'Essential': State holds search and rescue training to address MMIP crisis

GREAT FALLS — Sitting in the shade on the bank of the Missouri River, Tina Bierle slathered big scoops of Vaseline onto a cotton ball.

She pulled the cotton ball apart, exposing dry pieces, and stuck it back together before placing it atop a square of aluminum foil. She then struck a metal match, launching sparks onto the cotton — now caked in accelerant — which burst into flames.

She watched as the fire burned for about five minutes.

Bierle and about 20 others gathered in Great Falls last weekend for a three-day search and rescue course. The program, which included classroom and field sessions, was offered through the Missing Persons Response Team Training Grant Program , a new piece of state legislation that aims to provide resources to community-led search efforts.

While Native Americans account for about 6.7% of Montana's population, they comprise, on average, 26% of the state's active missing persons reports. Tangled in a web of complex tribal, state and federal jurisdictions, Indigenous families statewide frequently take it upon themselves to search for their missing loved ones.

Those searches, which often cover remote and rugged terrain, can be dangerous. Kimberly Loring and her family encountered grizzly bears while looking for her sister Ashley Loring Heavy Runner on the Blackfeet Reservation. And it's not uncommon for volunteer searchers to wade across rivers, trudge through snow or endure freezing temperatures while looking for their loved ones.

Saturday's search and rescue field session focused on survival skills. Knowing how to build a strong fire anywhere and under all weather conditions can improve the chances of survival not just for a missing person, but also for a volunteer searcher who finds someone hypothermic or who wanders off and gets lost.

"Everything we learn here is beneficial," Bierle said.

Searches gone wrong If not correctly organized, informal searches can be, at best, ineffective. At worst, amateur searchers can interfere with evidence, go missing or put themselves and others in danger.

When community members searched the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in 2013 for Hanna Harris, her mother, Malinda Harris Limberhand, said searchers found a shoe and picked it up, making it difficult for law enforcement to gather forensic information on what could have been critical evidence.

When the bill for the training grant program was first introduced to the Legislature last winter, Diana Burd spoke of failures in the search for Arden Pepion, a 3-year-old girl who went missing from the Blackfeet Reservation in 2021. Burd said the search lacked coordination and resources.

"Nobody (was) collaborating," she told lawmakers. "Everybody wanted to be the boss. ... It was horrible."

Arden is still missing, Burd said, in part due to the "lack of collaboration."

Cheryl Horn, who took the search and rescue class in Great Falls, said she learned skills that would've been helpful in the search for her niece, Selena Not Afraid, 16, who went missing in 2020. After a 20-day search effort, Not Afraid was found dead less than a mile from the rest area between Billings and Hardin, where she was initially reported missing.

"With Selena, I was everything," Horn recalled. "I did everything — I couldn't even go to the bathroom. Learning about how you can delegate and organize (searches) is really helpful. We can be better."

Leading a safe search Course instructor Brett Stoffel is the president and CEO of Emergency Response International , an organization that provides survival, search and rescue and emergency preparedness training.

Searches, Stoffel explained, are "not just gathering a bunch of people and sending them into the hills."

In the classroom, Stoffel emphasized the importance of holding regular briefings, in which search organizers delegate people to take on different jobs, whether it be cooking food, providing water, sharing information on social media or leading the search of a particular area.

Searchers must also be briefed on what they should be looking for, which could include things like footprints, bones, clothing, scuff marks, firearms, ammunition, shell casings or trampled vegetation.

"All of that is relevant, and if you don't know it is (what you're looking for), it may not be intuitively obvious," Stoffel explained.

He said it's also important to communicate what evidence or clues may look like. If searchers are looking for a baseball hat, for example, Stoffel said it's useful to show volunteers what a ball cap looks like when it is wet, trampled and covered in dirt.

"Sometimes you can miss something that's right there," he said.

In the field, participants learned basic survival skills — like how to build a shelter, start a fire and make tools from things found in nature. Attendees also participated in a "clue walk" in which they searched the woods for "evidence" placed by Stoffel.

For Bierle, the crisis is personal. Her 34-year-old son Donald Has Eagle went missing and was found dead in 2023. She said she and other community members searched for him for seven days. The crisis is so pervasive that even as she learned search and rescue skills in Great Falls, her community members 150 miles away on the Fort Belknap Reservation continued to search for Michael Lonewolf , 53, who has been missing since July.

"This training is essential for all of our Native American communities," Bierle said. "Everything we learn, we will take back home."

The Missing Persons Response Team Training Grant Program established a grant through the Department of Justice that local groups can access to support formal training, resources and funds to aid searches. Those interested in applying for grant funding can email the Montana Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force coordinator at .

Statewide Indigenous Communities Reporter