Who Is Searching for Emmilee Risling?

A few months after Emmilee Risling went missing, her parents received a map.

It was crudely drawn, sketched in ink on lined notebook paper. Slashed lines indicated roads; a rectangle marked a fire station.

An acquaintance had passed it along from an anonymous tipster who had a chilling message: Their daughter was buried there, under a rock.

Ms. Risling, 32, had disappeared on the Yurok Reservation, which stretches like a jagged scar across Humboldt and Del Norte Counties in Northern California. At nearly 56,000 acres, the land is about twice the size of San Francisco, much of it layered in dense, hilly forests of redwood, fir, madrone and tanoak.

The landscape is majestic as it follows the Klamath River, but its rugged topography can feel impenetrable. The main roads are few and far between, winding through thickets of evergreen that, even when broken with sunlight, are deep and secretive. Cell service is either spotty or nonexistent.

Ms. Risling had taken to hitchhiking after her car was stolen. Among the last places she was seen was Pecwan Bridge, which stretches over a creek near the Klamath. Residents also reported that she had been a mile north of there, in an isolated area where the main thoroughfare fades and the river shimmers below. It is known as End of Road.

Family members wanted a search conducted immediately after her disappearance in October 2021, but the Yurok Tribal Police comprised only five officers and two command staff. They were not trained in search-and-rescue operations.

“We just didn’t have the resources,” said Greg O’Rourke, chief of the department. “The thoroughness of the search would have been questioned. And, so, at that point, I determined that the most good we can offer is investigating, following up on tips, tracking down leads.” The last known locations of Ms. Risling, he added, were too far apart to be helpful.

Ms. Risling’s father asked the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, which has about 100 deputies and a volunteer search-and-rescue team, to take over the investigation. He was referred back to the tribal police.

“I said, ‘When you’re looking to try to help us or not, your approach is real bureaucratic,’” Gary Risling recalled. “‘You think of all the ways that you can’t.’”

It wasn’t until April 2022 — six months after Ms. Risling disappeared — that a coordinated search was begun, initiated by a wilderness safety nonprofit based in Minnesota. The Associated Press had recently written about Ms. Risling, the first in-depth story about her published by a major news outlet.

A team of cadaver dogs, K-9 handlers, volunteers and law-enforcement personnel set out on boats and all-terrain vehicles.

On the third and final day, handlers directed their two best dogs to the area mapped out by the tipster. It was up a hillside, in a village known as Wautec, not far from End of Road.

Dexter, a spaniel, became animated about one particular spot, but did not offer what is known as a trained final response. It was early in the day, damp and cool, the best conditions for picking up a scent. The second dog arrived when the sun was high and did not have the same reaction.

“If we had been called in immediately,” said Tanya Hurd, one of the K-9 search managers, “we would have had more of a shot.”

Before leaving, the team advised that the area continue to be explored.

Ms. Risling’s mother often wondered about the inconclusive finding that day. “I was totally fixated on the map,” Judy Risling, 73, recalled. She sent it to anyone she thought might care. Three years would pass before another K-9 team followed up.

‘Going places’

There was a brilliance to Emmilee Risling that made her enviable and beloved.

In high school she had been a standout, excelling in AP courses, serving as president of her class all four years and volunteering twice to organize a regional conference. To promote a raffle, she once persuaded a dealership to donate a car.

“She was a superstar,” recalled her friend Blythe George. “Raising your hand, being an active participant, wanting to be the club president — that was kind of really considered white kid stuff. Emmilee not only did those things, she was better at them.” Ms. George would go on to receive degrees at Dartmouth and Harvard, but she remained enamored of Ms. Risling’s gifted mind.

Ms. Risling also felt a deep responsibility to preserve Native American culture and was a perennial figure at tribal ceremonies, known for dancing with an unassuming grace. Her singing voice, lilting and haunting, could move a crowd to lean in and listen.

A member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, with Yurok and Karuk lineage as well, Ms. Risling had been raised in McKinleyville on the rural coast. The region is home to about a dozen reservations or rancherias where it is common to refer to someone as growing up either “on rez” or “out town.” The former meant you were accustomed to scant electricity and resources. The latter usually denoted middle-class aspirations and a better shot at upward mobility.

Well-spoken and striking with long, shiny hair and wistful brown eyes, Ms. Risling had been 15 when she ended up on the front page of The Washington Post for an article about the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian.

