Where Is Pauline Elsie Geary?

I keep returning to the missing poster.
Not because it tells the whole story, but because it’s all the world seems to have given Pauline Elsie Geary.

Yellow banner: MISSING PERSON.
Two photos — a young Alaska Native woman with long black hair and a gentle smile.
Age 35. Height 5’1”. Weight about 110–120 lbs.
Last known residence: Butte, Alaska.

It’s the kind of flyer most people walk past.
But I can’t.

Pauline disappeared sometime in 2019. For nine months, no official report was filed. She was simply gone. A store clerk recognized her at the Wasilla Walmart. A friend claimed to have seen her. Someone thought she visited the liquor store. But there is no confirmed location. No documented sighting. No verified movement.

Just absence — stretched painfully across time.

Her mother passed away in September of 2020, never knowing whether Pauline was cold or safe or alive. And in that silence, a truth settled in:

Another Native woman vanished, and too few people noticed.

Why this case matters — and why I refuse to let it disappear

In 2020, more than 5,295 reports of missing Indigenous women and girls were recorded. Yet the Urban Indian Health Institute found that only 116 cases made it into the national missing persons database.¹

That is not an accident — it’s a systemic failure.

Alaska remains one of the most dangerous states for Indigenous women.
Not because women disappear here more often — but because when they do, the world responds with less urgency.

Pauline’s case is a mirror — showing what happens when a missing woman slips past paperwork, past headlines, past attention. I refuse to let that be her ending.

Pauline is not alone — and that is the tragedy

Other Native women remain missing across Alaska. Their names deserve to be spoken, remembered, demanded:

📌 Valerie Jeanette Sifsof — disappeared near Girdwood in 2012. Tank top and sweatshirt found in Six Mile Creek. She has never come home.
📌 Anesha “Duffy” Murnane — missing from Homer since 2019. Later linked to a suspect, yet her body has never been recovered.
📌 Kathleen Jo Henry — murdered in Anchorage, her case showing how quickly Indigenous women become targets — and how slowly justice moves.

These women are threads in the same fabric.
The same wound.
The same crisis.

And I will not stop saying their names.

If you know something — anything — say something

One witness.
One rumor.
One memory from a Walmart aisle, a parking lot, a liquor store…

Truth begins with a voice.

Anchorage Police Department — 907-786-8900
Alaska State Troopers (MMIW/MMIP Unit)
Family Contact: Bertha Geary Jr. — 907-484-5023
Family Contact: Kitty Lee — 907-947-2997