Dead Women Wear Red

Photo by Ekaterina Kuznetsova on Unsplash

On August 13, 2020, I had a dream in which at least two sets of human remains revealed themselves. In the dream, I was with a group of girls on some kind of outdoor adventure camp excursion. Two girls with long dark hair, separate from the group I was with, walked out from a line of trees. One of them walked up to my car, sat on the hood, turned around and put her feet, clad in red sequined Chuck Taylors, on my windshield.

“There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” That was Dorothy’s mantra, while wearing the ruby red slippers in the Wizard of Oz. I don’t remember when it was exactly, which call from bones that want to go home it was, where red shoes became the symbol for a body that wants to come home but it has been that way for at least three years. When the ruby red slippers magically appeared on Dorothy’s feet, Glenda the Good Witch said, “Their magic must be very powerful…”

In the ideal world, the magic imbued in those shoes that got Dorothy home would do the same with those of the deceased I work with. In the movie, Dorothy closes her eyes, clicks her heels three times and while saying, “There’s no place like home,” wakes up in her own bed surrounded by those she loves.

These bones wanted to go home.

I knew who those shoes (and bones) belonged to. I’ve been waiting for them to show up since the summer of 2018. I knew who wanted to go home, that she was with someone else and that I knew where the dream-place was. In it, I drove down a dirt road, going too fast for those with me: “Watch out!” and “Be careful!,” were hollered in the tone that said those in the car with me were holding onto the “oh shit” bars. Going fast enough to kick up a dust tail, I skidded into a hairpin turn and kept going. That was the scene I was left with. I woke up, went to the bathroom and then opened Google maps looking for that hairpin turn.

I’m not an outdoor adventure camp kind of woman. However, I ‘just happened’ to know someone who was working at an Christian outdoor adventure camp in western Montana. And it ‘just happened’ to be only a few miles from the road in the dream. And I knew that he had crossed paths with the young woman who’d appeared in my dream.

I sent a text, received a call back and before I could even give details I heard, “Ingrid, I was on that road yesterday. And I felt really weird.” “I know. You crossed paths with someone who wants to go home.” Bless him, my friend volunteered to go back up but it was clear that moving too quickly was not a good idea. I didn’t have enough information to forward to law enforcement and I didn’t want him to go by himself. What I wanted to do was get in my car, drive fourteen hours and walk on the ground I drove the previous night in the dream. What I wanted to do was wrap my arms around a young woman whose bones were talking to me because her flesh had been wasted after her life was deemed by another to not be worth living. I wanted these things. I screamed these things into a living room where my echo and a very clear voice, not my own said, “Not yet.”

I was filled with a grief and rage that dropped into my belly creating havoc I didn’t need there and brought me to my knees. I knew where she was and I could do nothing about it. I’m not sure now how she came to be buried off a dirt road, in a forest, in Montana, not too far from home. I have known she was dead since September 2018 when Ashley Loring-HeavyRunner, another woman who had been disappeared a year prior, brought her to me to show me that they were together, that neither was alone in death.

In 2018, I met with the detective who was assigned to investigate her disappearance. Despite fearing rejection and hearing, “Where’s your proof?” again, I went and was met with a level of derision that I had never experienced. In the previous encounters, though I may have been dismissed, no one had, with just that particular tone asked, “What? Is this like talking to God or something?”

I’m not one who is quick-witted when I want to be so I didn’t think to say, “No. God is much more fucking direct.” What I did say, in essence, to this clearly non-believing detective was that I knew she was dead, was buried in the Lolo National Forest and I thought she was close to the Idaho border, information that was repeated in the dream in 2021.

The first thing my friend and his companions heard when they went on a the search for those bones, was from an Old Man’s disembodied voice: “You shouldn’t be here.” Despite the warning and overwhelming sensations of panic and heaviness, they followed a little used trail past strategically placed collections of animal bones, evidence of ceremony, and walked on to a place near the grave.

Documenting with photographs and voice recordings along the way what they saw, felt and heard these intrepid young people finally turned around when they ran out of trail and but each knew they were close to the young women who had connected in dream. Though I had not been there myself, I believed each of their recountings and could feel the energetic responses a day later when I received the information and confirmation that they had, indeed, been close.

 On September 9, I sent the coordinates to the assigned detective and left it alone, thinking I would just watch as things played out. By the end of October, though, I had not heard a word and prepared to go to the gravesite myself. However, mother nature had other plans. I drove into Montana one day after record snowfall and the road to the burial site was impossible to drive even in the SUV I had rented.