It did not surprise anyone when she earned several scholarships and went to the University of Oregon to study political science. Her graduation in 2014 was a distinct accomplishment. Only about 16 percent of Native American adults have bachelor’s degrees — less than half that of the nation’s average.

Ms. Risling planned to become a lawyer.

“She just really had a passion for anything she believed in,” said her younger sister, Mary Risling. “I always imagined her greatness and what was going to happen in her life. She was probably always considered the smart sister, you know, the one that was really going places.”

But by 2021, Ms. Risling’s life had fractured in unimaginable ways.

It was not long before she became the face of a crisis known as M.M.I.P. — Missing and Murdered Indigenous People.

Jurisdictions

There are certain names around here that are spoken with warning and regret.

Andrea “Chick” White. Sumi Juan. Both young mothers who disappeared.

Dante RomanNose-Jones. Shot in the head at 13 years old.

Barbara Jean McNeil. Beaten to death in her home.

They are among those swept into M.M.I.P., a designation that aims to highlight two tragedies plagued by the same problems: trivialized victims, minimal resources and a jurisdictional mess. It is an abyss where public attention has waned and justice is absent.

The issue is systemic, with roots traced back to colonialism. Just 3.5 percent of the total U.S. population identifies as Native American, according to census figures. But it is a group disproportionately affected by violence, domestic abuse and mental-health disorders.

Their death rate by homicide is five times higher than that of whites. Their children are overrepresented in the foster care system. They have the highest rate of poverty and suicide among all racial and ethnic groups. And they experience a high rate of alcohol and substance abuse. But their access to services is limited.

In 2023, about 10,650 reports of missing Indigenous people were entered into the F.B.I.’s National Crime Information Center. That number is believed to be inaccurately low, as many cases are poorly documented or the person is misidentified as white.

Complicating matters is a statute that created what many see as a muddled sense of law-enforcement responsibility. Public Law 280, enacted in 1953 when the federal government was pushing to disband tribes, gave certain states criminal jurisdiction over reservations, but without financial support.

California, home to 109 federally recognized tribes, is among a handful of states that remain under the law.

Here, local sheriff’s departments are responsible for sovereign nations with tight-knit communities that have little trust in law enforcement.

Some tribes have their own police force, although their operations are small and they can be beholden to the sheriff’s office. That leads to tension between agencies, a confused sense of leadership and a feeling that no one is aggressively taking the lead.

In California, the M.M.I.P. issue is concentrated in the northern region. The issue was gaining traction when Ms. Risling went missing, which meant added scrutiny to the response.

William Honsal, the sheriff of Humboldt County, said that while his office had jurisdiction over Ms. Risling’s case, he trusted the Yurok Tribal Police to call the shots. His office has provided training to tribal officers and deputized them, which allows them to enforce state law.

If the tribe had requested a coordinated search-and-rescue effort, the sheriff’s office could have initiated one, Mr. Honsal said. But he said that any search efforts would have been compromised from the start because four days had passed before Ms. Risling was reported missing.

Mr. O’Rourke, the chief of the Yurok Tribal Police, said he was empathetic toward the Risling family. Emmilee Risling used to babysit his daughters. “The tribe didn’t just shrug and say, ‘Oh well,’” he said. “We really did try to help.”

Mr. O’Rourke worked as a deputy for the county for 12 years and said he had emphasized a good relationship with the sheriff. “I chose to integrate myself so when a call comes in, they will say, ‘Oh, the Yurok tribal office is handling it, they know what to do.’”

Not everyone takes that approach.

“If the Yurok Tribe wants to be buddies and have all these good relationships, more power to them,” said Ryan Jackson, chairman of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. “We don’t see it that way. We have had a terrible history with the county.”

On either reservation, there can be a general sense of lawlessness.

“It’s been known that if you want someone disappearing — whether you dump their body here, whether you kill somebody,” said Alanna Lee Wright, a distant cousin of Ms. Risling, “it’s kind of a black hole for the county, that they just don’t respond here.”

Descent

Ms. Risling’s disappearance exposed an uneasy truth about the M.M.I.P. movement: The missing and the murdered often needed help long before they spiraled into their demographic’s stark statistics.

After college, Ms. Risling returned to McKinleyville and worked with indigent families in need of assistance. “She is so kind,” applicants would say.

