Ortonville, Minnesota, videographer, mother of woman who disappeared fight for missing Indigenous women

Apr. 15—GRANITE FALLS

— Monica Fast Horse feared the worst when the daughter on whom she relied for rides to dialysis and other care failed to show up at her home one August day in 2021.

She hesitated before reporting her missing to the police, but knew immediately something bad had happened. Her missing daughter was always dependable in caring for her. And, Fast Horse explained, she was caring for her missing daughter's 5-year-old daughter.

"My first mistake was waiting too long the first day," Fast Horse, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, told videographer Karina Kafka as a camera recorded.

"A Mother's Love," a video documentary created by Kafka, aims to raise awareness about the plight of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The documentary is told from the mother's perspective.

Fast Horse speaks directly to the challenges that followed once she reached out to law enforcement and the media in hopes of finding help in locating her missing daughter.

Her initial delay in reporting her daughter as missing may not have mattered. Fast Horse said law enforcement did not seem very excited about what she told them. In time, officers would ask if her daughter was doing drugs or drinking, or had gone to a reservation to do so.

Eventually, Fast Horse said she went over the head of one of the detectives assigned the case to get her missing daughter on an Attorney General's list of missing persons.

Kafka, who grew up in Ortonville, is a 2021 graduate of Augsburg University with a bachelor's degree in fine arts and cinematography. Of Asian descent, Kafka said the widespread media attention about the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a white woman murdered at age 22 in August 2021 by her fiancé, got her thinking.

"If I was missing, would my face be on the news, in the papers? Probably not," she told an audience who gathered with her and Fast Horse for a screening of her video documentary at the YES! House in Granite Falls on March 15.

Kafka said that observation led her to become passionate about the need to raise awareness about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. She sought out someone whose story could be told.

She learned in an article in

The Guardian

about the ordeal experienced by Fast Horse and got in contact. Since producing the documentary, Kafka and Fast Horse have joined to offer screenings to other communities, such as Madison.

Kafka produced the documentary with a budget of zero. She was the entire production crew.

In the documentary, Fast Horse describes the "really ugly feeling" and helplessness she experienced as she sought help. She enlisted her missing daughter's three siblings and launched her own search.

For weeks on end, Fast Horse and her children plastered utility poles and trees in Sioux Falls with thousands of fliers.

One daughter went looking. Day and night, she checked out motels, casinos, bars and other gathering places for her missing sibling.

Fast Horse's fears were eased when one of her daughters, who has a degree in information technology, was able to get into the missing daughter's Facebook account and track her whereabouts. She now knew her daughter was alive, Fast Horse said.

After roughly 18 weeks, Fast Horse said her daughter returned with a knock on the door. She came home thin, with dark circles under her eyes, and not wearing the clothes she had been wearing when she disappeared, according to Fast Horse.

A person she thought was a friend had given her a ride the day she disappeared, Fast Horse said her daughter eventually told her. She had been taken away and often kept locked in a closet, fed a diet of mostly peanut butter despite her allergy to peanuts, and was beaten, said Fast Horse.

"They broke her," said Fast Horse.

To this day, her daughter will tell her very little about what happened.

One thing was clear: The persistent campaign by Fast Horse to find her missing daughter mattered.

"One of the reasons why they brought her back was that I was making too much of a fuss," said Fast Horse.

She remains frustrated by the lack of help she found during the search. Pleas to the media for help went largely unanswered, she said.

Her tribe, the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota, told her they did not have resources to provide help off the reservation.

Fast Horse said her grandmother told her as a young girl that Native women are on the bottom of the totem pole.

"You are the one holding everybody up, mother of all these people (yet) they do not acknowledge that. You are next to nothing to them," she said.

"It shouldn't be that way," she said her grandmother had told her.

Following the screening in Granite Falls last month, audience members' discussion focused on changing society's views toward Native women. Law enforcement, the media and society in general need to treat the disappearance of a Native woman no differently than that of a white woman.

It's important to let Native girls know they have support and end the "victim thinking" that so many Native women experience, said one audience member.

The documentary can be viewed by contacting

Kafka on her Facebook page

.