Unable to retrieve remains in Montana, I headed to Wind River, finally making good on the promise in April 2017 to return. In 2017, as I turned directly south into the heart of the reservation, a golden eagle circled above me four times before vanishing into the blue, cloudless sky, greeting me. No sooner than I said thank you, I was overcome with such a profound grief and anger I had to pull over. Sobbing, I heard ,“Where have you been?” When other lands and peoples have said, “She's here!" or “Where have you been?" the tones implied I have been missed and the return was being celebrated. This time it was filled with unbridled anger. I sat sobbing in the car, overcome with deep, deep sadness, grief and shame that I couldn’t understand. I apologized to so many I could not see for my ignorance and deafness, not understanding until that moment the Chief Washakie had been calling me there since I first drove north on Interstate 25 in February 2014. They had been waiting three years and I had not known it.

Since I’d last driven through the rez, in 2017, Wind River had been the nation that has presented me with the most prolonged and consistently desperate cries for help; never with any specificity but always with intensity. And since April 2017 I’d been promising I would go back every time the call was heard. My opportunity to do so I was on the return trip from Montana.

Before meeting for coffee and a smoke with Washakie my first morning there, I was directed, through vision, to a specific body of water to sit in the same way I did while at the Cheney Reservoir near Wichita, Kansas, the winter of 2018. Ocean Lake, a small ocean in the middle of the plains of Wyoming. To get some kind of clarity, I took breakfast to the Chief’s grave and I sat on the base of his headstone after laying out a smoke and pouring out some coffee. We smoked and sipped. I listened and heard nothing. Cemeteries are quiet by nature but what I was in the midst of was an unnatural quiet and disquieting stillness. There was no wind. There were no birds. There was not rustling of leaves or grasses, no crunching snow. There was no cow lowing, garbage rolling, or plastic fluttering. There was no energy at all. I was in the middle of a dead zone.

“What would you have me do, Old Man? You’ve finally got me here but I don’t know how to help those who won’t hear.”

“Be.”

“Oh. That’s all? Any suggestions on how to do that exactly?”

His suggestion was, “Look up.”

While I smoked and sipped some more, I waited and watched. The clouds began to do the talking. They showed the Ocean Lake and a large white bird going to it, with other figures surrounding her.

“Leave now. To the lake. Now. Don’t delay.”

“Now.”

I put out the smoke, split the rest of my breakfast with him, received thanks through a magpie, and left. I got turned around on the way and was redirected by a bald eagle circling overhead when the GPS turned me in circles.

“This way. Follow me.”

I did and, again, I sat. This time on the shore of a lake and noticed that the preternatural quiet and dead-zone stillness. I was at a fish-filled lake dotted with ducks and there was no sound—only a disturbed stillness.

“Look up.”

I did and the clouds began moving as though they operated outside the laws of physics and winds. The first messenger was a woman bringing me her child, the young one in her arms outstretched in the universal prayer, “Save my child.”

She was the first in this line of cloud messengers but not the first to bring me her child. Since the winter of 2015, in the identical manner, I have been brought them. In vision, children in their mother’s outstretched arms, “Save my child, heal my child.” They have come representing individuals, tribe, nation and tree. Each mother with the same plea: Save my child.

I stared, not in disbelief because how could I not believe what was before me in blue and white. I stared in anger and despair. “They’re even coming in the clouds. There’s no escaping this need I can’t meet.” I had heard, “Save my child” more than I had heard, “Speak” and yet what was I to do for those who could not see me, would not hear me, and would not welcome me.

As the cloud formations morphed I grabbed my phone and began taking pictures of the messages coming through, unmistakable in form and function, shifting only when the message had been received and acknowledged by me. I sat in the sand and watched the clouds bring rib cages that have been separated from a head and knew that somewhere below the water in Ocean Lake was a woman’s body. I knew it at Cheney Reservoir two winters prior and had hoped that was not why I was being sent to this body of water. However, the message was unmistakable. There it was. Followed immediately by the last messenger cloud: “Speak.”

“Speak.”

“Speak child, speak” and “SPEAK!” have been refrains that have accompanied me since the summer of 2015. In front of the TV watching CNN coverage of the Charleston, South Carolina, Emanuel AME Church mass shooting , in tears, the voice came through with the same ferocity it did five years prior: "SPEAK!!”

“What would you have me say?! Don’t kill each other?! Moses already did that and you see how well that’s gone over!! What would you have me fucking say?!”

Who the hell did God or anyone else think they were to tell me what to do? Say what, exactly? To whom, exactly? Speak, my ass. Perhaps it was his timing; demanding yet another thing from an exhausted woman who had done nothing more than his bidding for years.

I never did receive a response. Not then and not when Old Ones came down from a mountain to say, “Speak, child. Speak.” My response was the same, matching their gentleness that was in stark contrast to the ferociousness of the original messenger. “What would you have me say? To whom do you need me to speak?”

