This is the fourth episode in our latest season, featuring missing persons across the United States,

and the first in a two-part series.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are solely the interviewee zone.

All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

This episode discusses child endangerment.

Listener discretion is advised.

This is the fall line.

When we first met our friend Rhonda Grant Connolly back in 2023, she had not yet formed her advocacy group, Blackfeet MMPIP.

We connected with her through another colleague and activist, Carolyn DeFord, whose mother

Leona Leclair Kinsey, we've covered on the show several times before. When we initially

spoke with Rhonda, she was grappling with what she viewed as an epidemic on the Blackfeet Nation Reservation.

So many unsolved disappearances and deaths, cases gone cold, and families who felt that they had nowhere to turn.

When she told us the story of her own nephew, Matthew Rattlesnake Grant's murder, she also mentioned other people's lost

children, Leo Wagner, Ashley Loring Heavy Runner, Arden Pepian. In 2023, the state's newsroom

reported that though Native Americans make up 7% of the state population, they account for 30%

of missing people in Montana. That's a reality that

Rhonda already knew well. The three people we mentioned, Leo, Ashley, and Arden, they're still missing

today. And Arden remains the youngest missing person on the reservation. When we first began our

work on Matthews' case, three-year-old Arden had been missing for two years.

Now, in the summer of 26, it's been five.

Rhonda founded Blackfeet MMP with others, mostly women, who wanted to see change.

Billboards have gone up, rallies have been arranged, and direct help, like search parties and DNA

...