Searching for Savanna
Arriving April 25, 2023
About Searching for Savanna
In the vein of Yellow Bird and Highway of Tears, a gripping and illuminating exploration of the disappearance of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind when she was eight months pregnant, highlighting the shocking epidemic of violence against Native American women in America and the societal ramifications of government inaction.
In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna's body would not be found for days.
The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.
With pathos and compassion, Searching for Savanna confronts this history of dehumanization toward Indigenous women and the government’s complicity in the crisis. Featuring in-depth interviews, personal accounts, and trial analysis, Searching for Savanna examines these injustices and the decades-long struggle by Native American advocates for meaningful change.
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Author Mona Gable
Mona Gable is a writer in Los Angeles who specializes in gender, science, culture, and travel. Her paternal grandmother, who died before she was born, was a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. Exploring her Chickasaw heritage ultimately led her to write Searching for Savanna.
Gable’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles magazine, Fast Company, Pacific Standard, Salon, The Huffington Post and other national publications.
In 2015, her story in Los Angeles magazine about college sexual assault, "The Trouble at Oxy," was named a "Best Longreads of 2015.” In 2006, her story in the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine on domestic violence in LA’s Korean-American community received a Neiman Notable Narrative mention.
Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including “The Maternal is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change” and “Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood.”
Prior to writing for the Times, Gable was a West Coast correspondent for the leisure and arts section of The Wall Street Journal. She began her career at San Francisco magazine after attending the Stanford Publishing Course. She has a B.A. in social sciences from UC Berkeley, where she also received a master’s degree in education.
She has traveled throughout the world writing on issues of climate change and sustainability.