While at Standing Rock, my Wakinyan stomped around camp, getting a message to me through someone else when I ignored him. “We TOLD her what to do in 2011!!” No they didn’t. What they said was, “You are The Messenger.” They didn’t say what the message was. They, he and others that I had not met yet, left out those details of the job description. Over and over again for nearly five years, “Speak.”

At Ocean Lake, to see Her in the clouds saying it again seemed obvious. “Tell someone there’s a woman’s body in the lake.” That was something I could do. I didn’t do it right away, though. I was exhausted and was certain there would be little to no receptivity from tribal law enforcement and I still did not know where I stood with the FBI. I left the rez with the information that there was a woman, who had been disappeared, and sunk in the lake.

When I finally got home I asked Ancestors to whom I should give this information. I was directed to a woman who sits on the Northern Arapahoe Business Committee. I sent her a letter to her home address because I did not want it to be seen by a secretary and then passed along the moccasin telegraph, putting myself or anyone else in danger. And I never heard back.

Four days later, I was awakened in the early hours by a text. The Ancestor who had given me visual cues the night before was apparently annoyed that I had fallen asleep mid-vision, so he went to someone I knew. “He’s sad… Despondent… He says his people are suffering from something that can't be seen but felt…He says, “Stop talking and get help!" Mr. White Feather, a Lakota Sioux who introduced himself as the grandfather of a Cheyenne River tribal council woman, gave us information about a woman’s body buried on the Pine Ridge reservation. He shared that her body was where the power grid cables are being laid. “They shouldn’t be there!” I couldn’t tell if he was more upset that some utility workers were intruding upon a grave than a young woman had been thrown in the dirt, given less respect in burial than a rez dog. And I let him know it.

I also picked up the phone to call the administration of the Oglala Sioux Nation. Mr. White Feather’s insistence and desperation made it seem as if time was of the essence, that his information was real-time and immediate intervention was necessary. When one number didn’t elicit a response, I tried another. When that call forwarded me to yet another number, I pressed on and finally was connected to the President’s office. Though I didn’t speak to him directly, the person with whom I did speak agreed to pass on the message. I thought I’d doubled the odds of getting a response by following up with an email reiterating what I had shared on the phone. Though not entirely ignored because someone ‘energetically’ felt me out, I never heard back.

Those non-responses inspired me to follow up with the detective in Missoula regarding the information I’d sent him on September 9, thinking maybe I’d get at least one response, even if it was from a White cop. The conversation didn’t last long enought for any derision or contention to evolve: “I forwarded that to to Lake County. It’s their jurisdiction.”

Except it’s not. Those coordinates are in another county and under federal jurisdiction because they are in the Lolo National Forest. How could he not know this? Federal lands are federal jurisdiction. That’s what I heard back. His lack of attention and the repeated avoidance from tribal leadership left me simultaneously furious and dejected. How is it that for those who created such outcry and pageantry around returning bones from boarding schools and artifacts from museums could care so little about those murdered? Why were some Ancestors celebrated and others not enough of something to even be acknowledged? Why, with tribal people screaming across the continent about ‘awareness’ for the missing and murdered, was direct knowledge being ignored?

With frozen ground in Montana, frozen water in Wyoming, and frozen out of assistance from South Dakota, I thought I could wait to do my own investigation. I didn’t know how I could do what others wouldn’t but I did know the ground would accomodate the bones; they weren’t going home any time soon but they would held until I could get to them.

And while those bones were being held in those places, the ground began giving up others. On December 4, I had a vision related to the murder of children and a kid’s saddle. The context that was missing in the moment arrived four days later, when on the first video call with a potential date, was delivered. During the conversation, an energy flow began around my head and the universe broke wide open—in my very first conversation with a person I was pretty sure I wanted to see naked.

“Mountain and mud” rolled through my head, I could smell wet earth and knew we were receiving information about the two I’d seen murdered earlier in the week. The potential date, who knew about me only through what he’d read online, and a series of text exchanges was shown a young boy and his older sister buried face down. He saw her dirt-covered red pants and white shoes and the youngster’s blue light-winter coat.

The ground around them pulled me with enough force that my body began contorting itself as though, through 135 miles of mountain, stone, sand and soil, it could connect me directly to them; two sets of human remains, siblings shot and buried with the same level of respect as the young women dropped in Ocean Lake, buried near a solar power plant and on the back roads of a National Forest in Montana. “

“You’re not supposed to know this,” said an Old Man, to the new one in my world. And yet the ground made sure we did.

For years the ground has tried to give up the bones that want to go home.

And for years I have not been able to do the most simple thing: bring them home.