She had become a devoted mother to her son from a college relationship. She coached his T-ball team, carted him to jujitsu classes and threw him elaborate birthday parties.

But Ms. Risling dated haphazardly and began seeing a man who friends and family members said was emotionally and physically abusive. “She would tell me things like he would spit in her face all the time or dump a bottle of alcohol on her head,” said her friend Shawna Ibarra. Deputies investigated him for at least one alleged assault on Ms. Risling in May 2020, but no charges were filed, according to the county district attorney’s office.

Ms. Ibarra watched as her friend slipped into a different world, smoking meth and surrounding herself with addicts. The drugs seemed to trigger a new persona. Ms. Risling would talk to herself, make nonsensical statements or lash out violently.

After the birth of her daughter in 2020, Ms. Risling showed signs of postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia. Her children were placed in the care of her mother, and she began staying with a friend on the Hoopa reservation. The police stopped her numerous times for walking around naked in public.

Clinics on the reservations offered minimal mental health services. The only inpatient psychiatric hospital within 300 miles had 16 beds. The few times Ms. Risling was taken there, she was released. “She would be having a mental episode, a breakdown, but then once she got there, she could talk her way out of having to be admitted,” Ms. Ibarra said.

In late 2020, Ms. Risling was spotted by her friend Ms. George in the grocery store. She appeared frazzled and breathless as if she had fled an unsafe situation. Her son by her side, she clutched her infant daughter to her chest. When she went to pay for baby formula and bottles, her credit card was declined. Ms. George handed her some cash. She would not see Ms. Risling again.

“You spend the rest of forever wondering, should you have done something different?” Ms. George, 34, said.

In 2021 alone, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office received nearly two dozen calls for service concerning Ms. Risling. Deputies placed her on an involuntary psychiatric hold, known as a 5150, several times.

In September that year, tribal officers responded to a small fire at a cemetery on the Hoopa reservation and found Ms. Risling without clothes. Her friend Tek-Wes McCovey said tribal officers called and requested she pick up Ms. Risling.

“They said the sheriff’s office didn’t want to come over the hill and into the valley,” Ms. McCovey said. “It wasn’t until the next evening the county cops showed up at my house to arrest her.”

At a court hearing, the Hoopa police chief at the time referred to Ms. Risling as a nuisance in need of mental support. A probation officer recommended that the court deny her release.

Ms. Risling’s parents were present that day and hoped for the same.

But the judge noted that Ms. Risling had no prior convictions and allowed her supervised release. She was ordered to return for the next court date.

“My heart just sunk right there,” her father, a former fire chief for Hoopa, said. “We knew she had no cellphone, no money, no car, no nothing. How in the heck are you going to expect her to show up at some hearing in a week?”

The judge also said Ms. Risling could be monitored through an electronic ankle bracelet if the probation department deemed it necessary. No such device was issued.

Days after her release, Ms. Risling vanished.

A sense of futility

The Yurok are not a rich tribe. It is the largest in California with 6,500 members, but its reservation is less than two-thirds the size of Hoopa and much of the land is not actually owned by the tribe. The Yurok have one tiny seasonal casino, a modest hotel and three gas stations. Most of their funding is through grants.

Now the tribe has found itself thrust into the difficult position of trying to effect institutional change.

Shortly after Ms. Risling went missing, seven women reported being approached by possible traffickers, prompting the tribe to issue an emergency declaration.

It has since established a prosecutor’s office and advocated state funding for tribes to address M.M.I.P. It helped sponsor the bill that created Feather Alerts, a statewide emergency system that notifies the public when an Indigenous person goes missing. And it was recently awarded a grant to build a wellness center that will include mental health services.

The tribe also managed to hire the state’s first investigator dedicated solely to M.M.I.P. cases: Julia Oliveira, who arrived in March 2023.

Ms. Oliveira — six feet tall, mild-mannered, agreeable — had been a police sergeant at the nearby Blue Lake Rancheria, but most of her law enforcement career had been with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.

The M.M.I.P. job had been a chance to take on something personal. Her mother was of the Wyandotte Nation, a tribe in Oklahoma.

The role is about advocacy, reaching out to families, attending trainings and conferences, and pushing for Feather Alerts. She also works with various agencies, inserting herself into current cases, which take priority. It leaves little time to dig into the past.

But Ms. Oliveira, 59, hoped to find answers to Ms. Risling’s case, which had languished in the sheriff’s cold-case unit, run by two retired investigators.

