bureau of Indian Affairs offices around the country that have at least one agent dedicated to solving MMIP cases, according to a spokesperson for the agency. The agency’s Missing and Murdered Unit has worked to enhance NamUs, and has enabled BIA to expand partnerships with other federal agencies and offices, like the FBI’s forensic laboratory and the U.S. Marshals Service Missing Child Unit, the spokesperson said in a statement. The Missing and Murdered Unit has six offices around the country.

But the agencies have more work to do in overcoming entrenched skepticism and distrust of the federal government among Native Americans. Ms. Yatsayte says the government needs to listen to and take recommendations from victims, families, and advocates about the MMIP crisis.

Still, on the ground, progress is being made. Mobilization and advocacy are hitting new heights, data gaps are being filled, and partnerships and coalitions are forming.

Many states – including New Mexico, Minnesota, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, and Wisconsin – have formed task forces in recent years to curb the problem. Ms. Yatsayte is close to finishing a 30-page “tool kit” that gives families instructions on what to do when a family member goes missing. 

The Sovereign Bodies Institute – a nonprofit research organization based in Northern California that maintains perhaps the largest and most comprehensive database of MMIP cases in North America – has opened a second office in Montana. California and Montana have some of the highest numbers of MMIP cases. 

In April,the organization announced it was suspending taking on new cases “due to an overwhelming influx of clients since the beginning of 2022.” But Annita Lucchesi, the group’s executive director, is heartened by what she has seen in recent years.

“Grassroots advocates are making all sorts of progress,” she says. “We have the expertise to do the work in a way that’s truly effective.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Eugenia Charles-Newton, a Navajo Council delegate who has been speaking out about the missing persons issue, stands in the council chamber – which is shaped like a traditional Navajo hogan with a timber roof – in Window Rock, Arizona.

Ms. Charles-Newton has been trying to get more resources to fight the problem for years. She tried again last September, when she urged the Navajo Nation Council to reallocate funds from the tribe’s Washington, D.C., office to set up a special division to prosecute cases involving missing people.

It was the first time she’d spoken publicly about her tragedy. 

To this day, she doesn’t know how she got away on that night more than 20 years ago. She doesn’t know if she escaped, or if the man released her. She just remembers it was dark. The man had taken her glasses, so what little she could see was a blur.

Naked, except for one shoe, she says she stumbled across the rocky landscape toward a light, which turned out to be a nearby road. A car passed by, and, remarkably, the driver was someone she’d known since middle school. He put a jacket on her and took her to the hospital.

A police officer took her statement at the hospital, but, she says, law enforcement authorities doubted her and never properly investigated. She says the case was never referred to the local U.S. attorney, who would have had jurisdiction over sexual assault cases at the time. No arrests were made, she says. The Navajo Police Department didn’t respond to a request for comment on the case.

Still, the worst was yet to come.

“In fact, I represent the man who did this to me,” she said in her public comments at the Navajo Nation Council meeting in September. “As a council delegate, this man is in my community.”

Ms. Charles-Newton said her experience and the desire to keep others from going through a similar ordeal helped motivate her to attend law school, become a prosecutor on the reservation, and run for the council. 

Still, she knows there is a long way to go to prevent the disappearance and killing of Indigenous people. Her efforts to fund a missing persons unit failed by one vote.

“Some things have changed” for the better, she says now, “but I think some things still remain the same.” 

Randall Poster spends many hours each day listening to music. It’s his job. Some of Hollywood’s most prestigious directors – Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Nancy Meyers – hire him to pick out the perfect songs to pair with scenes in their movies, so the music supervisor is on a continual quest to find remarkable melodies. 

Then in 2020, Mr. Poster discovered something extraordinary. The New York resident cottoned on to something he’d heard innumerable times but had paid scarce attention to. Its emotional resonance floored the man with the golden ears. 

It was the sound of birds.   

“During this dark moment of the pandemic, when we didn’t know what was ahead of us, … you look out the window and nature was still going,” says Mr. Poster in a Zoom call. “I took a lot of solace in the fact that the birds were vocalizing and basically sort of saying, ‘We’re here. We’re still singing.’” 

