The First Thirty Days: Building Trust Before It Is Needed

In September, a member of our circle typed something into our Zoom chat that I have not been able to put down. In the child welfare cases she sees, she wrote, some parents are overwhelmed by the system. Early in a case, before there has been time to build relationship or trust, they leave, and they can be gone for months at a time. Her question, in my words: what do we do when a family leaves before we have earned the right to be trusted?

That question is our whole October circle.

Why trust is not a given

A Native family that has been watched learns to read a helper as a risk. That is not paranoia. It is memory. Before Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, Native children were being removed from their families at rates of 25 to 35 percent, and most of them were placed outside their families. Many of the grandparents of the families we serve were sent to boarding schools. So when a stranger with a clipboard knocks in the first week of a case, a family's body answers before anyone speaks.

What the first thirty days decide

In those first weeks, a family is quietly asking three questions. Will you tell me the truth? Will you come back when you said you would? Are you here to help me keep my children, or to take them? Every kept promise answers one of those questions. Every missed call answers it too.

Relationship is a protective factor

In the science of adverse childhood experiences, relationship is medicine. A 2019 Johns Hopkins study found that adults who had six or seven positive childhood experiences had 72 percent lower odds of depression or poor mental health than adults who had two or fewer. Those experiences include feeling safe and protected by an adult at home, having at least two adults besides their parents who took a genuine interest in them, and enjoying the traditions of their community. Our grandmothers did not need the study. It is good that it exists.

What we will do on Wednesday

Ten minutes of teaching, and then the circle does the work: small rooms of three or four, one question, and a harvest of what each room knows. Three people who live this work every day will share what is working where they are. The chat counts as much as unmuting.

Wednesday, October 7 · 1:00–2:15 PM Arizona · Zoom · Free

Who this circle is for

The Rural & Indigenous Community Committee is a circle of the Arizona ACEs Consortium. We meet the first Wednesday of every month. The circle is for tribal programs, schools and educators, health and behavioral health, courts and first responders, Head Start and early childhood, and community members and relatives. No membership fee. No credentials required.

To join, email me at casandrastouder@gmail.com and I will send you the link. Bring someone who should be in the room.

What is the one thing that makes a family decide to stay in relationship with you?

Ahéhee', Cas

Casandra (Cas) Stouder · Diné & Seminole · Indigenous Wellness Consultant Chair, Rural & Indigenous Community Committee · Arizona ACEs Consortium

Sources: National Indian Child Welfare Association, “What is ICWA?”; Bethell C, et al., “Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Mental and Relational Health in a Statewide Sample: Associations Across Adverse Childhood Experiences Levels,” JAMA Pediatrics, 2019.

Permission to Grieve

A few days ago I spent a morning on a screen with people who answer the worst calls in their communities — crisis workers, health staff, peer supporters, the relatives everybody phones first. We were there to talk about grief. Not the tidy kind. The kind that follows an overdose, a suicide, a relative who is still alive but changed. Here is what I told them, and what I keep having to tell myself.

Permission

Grief is love with nowhere familiar to go. It is not weakness, and it is not a disorder.

Many of us were raised to be strong, stay busy, and keep it in. Some of that was survival. But we can practice something different: permission.

Your loss is real. Your feelings make sense. You do not have to carry this alone.

And here is the part I want the helpers to hear. We give everyone else that permission all day long, and almost never give it to ourselves.

Grief is what we feel. Mourning is what we do with it.

Grief is the natural response of a whole person to losing someone or something that mattered. It is not an illness to cure. It is something to be carried, witnessed, and honored.

Mourning is the other half — what we do with it. And every one of our peoples has always known how to mourn. Gathering. Feeding. Singing. Sitting with the family. Coming back after the crowd goes home. Those ways are medicine, not history.

William Worden gave us a frame I find kinder than stages: four tasks. Accept the reality of the loss. Process the pain. Adjust to a world without what was lost. And find an enduring connection with what was lost while moving forward in life. That fourth task matters most in our communities. We do not “let go” of our people. We carry them. Ancestors stay relatives. Moving forward and staying connected are the same task.

Loss is bigger than death

We grieve deaths. We also grieve losses no funeral is ever held for. Land. Language. Ceremony. Health. A marriage. A job. Safety.

And this one, for the recovery people reading: we grieve the drinking or using life, and the relatives who are still in it. Sobriety includes grief. That surprises people. It’s real.

The rule is simple. If it mattered to you, the grief is real.

The grief that goes unnamed

Some grief is never given a place to sit. Loss to overdose or suicide, silenced by stigma. Loss of someone incarcerated, or estranged, or still alive but changed. Miscarriage and infant loss. An ex-partner. The relative the family stopped speaking of. Kenneth Doka called this disenfranchised grief — grief that others do not acknowledge or make room for.

It is not rare. In a national survey published last year, more than forty percent of American adults said they know someone who died of a drug overdose. Forty percent. Most of that grief has never been spoken out loud.

When no one names the loss, the griever mourns alone. So this is the job, in our programs and in our families: say the name. Name the loss. Make the grief speakable.

What to say, and what to retire

Show up. Presence matters more than perfect words. Say the name. Say, “I’m sorry. I’m here. Tell me about them.”

Retire these: “At least…” “They’re in a better place.” “Be strong.” “Time to move on.”

Feed people. Sit with people. Come back after the crowd goes home — week six matters more than day one. Ask twice: “How are you really?” Then witness. Don’t fix.

Helpers grieve too

If you carry loss for a living — crisis work, health work, peer support, ministry — the losses stack up in the body with no pause between them. The signs: numbness at work. Dread. Irritability. Feeling nothing at the news of a death. That last one scares people, and it is a sign, not a character flaw.

