This weekend marks the annual Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women’s March on the Qualla Boundary.
This year, the march has a bright spot – a 10-year-old cold case has recently been brought to trial. Community leaders say the case is an example of new community-led momentum to address violence against Indigenous people.
For over a decade in the pages of the Cherokee One Feather, the Eastern Band of Cherokee tribal newspaper, the face of a Cherokee woman stares out under the words “Cold Case.”
“Marie Walkingstick Pheasant was found in a burned vehicle on Old Rock Crusher Road in the Big Cove Community on December 29, 2013,” a 2022 version of the ad reads. “The Cherokee Indian Police Department reported at the time that ‘foul play’ was suspected. No arrests have been made in this case. A $20,000 reward is offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible.”
Cherokee One Feather reporter Brooklyn Brown has been reporting on human trafficking issues on Eastern Band of Cherokee tribal land. She said the Pheasant case was her first for the paper.
“It’s a heavy, heavy feeling …Yes, there's justice being sought but once justice is there, you really really recognize what has happened and feel it all over again, what has happened,” Brown said.
Marie Walkingstick Pheasant’s husband, Ernest D. Pheasant, Sr., an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, was arraigned with one count of first-degree murder at the end of 2023. The case was heard in federal court in April. His case is still moving through the court system.
“For that decade that her case was unsolved, the community knew who it was,” Brown said. She explained that the continued push from Cherokee Indian Police, the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) chapter and others pushed that case forward.
The reason that Brown covers MMIW cases is personal. She is a member of Alpha Pi Omega, the Native American sorority at UNC Chapel Hill. She remembers when another student was killed.
“My sorority sister Faith Danielle Hedgepeth. She was murdered in 2012 and that was my first real introduction into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Movement,” Brown said.
Hedgepeth was a member of the Haliwa-Saponi tribal community. Authorities arrested her suspected killer in 2021.
Brown has been a reporter with the paper for about eight months.
“I'm actually a first descendant of the Eastern Band Cherokee Indians, but I was raised in the Birdtown community. And so I've always been raised knowing that I am Eastern Band, even though I'm not enrolled,” Brown said.
Brown says tribal leadership and the Cherokee Indian Police Department have been collaborating between other agencies to work on these cases.
“There’s a powerful shift that I've seen in our community … instead of just talking about these cases, we’re doing something. We're seeing justice can be served. We're seeing where stories can be shared to prevent things like this in the future. We're not being reactive anymore. We're being proactive,” Brown said.
Brown received a grant from the International Women’s Media Fund to write a story for all 35 women who are member of the Eastern Band community whose cases are solved or unsolved.
So far, she’s written about 16-year-old Ruby Sky Montelongo, 8-month-old Lively Crue Colindres and Dora Owle, who was 24 when she was killed in 1947.
Brown says the main thing she hopes that her coverage brings is a light onto local human trafficking.
“It's soliciting any form of sex and pressuring people into those sex acts,” Brown said. “It isn’t always as obvious as someone being stolen from their home and moving to a foreign country and you never see them again.”
‘Who better to tell our stories’
Sheyahshe Littledave, Maggie Jackson and Ahli-sha "Osh" Stephens launched the “We are Resilient” podcast in 2021. The true-crime podcast shines a light on missing Indigenous women with a community perspective. All three are members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.
“Who better to tell our stories than us? And that's essentially where this podcast came about because our sisters matter and it was just very important to have an Indigenous perspective and Indigenous voices out there - and we still need more of them,” Littledave said.
None of the women had a background in podcasting but their skills complement the issues that they discuss in the episodes. Littledave works in public relations, Jackson works in health care and Stephens is a coach at Cherokee Central Schools.
The podcast now has over 100 episodes and highlights stories of people across the country. The three women have also been involved with the local MMIW chapter.
Stephens says that the Pheasant case was one of the first times she had heard about a local murder.
“I was still kind of young – young adulthood – and those things just weren't things that I paid attention to before … it was just scary,” Stephens said.
Jackson credits community efforts with moving forward Pheasant’s case. The community continued to say her name. One Feather consistently shared her flier. And the Cherokee Tribal Police Department increased the reward for information on the case, which could help lead to an arrest. Tribal leadership and other agencies have all been involved in trying to solve cases.
“It was honestly a community effort to just raise awareness to something that was haunting our people and we all knew that it needed to be solved. I don't know what the catalyst was but I feel like it was multiple different things that just really brought her story to life,” Jackson said.
The group put together a petition about Pheasant’s murder and took it to the FBI office in Asheville last year. Stephens said at last year’s march she saw a new willingness in the community to share stories of their loved ones.
“A lot of the stories I have never heard of. I never knew what happened to them. So I think there's more conversation (needed). …Cherokee people, sometimes we like to hide, like to keep things ….We put a wall up, like showing emotion is a sign of weakness. And so when you're able to express those things and in a healthy manner, it helps heal,” Stephens said.
The group says they have learned a lot doing research for the podcast. They point out that domestic violence is often an issue, among other patterns.
Indigenous women are murdered at a higher rate than white women – as much as 10 times higher than the national average in some counties in the U.S., according to a report by the Department of Justice(DOJ).
Violence “could happen to anyone of us,” Jackson said.
“The circumstances that happened to these women, the stories seem to repeat themselves. They run into the same barriers: jurisdictional issues, systemic racism. There's no data collection. There's not a database. There aren't any concerted efforts towards ending this,” Jackson said.
This year will be the 5th annual march organized by Qualla MMIW. It’s been renamed MMIR March: Murdered and Missing Indigenous Relatives. Jackson explains why that change is important.
“MMIW was kind of the start of the movement. But this epidemic does not only touch women and girls, it unfortunately touches every Indigenous person in the world because it's an epidemic of Indigenous people. So the MMIR movement is Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives to encompass everyone that could potentially be victimized by this,” Jackson said.
Jackson explained that EBCI member Gabriel Crow has been missing since January.
“We would be remiss to not mention Gabe Crow's name and just hope and pray that someone out there has some information about where he is so that his family can bring him home,” Jackson said.
Asheville Police Department and Buncombe County Sheriff's Office led an interagency search of Spivey Mountain and its surrounding areas this week. APD urges anyone with information regarding Crow's disappearance to contact the department.
The MMIR march will be at Oconaluftee Island Park from 3 to 5:30 p.m., in Cherokee.
