Pierre SD- South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley has named Marlys Big Eagle, an enrolled member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and a resident of Fort Thompson, as the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Person Specialist, according to a release from the Attorney General’s Office.
“Marlys has spent her career helping victims of violence and families looking for missing loved ones,” Jackley said in the release. “Her credibility with tribal communities, law enforcement, and prosecutors makes her an outstanding choice.”
The release states Big Eagle spent 27 years with the U.S. Department of Justice, including 23 years as Supervisory Victim Witness Coordinator for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Dakota.
Her final four years were spent in Washington, D.C., where she served as the DOJ’s first Native American Outreach Services Liaison for MMIP cases in Indian Country — a federal role that put her at MMIP-awareness events around the state in recent years, including a 2023 memorial walk in Lower Brule and a 2024 community panel discussion hosted by the Yankton Community Library.
She is also a past recipient of the U.S. Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service in Indian Country.
“I am deeply honored to be selected to assist families of missing or murdered Indigenous persons as they seek answers and confirmation about what may have happened to their loved ones,” Big Eagle said in the release. “I look forward to working alongside other MMIP stakeholders and partners to help bring answers, support, and justice to these important cases.”
The MMIP Program
The MMIP program operates out of the Attorney General’s Office, and the issue has a direct throughline to Rapid City: the state’s annual MMIP Conference has been held here each of the past two years, most recently on May 1, 2026.
Speaking around that event, Jackley put the state’s open missing-persons list at 109 cases, 68 of them involving Native American or Indigenous individuals — a share tribal victim-services advocates say likely undercounts the real total.
The Position Transition
The role Big Eagle is stepping into opened up recently. Allison Morrisette, the outgoing liaison — a position state lawmakers created within the Attorney General’s Office in 2021 — left this summer for a new job with South Dakota’s Unified Judicial System, working in youth diversion programming.
In a June 30 exit interview with South Dakota Searchlight, Morrisette called the move the best decision for her family and a return to work she’d done previously in Pennington County.
She said she was building a transition plan for her successor and hoped “somebody really good” would take the job. “It was far more than a job for me, that’s for sure,” she told Searchlight.
In that same interview, Morrisette — a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation — said roughly 60% of the missing-persons cases listed on the Attorney General’s website at any given time involve Native Americans, a share that climbs higher for missing women and girls in a state that is about 9% Native American.
She also flagged a standing gap in her own coverage: with the entire state to cover alone, she said there were events on South Dakota’s eastern side she was rarely able to make it to, and that even one additional liaison position focused there “would be really beneficial.”
Whether Big Eagle’s arrival changes that geographic coverage is still an open question.
Sourcing: South Dakota Attorney General’s Office press release, Sept. 2, 2026; South Dakota Searchlight, “Q&A: South Dakota’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People liaison reflects as she departs,” June 30, 2026; South Dakota Searchlight, June 2023; SDPB “In the Moment,” May 2026; Yankton Community Library MMIP panel coverage via yankton.net, 2024.
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