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‘Searching for Savanna’ author Mona Gable investigates violence against Native American women

May 1, 2023

The statistics are gut-wrenching.

On some reservations, Native American women are murdered at more than 10 times the national average.

Nearly one in three Native American and Alaska Native women will experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.

Los Angeles journalist and author Mona Gable – whose articles have been published in The Atlantic, Vogue and The Daily Beast, among others – has long reported on violence against women. She was somewhat aware of the long, troubling problem of unsolved cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

And in recent years, Gable had started to get in touch with her own Native American heritage, researching the life and culture of her paternal grandmother Naomi Jones, a member of the Chickasaw Nation who had died in childbirth.

In an effort to reclaim some of the heritage that hadn’t been much talked about in her family, Gable says she “was just looking for Native American stories. I felt like my own education was really just wretched in terms of what we learned in California public schools about Native American tribes.”

So when Gable happened upon a news report about the bizarre, unexplained disappearance in North Dakota of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman who was 8 months pregnant, her professional expertise and her personal interest collided: This was a story she needed to follow.

The result is “Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many,” published on April 25 by Atria. Gable will be appearing at Vroman’s to discuss the book on May 9.

In this true-crime saga, Gable chronicles the tragic and grotesque events – Savanna’s upstairs neighbors murdered her and tried to steal her infant; her body isn’t discovered for days – while exploring the complex interplay of culture, politics and racism that has entrenched violence against Native women.

She began researching the story over the phone: “I started calling people who were connected to the case, including the two female prosecutors who were really incredible. They were really fighting hard to see that Savanna got justice in the court system,” says Gable.

But quickly, she hit a wall – the people close to Savanna weren’t speaking to the media. “They’re super private and this was just so, so horrific for them,” she says.

Instead, they were busy organizing grassroots efforts that at first centered on the search for the missing Savanna, then on finding justice for her murder.

“They organized, like many Native American families end up having to do, because the police did not find her. They organized all these searches for her in Fargo and tribes from all over the Plains came to help. But also what was really fascinating to me was that the whole community in Fargo – which is a very small town and everybody kind of knows each other – all rallied behind the family, too.”

Gable would get to know the flight schedule to Fargo, North Dakota, very well over the course of four trips. “As soon as I could go to Fargo, I went to Fargo and I started trying to find people to interview about Savanna, who knew the family.”

It wasn’t easy, but eventually, she gained the trust of Savanna’s family and the community.

“I think a lot of it was just being patient, and if people didn’t want to talk to me, I respected that and then I would say, ‘Can I come back to you later?’ If they said yes, then I did that. Also, the prosecutors were very close to the family and they really vouched for me because I spent a lot of time with them. And so that’s really how I got my interview with Savanna’s mother,” she says.

Being on the ground in North Dakota helped imbue the story with details that otherwise would have been impossible to capture and helped her own understanding on many levels. “I felt it immediately when I was there that it was its own unique place and with its own politics, obviously, and culture. I visited Savanna’s reservation that she had grown up on. That was important to me to actually go there and talk to the tribal chief and see what it was like. I just try to be patient, and be empathic.”

Beyond the compelling story, by illuminating the problem of murdered and disappeared Native American women and their communities’ efforts to stop it, “Searching for Savanna” also takes on the true-crime narrative, which critics of the genre have called out for too often being exclusively centered around White victims and White law enforcement.

“I was very aware of that and that’s one reason I wanted to focus on the larger context,” Gable says. “Once I really found out how widespread this violence is and how long it had been going on against Native American women, I really wanted that to be a central theme of the book rather than just, ‘Oh, look at this horrific murder.’ What really motivated me was trying to not just tell Savanna’s story but the larger story of other women and girls, and what Native American advocates are doing – and have been doing – to try and draw attention to this problem.”

And in the process of writing the book, Gable found some of what she had been looking for personally: A deeper intimacy with her part of her family’s story.

“I think it was very affirming to me in the sense that I felt like it was something I really wanted to explore and, and felt good about exploring. In the back of my mind, I always was very wary about walking around saying, ‘Oh, I’m such and such percentage [Native American]’ – especially when there was all this controversy surrounding Elizabeth Warren and her claiming Native American heritage she turns out not to have.”

Gable says she has “learned a lot” in the process of writing her book, and in fact is preparing to visit the Chickasaw nation of her grandmother, one of the five tribes that were forcibly relocated off their lands to go to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.

“I just feel like I’m educating myself. Several Native American women that I’ve connected with in the process of this have been so welcoming, and all said to me, ‘It’s all about community. You don’t have to be ‘X-percent’ Native American. You don’t have to have grown up on the reservation. We want you to come home.’”

Mona Gable at Vroman’s

When: 7 p.m., May 9

Where: 695 E Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

Information: 626-449-5320, www.vromansbookstore.com/Mona-Gable-Searching-for-Savanna

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