The epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) is not exclusive to any region of the United States, but some states have a higher number of cases. Utah ranked 8th in the United States for the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The state's capital, Salt Lake City, was the city with the 9th highest number of cases of MMIW.
Historical factors
Utah was one of the final territories claimed by the United States during the expansion era of the nation's founding. This positioned it at the forefront of the interactions of colonial settlement and the native populations. When settlers arrived, there were five tribes established in the state, numbering to about 20,000 American Indians. During the colonization of the state there were many violent encounters between tribes and settlers, such as the Bear River Massacre, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the Black Hawk War Utah has historically been primarily dominated by a large population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which adds another dimension to the experience of Native Americans in the state. In the Mountain Meadows Massacre, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dressed up as Indigenous people as a disguise before killing members of the Baker-Fancher party. The Black Hawk war was also between Native Americans and Mormon settlers from 1865 to 1867. Some of the general historical details of Native Americans in the United States are also relevant to understand in regards to MMIW.
Operation Relocation
Operation Relocation was in response to an emergency airlift to provide supplies to Native Americans on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in order to prevent starvation after a series of blizzards in the winter of 1947–1948. The airlift was seen as embarrassing for the federal government and prompted an investigation, the findings of which indicated that the land base could only support "35,000 of the area's 55,000 inhabitants". This "surplus population" theory was used as a justification to pass the Navajo-Hopi Act, which utilized job placement services to relocate indigenous people to US cities, including Salt Lake City. This shift to more urban centers exacerbated the issue of MMIW, as research shows that there are more recorded cases in these areas.
Residential Schools
Utah also had multiple Residential Schools, which have been known to be burial grounds for Native American bodies, where Native American children were sent in order to integrate them into the LDS Church. These schools included one near Brigham City and one in Panguitch.
Complications in compiling data
There are many difficulties that make gathering data on the subject challenging. Native Americans are often mislabeled in race-specific statistics in censuses, surveys, and other types of data collection. This creates a vast margin of error for research published on this issue, as Indigenous people are sometimes mislabeled as white, Latinx, or general classifiers such as "other". There are also difficulties that arise from cultural factors. There is a statistically significant lack of participation from Indigenous populations when studies are conducted by the federal government, which could be attributed to a sociocultural mistrust (see Native American reservation politics for more information).
Urban centers
Many research difficulties vary from Native American reservations to the experience of indigenous women in urban centers. In urban centers, if Indigenous women are not affiliated with federally recognized tribes, then there is no data collected from Indian Health Services. There is also a severe problem of underreported cases in western cities, as well as a lack of publicity. This lack of publicity is currently being tackled by activist efforts in Utah. There is often a lack of transparency between police departments and researchers. Utah police departments are known for such obscurity, this is usually a result of a lack of coherent record being kept of MMIW cases. Several meetings have been held by government officials to discuss how to combat the lack of accurate reporting on Native American issues.