As Mr. Poster’s newfound interest in avian life developed, he became more aware of how climate change threatens birds. A colleague, Rebecca Reagan, conceived an idea: Mr. Poster could invite notable musicians to create music built around birdsong. The result, produced in collaboration with the National Audubon Society, is “For the Birds: The Birdsong Project.” 

The big idea behind the project? Take the listener out of their noisy everyday humdrum so that they become more aware of their natural environment. The more we appreciate it, the more we will endeavor to preserve it.

Audubon

"For the Birds," with 174 new pieces of music featuring birdsong, was released in collaboration with the National Audubon Society. It encompasses a variety of musical styles, from minimalist composer Terry Riley, to jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, to hip-hop artist Wale.

“The world is far more than people,” says Jonathan Meiburg, leader of the band Shearwater and author of the book “A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey.” “It’s very difficult to become attuned to the world of birds and not then start becoming attuned to … thinking about other life on this planet.”

An aural ecosystem

“For the Birds” is a staggering 13 hours of music and features musicians such as Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Elvis Costello, Beck, Beach House, The Flaming Lips, Cassandra Jenkins, and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. A 20 LP box set will be available in the fall. In the interim, the tracks are being released in batches to streaming platforms.

Mr. Meiburg’s band contributed an instrumental featuring an evening chorus that he’d recorded on a high sandbank overlooking the curve of a river in the jungles of Guyana. Mr. Meiburg also wrote an essay for the box set, which he likens to an ecosystem. Indeed, interspersed between the music are poems and short stories read by actors Robert Pattinson, Greta Gerwig, Regina King, Maggie Smith, and others. The spoken word pieces enhance the meditative feel of the set, says Mr. Poster.

The band Calexico, which consists of Joey Burns and John Convertino, also wrote a new song for the project. They’ve previously recorded several bird-inspired songs. In the spring of 2021, the duo were staying at a friend’s beach house on the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge in Washington state – “the right place at the right time to capture music for this project,” says Mr. Burns via email. He spotted a couple of hitchhikers in the rain walking near a great blue heron that was “strutting along the shoreline.” The image inspired him to write lyrics to accompany a swampy, distorted guitar motif. 

“I love how Randall gets people involved with his projects, and ‘For The Birds’ is one of my favorites that we’ve been asked to be a part of,” says Mr. Burns. “My family is always tuned in to wildlife and ways of preserving nature.”

Camilla Cerea/Courtesy of Audubon

Brooke Bateman, director of climate science at the National Audubon Society, hopes “For the Birds” inspires people to go outside, even if only to their backyard, and listen.

“Nurturing … concerned people”

Brooke Bateman, director of climate science at the National Audubon Society, says that bird sounds often connect us to memories of place. For Dr. Bateman, the mournful call of the common loon transports her back to her grandparents’ cabin in northern Wisconsin. A 2019 Audubon report, “Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink,” included the loon among the birds at risk from range loss and potential extinction due to climate change. The biologist hopes that “For the Birds: The Birdsong Project” inspires people to go outside, even if only to their backyard, and listen.  

“It’s time to be inspired in a way that we take action because birds are telling us it’s time to take action,” says Dr. Bateman. “You see ‘389 birds,’ it’s a number, it’s a statistic. But if you unravel what each of those species are, a lot of us are connected to those birds and the places that they connect us with.”

The kinship between mankind and fowls of the air has long been expressed through music. For example, Ludwig van Beethoven’s 6th Symphony simulates a cuckoo with a clarinet, a nightingale with a flute, and a quail with an oboe. The Beatles included chirps of a black-billed magpie in “Blackbird.” In her 2005 song “Aerial Tal,” Kate Bush mimics bird language in a duet with blackbirds. The universality of bird sounds explains why “For the Birds” encompasses such a wide range of musical styles, from minimalist composer Terry Riley, to jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, to hip-hop artist Wale, to Japanese singer Hatis Noit. 

Mr. Poster conjectures that humankind’s first music may have been an imitation of birds. 