She sought a cast of characters who had already given their statements to the police. Like the mechanic who lives at End of Road who was among the last to see her alive. And the brother and sister nearby who said that they had given Ms. Risling a place to rest and that she mentioned wanting to visit a remote village on the reservation known as Ah Pah.

Interviews were best done in person, but heavy rain and snow were frequent impediments. Updates with Ms. Risling’s mother were wrenching.

“It’s hard not to feel somewhat responsible, because I want to give them something,” Ms. Oliveira said.

But Ms. Oliveira did not glean much. She did find a partner: Ms. Risling’s cousin Alanna Wright.

A paralegal for the Yurok Tribal Court, Ms. Wright, 34, had been on a committee tasked with researching the missing and murdered epidemic. Ms. Risling’s father met with the group and told them how his 9-year-old grandson wanted to look for his mother but was told it was too cold to go outside.

“Her son said, ‘Grandpa, I have a coat.’ That stuck with me,” Ms. Wright recalled.

By early 2023, Ms. Wright had created a drone program for the tribe and was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration as a drone pilot.

She also had a grant-funded drone with a thermal imaging camera that could sense body heat. The day after she received it, she used it to help search for a missing mushroom picker whose body was found a month later. She and Ms. Oliveira soon partnered up.

Together they continued the search for Ms. Risling in ways that might have seemed in vain. Walking for hours in the brush, launching the drone in a promising area, even following up on the vision of a medium who said Ms. Risling was buried in a rock quarry.

The outings felt purposeful. Ms. Risling’s case had been riddled with red tape and a lingering question: How do we bring her home?

Their work got notice; tips trickled in.

But their prospects were marked with futility. Two people. Overwhelming odds.

An excavation

On an overcast morning in April, Ms. Wright and Ms. Oliveira drove for about an hour on the Yurok Reservation.

On their phones was a screenshot of the map drawn by the tipster a few years ago. Ms. Risling’s mother had recently sent it over. It took them near End of Road and up a steep hill.

Joining them were two K-9 handlers whom Ms. Wright had befriended through her work with the Del Norte County search-and-rescue team. They had brought along what are known as historic human remains detection dogs, which are trained to trace much fainter odors than search-and-rescue dogs.

The group was on a wooded slope where the road splits into two when Trooper, a chocolate Labrador, sniffed and froze. He had a hit.

He was guided away, but returned to the same spot several times. When the second dog, Cain, was allowed to meander, he sat at the same location. Both dogs displayed their trained final response.

Ms. Oliveira notified the tribal police chief but was told she needed more data. No law enforcement showed up.

The reaction was deflating.

What happened over the next two weeks would further shatter any glimmer of progress and expose the obstacles that can hinder a missing-person search on the reservation.

Ms. Oliveira returned with ground-penetrating radar. It showed an anomaly about 10 feet away from the site, but a small excavation revealed only a dense tangle of roots.

The tribal police chief and a team conducted a follow-up excavation. They determined that the ground had not been disturbed for at least two decades and that the dogs had been influenced by an old family graveyard down the hill from the site. Ms. Oliveira was absent that day; she said she had been told that her presence was not needed.

Law enforcement officials were unhappy with Ms. Oliveira and Ms. Wright, saying the two had not followed procedure with the search, including failing to give agencies enough notice to collaborate. Ms. Oliveira, whose role was under the tribal police department, was stripped of her deputy status.

She said she was told her job may be transferred into the tribe’s courts program, which oversees M.M.I.P. initiatives.

Ms. Wright was informed that any future use of drones would require approval from the executive director with the tribe.

Ms. Oliveira and Ms. Wright worry that the fallout has, once again, diverted attention away from Ms. Risling’s case, and left a mother with no more answers than before.

It is Judy Risling who will remain her daughter’s most committed advocate, unafraid to dial the cellphone numbers of the tribal police chief and the sheriff when she thinks they have lost their way. Her demand that they hasten the excavation was strong, even if she could not help but collapse inside at the possibility of her daughter’s fate.

For so long she has reminded anyone with a moment that her daughter may have become a symbol of despair, but she was also loved. She was worthy of more.

Even in the most rugged territory, of vast terrain, of a landscape thick with wild brush and woods — even after years have passed and the prospects are grim — her daughter, she believes, deserves to be found.