An award-winning documentary about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) crisis will play at the Wyoming International Film Festival in Cheyenne this Friday. The screening will be followed by a Q&A co-hosted by the director and the chair of the state’s MMIP task force.
“She Cried That Day” tells the story of Dione Thomas, a Native woman who was murdered in a hotel room in Gallup, New Mexico in 2015. The feature-length film follows her sister, Christine Means (Arikara, Dakota, Diné), and her family as they search for justice for Thomas.
Amanda Erickson is born for the San Carlos Apache of the White Water Clan and directed the film.
“It really gives you a good insight into what's happening not only from a family's perspective, but you get an insight from tribal police, state police, and from the policymakers and those individuals who are trying to do something about this,” she said.
Erickson first heard Thomas’ sister, Christine, speak at New Mexico’s inaugural state MMIP task force meeting back in 2019.
“It just pulled at my heartstrings and I was immediately wanting to root for this family. I wanted to understand and I wanted to help,” she said.
The MMIP crisis isn’t a new phenomenon and Native communities have struggled with high rates of assault and murder for decades. Many community advocates say that violence is rooted in generations of government policies like forced removal, land seizures and cultural erasure.
Native American women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“These are families that are suffering, that are largely having to fight for justice on their own, search for the missing on their own,” said Erickson. “It's imperative that everyone in our communities, everyone across the state, comes together to figure out what we can do to make some change.”
The crisis has deep roots in Wyoming and on the Wind River Reservation as well. Native people are six times more likely to be the victims of a homicide than white residents, according to a 2026 update from the state’s MMIP task force. Between 2011 and 2020, Indigenous people were reported missing in 22 out of Wyoming’s 23 counties.
“That's something that every person in Wyoming should care about and want to understand what's happening in our state and what can we do to fix this issue,” said Erickson. “When you lose a Native woman, when you lose an Indigenous person from a community, you're losing generations of knowledge on the land. You're losing out on so much.”
The director will be joined by Cara Chambers, the chair of the state’s MMIP task force, to co-host a Q&A following the screening on July 10.
“The vast majority of missing cases in our state are Indigenous folks. The vast majority are from Fremont County and the Wind River. Eighty-two percent of our missing people are coming from that region,” said Chambers, who is also the director of the Division of Victim Services in Wyoming.
Like New Mexico, Wyoming’s state task force started in 2019 and was founded in response to grassroots Indigenous activists pushing for more attention for the long-ongoing and long-overlooked issue.
Since then, the group has published a handful of reports and updates tracking the crisis throughout the state over time. The task force also helped pass legislation creating Ashanti Alerts in Wyoming in 2023, which are essentially Amber Alerts for adults, and pushed the state to explore using new forensic genetic genealogy technology to reexamine cold cases.
One of the task force’s big focuses this year has been on teen dating violence, which disproportionately affects Indigenous youth on and around the reservation.
“Today we have 13 missing indigenous people in the state of Wyoming, nine of whom are 18 or younger,” said Chambers.
In February, Gov. Mark Gordon, tribal leaders and speakers talked to over 1,000 students at Central Wyoming College in Riverton and Lander Valley High School in Lander about ways to prevent teen dating violence and promote healthy relationships.
This fall, state task forces from around the country will gather together in Minneapolis to look at how they can continue to implement recommendations created as a result of the 2019 Not Invisible Act.
Those recommendations included more funding, better collaboration between state, federal and tribal agencies, as well as better communication to victim’s families and more resources for tribal members who live outside of reservations.
The Trump administration took the Not Invisible Act Commission's 212-page report with recommendations off the internet last year, despite signing the act into law in 2020 alongside Savanna’s Act, which sought to improve the federal response to the MMIP crisis.
The report can still be viewed online using the Wayback Machine website.
“She Cried That Day” will play at the Surbrugg-Prentice Auditorium at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne on July 10 at 2:25 p.m.
The Wyoming International Film Festival kicked off on July 8 and is hosting more than 150 screenings through Sunday.