“I certainly did not invent the notion of incorporating birdsong into man-made music,” says Mr. Poster, who is also quick to credit the success of “For the Birds” to the efforts of Ms. Reagan and fellow executive producers Elliot Bergman, Stewart Lerman, and Lee Ranaldo. “But in this moment, it felt like it was something that was a timely tribute. And people, I think, are trying to live a little bit more consciously than they did maybe prior to the pandemic.”

The final component of “For the Birds” is a partnership with eyeglass retailer Warby Parker. Mr. Poster asked the company to create a line of inexpensive binoculars to distribute to underserved children in public schools. He hopes to inspire kids to become birders. And adults, too.

“It’s nurturing another generation or two of concerned people,” says Mr. Poster. “Ultimately I think that’s going to be the legacy of the project.”

AP

Rev. Glenn Grayson, above center, and city outreach workers in Pittsburgh pray at a June 4 march for peace as they remember those lost to gun violence.

Mass shootings that capture the national spotlight, like the recent events in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, tend to focus public attention on Washington – specifically the stuck debate over gun control in Congress. That often reinforces frustration that from one tragedy to another nothing changes.

That can obscure attention from the growth of solutions in cities that have cut gun homicides by as much as 60% in some urban neighborhoods, according to the San Francisco-based Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence. Those programs, called community violence intervention initiatives, seek local solutions to gun violence. They are built on qualities of compassion, forgiveness, and redemption that help bind a community and suppress violent behavior.

One measure of the credibility of these approaches is how philanthropies are taking note. In 1996 Congress banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying gun violence as a public health issue. That entrenched a narrow definition of gun violence as a criminal justice issue and deprived private foundations of a critical source of data for developing and promoting other solutions to the problem. The block was repealed in 2018. Since then philanthropies have begun to boost funding to fill the research gap on the broader social and economic causes and costs of gun violence.

“The good news is that philanthropy’s approach to gun violence is evolving,” the news site Inside Philanthropy noted recently. “There has been an uptick in activity as the funding ecosystem shifts from a punitive mindset to a prevention and public health mindset.”

Local officials have been waiting for the shift. In recent years cities have created various models of violence intervention. Those programs unite community stakeholders – religious groups and hospitals, social workers and educators, police and in some cases gang leaders – to identify threats and stop violence before it happens.

These violence intervention programs have shown impressive potential. According to a June 3 survey by the Center for American Progress, they have reduced gun shootings and homicides in Oakland, California, by 50% over the past seven years in areas where they were tried. Chicago saw a 50% decrease in gunshot injuries over an 18-month period starting in 2019 during a program involving 234 men from two neighborhoods; among the participants, 85% reported a personal or family tie to gangs. Shootings and killings dropped by 30% in Baltimore and New York City neighborhoods where respected community figures served as “violence interrupters.”

But these programs represent just a beginning. Cities require funding and research to broaden their reach and share what works. Last year the Biden administration sought to enlist mayors from 16 cities together with law enforcement officials and philanthropic leaders to increase investment in community violence intervention programs. The American Rescue Plan Act, passed by Congress last year, included $350 billion for local initiatives, including $122 billion for violence intervention in schools.

A range of new private funding initiatives for research on gun violence as a public health issue, meanwhile, shows that philanthropy is attempting to align with shifting public policy approaches. But there’s a hurdle. Foundations often have their own approaches and priorities, but community-based violence prevention models depend on local currencies of trust and credibility. That presents a cultural challenge.

“By combining the power of policy change and community action, we can end gun violence. The answers exist,” wrote David Brotherton, the Kendeda Fund’s adviser for gun violence prevention, in The Chronicle of Philanthropy. But “what if the most important step a foundation can take is a humble one – a willingness to learn from others and invest in copying or expanding solutions that have already proven effective?”

As the United States seeks a new balance between gun rights and public safety, violence prevention programs are showing the creative urgency of democracy to find local solutions through civic renewal. That starts with a recognition that the most important resources are already within the most vulnerable communities – which have lessons to share.