Tribal and local authorities and volunteers from a Minnesota-based missing persons foundation will search the Yurok Reservation in remote Northern California over three days for Emmilee Risling, a 33-year-old Native woman who went missing last October.

The search, which will involve more than 30 people, several boats, and 10 cadaver dogs, was prompted by an Associated Press article published in February about Risling's disappearance. It began Friday morning and ends Sunday night.

The mother of two, who has ancestry from three area tribes, fell through the cracks both in life and in death. Her case was one of five instances since 2020 where Indigenous women went missing or were killed between San Francisco and Oregon and helped prompt the Yurok Tribe to declare a state of emergency around missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The Jon Francis Foundation will provide volunteers and helped assemble 20 other searchers and 10 cadaver-sniffing dogs, said Yurok Tribal Police Chief Greg O'Rourke. The Humboldt County Sheriff's Office and Yurok police will also provide a combination of several sheriff's deputies, search and rescue personnel, two boats and four boating officers, he said.

The search will cover a massive area — about half the reservation — and also parts of the Klamath River and its banks.

The AP previously reported on jurisdictional issues with the case: Risling was a member of the nearby Hoopa Valley Tribe but went missing on the Yurok Reservation. The Yurok Police Department is in charge of the investigation, but the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office will decide when to declare the case cold.

The search is under tribal authority but the sheriff's office will provide three deputies, all-terrain vehicles and volunteers from their search and rescue posse, said Samantha Karges, agency spokeswoman.

Risling was an accomplished traditional dancer and graduated from the University of Oregon with a double major. She planned to attend law school, but got caught up in an abusive relationship and struggled with mental health and drug addiction after returning to the Hoopa Valley Tribe's reservation.

Her parents and tribal law enforcement say she repeatedly fell through the cracks in a vast, remote area with almost no mental health services and limited law enforcement and addiction treatment services.

She sometimes wandered naked on the Hoopa Valley and Yurok reservations. Just before her disappearance, she had been released from jail on an arson charge and hadn't shown up for her court date.

She was last seen in October soon after walking across a bridge in a remote sliver of the Yurok Reservation.