Helpers deserve the same permission. Debrief. Memorialize the people you lose — a candle, a circle, a moment. Take grief leave when it is offered. You cannot pour from a dry vessel. Mourning is part of staying in this work.

When to reach for more

For most people, grief softens with time, support, and mourning. It never disappears — it becomes carryable. For roughly one in ten bereaved adults it stays stuck: intense yearning and shutdown that do not ease over many months, avoiding every reminder, feeling that life is over a year on. Stuck grief responds to help. Grief counseling and grief groups combine well with culturally grounded healing — science and ceremony work together. And 988 is there to call or text, any hour.

So here is the question I left that room with, and I will leave it with you. Whose grief in your community has never been given a place to sit?

Sources

Worden JW, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, 4th ed. (Springer, 2010) · Doka KJ (ed.), Disenfranchised Grief (Research Press, 2002) · Athey A, Kilmer B, Cerel J, American Journal of Public Health, 2024 (RAND American Life Panel, 2,072 adults) · Lundorff M et al., Journal of Affective Disorders 2017;212:138–149 · American Psychiatric Association, prolonged grief disorder (DSM-5-TR, 2022) · 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Disappeared Twice: What the MMIP Crisis Looks Like Under the Surface

Most people have heard the words "Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples." Almost nobody knows how the machinery actually works. Let's go there.

Start with two numbers: 5,712 and 116

In 2016, the National Crime Information Center received 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls. That same year, the Department of Justice's public missing persons database — NamUs, the one families, researchers, and the media actually search — logged 116 of them.

Not 116 fewer. One hundred sixteen, total.

That gap is the crisis inside the crisis. Our relatives disappear twice: once from their lives, and once from the record. If a person never enters the database, there's no case number, no media alert, no researcher counting her, no pressure on anyone to look. On paper, she simply never went missing.

Erased by a checkbox

Here's the part that stops people cold: many of our missing and murdered relatives are in the system — recorded as the wrong race. Police reports and death certificates routinely misclassify Native people as white or Hispanic. Researchers have found the same person listed as Native in one federal database and non-Native in another. When the Urban Indian Health Institute investigated cases in Seattle — a city that actually cooperated with records requests — they found that a quarter of the missing and murdered women they verified weren't in law enforcement records at all. They had to be confirmed through families, social media, and community memory.

Data is not boring. Data is who gets searched for. Every misapplied checkbox is a woman who statistically never existed.

The 1978 court case that built a hunting ground

Now the piece almost nobody outside Indian law knows: a Supreme Court decision called Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. In 1978, the Court ruled that tribal nations cannot criminally prosecute non-Native people — even for crimes committed on tribal land, against tribal citizens.

Sit with that. If a non-Native man harms a Native woman on her own homeland, her own nation's court is not allowed to try him. The case goes to distant federal or state prosecutors — and for years, federal prosecutors declined to file charges in roughly half of the Indian Country cases referred to them, including the majority of sexual violence cases.

Predators are not confused about this. The loophole is known, and it is used. Recent laws like the Violence Against Women Act's tribal provisions have restored slivers of jurisdiction, but the foundation Oliphant poured is still under our feet.

Man camps: when the boom comes to the border town

Follow the pipelines and the oil fields and you'll find "man camps" — temporary housing for thousands of transient extraction workers, often set down right beside tribal communities. When the Bakken oil boom hit, tribal police at Fort Berthold in North Dakota reported more murders, sexual assaults, trafficking cases, and violent incidents than in any year on record.

Layer that on top of the jurisdiction gap and you see the design: a rotating population of outsiders, next to Native communities, in the exact places where prosecution is least likely. This is why water protectors say extraction and MMIP are the same fight.

The silence is also built

When Wyoming's governor commissioned the first statewide MMIP report, researchers found Indigenous people made up 15% of the state's missing persons records over a decade — far beyond our share of the population — and that media coverage of Indigenous victims lagged badly behind coverage of white victims. Missing Native youth are quietly labeled "runaways," which can mean no alert, no urgency, no story. A family holds a search party with flyers they printed themselves while the evening news covers something else.

And some relatives are missing even from the movement

Two more truths from under the surface: our men and boys make up a huge share of MMIP cases and are almost never named in the conversation. And about 71% of Native people live in cities — where, for years, almost no violence research was done at all. The crisis is not only "out there" on reservations. It rides the bus in Phoenix and Seattle and Albuquerque.

What the underground response looks like

Here's the part that keeps me going. Because the system wouldn't count us, communities built their own machinery: tribal epidemiology centers doing the research the government didn't, aunties trained to enter missing relatives into NamUs themselves, community-run search teams, state "Feather Alert"-style systems for missing Indigenous people, and grassroots databases kept by Indigenous women who refused to let names disappear.

That is sovereignty in action. Not waiting for permission to matter.

Why I carry this into healing spaces

Families living inside this machinery carry a grief with no closure — decades of it, generations of it. It lives in the body. This is why MMIP belongs in every talking circle, every trauma training, every wellness space serving our people. Awareness posters don't heal that. Ceremony, community, culturally grounded care, and truth-telling begin to.

If your organization serves Native families and no one has ever walked your staff through what you just read — that's the training gap I fill. Reach out. Let's do this work right.

StrongHearts Native Helpline: 1-844-762-8483 · BIA Missing & Murdered Unit: 1-833-560-2065

Cas Stouder is an Indigenous wellness practitioner and trainer specializing in trauma-informed, ceremony-grounded work with communities impacted by ACEs, substance use, and the MMIP crisis.

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