On Monday, the body of 16-year-old Crow Tribe citizen Selena Not Afraid was found a mile from the Montana rest stop where she was last seen on New Year’s Day. Before then, Not Afraid, who friends and family called “Sal,” was like any other kid from Hardin High. But when she disappeared, she became something else, too: a name attached to a statistic. Her disappearance and death, along with that of 18-year-old Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, who was found dead in August, led to a write-up from The New York Times, headlined: “Rural Montana Had Already Lost Too Many Native Women. Then Selena Disappeared.” The coverage is something—a small recognition in a sea of loss. “[F]amilies like Selena’s are taking an urgent public stand to pressure politicians and law enforcement to provide more aggressive responses to these cases,” the Times wrote. “They are raising alarms through social media and even bracing themselves against Montana blizzards to keep their loved ones from being forgotten.”

But there will be other pieces like it, more names to learn as the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women drags on. Another Native woman killed, another name, another headline, and so on goes the cycle.

Here’s a number embedded in my brain through simple repetition: In 2017, 5,646 Native women were reported missing in the United States. Here’s another, specific to Montana, where Selena and Kaysera called home: Native citizens are 6.7 percent of the population, yet between 2016 and 2018, they made up 26 percent of the state’s missing persons cases.

After you’ve read enough about it, you realize that the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women’s crisis is about patterns and a refusal to do what’s necessary to stop them. Patterns of violent men and extractive industries breezing through land they do not own to take lives that do not belong to them. Patterns of tribal sovereignty being undermined and jurisdictional borders being crossed. Patterns of police dismissing concerned mothers and fathers and aunties and grandparents with the excuse that “runaways always come back.” Patterns of coroners dodging paperwork and scrawling “other” next to the line titled “Race” and “accidental death” next to “C.O.D.” Patterns of government officials, top to bottom, ignoring practical, sovereignty-first reforms and instead hoarding the kind of power that keeps the crisis alive.

There have been steps made to put an end to the violence. States have enacted task forces and financed studies and created six-figure salaries for investigative experts to help them fill the gaps. Even from the most unlikely of places, a baseline acknowledgment that something awful is happening has arrived. Those in Indian Country seemed to be torn when President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr announced a plan to combat the MMIW crisis in December. On the one hand, here was the president actually stepping forward and addressing the crisis head-on; on the other, the plan, a meager offering from a violent administration, still lacked both the necessary consultation requirements, funding levels, and the legal changes to give tribal nations the authority to arrest and detain those charged with violent crimes. But like the Times story on Selena and Kaysera, it was something, where before there was nothing.