YUROK RESERVATION, Calif. (AP) The young mother had behaved erratically for months, hitchhiking and wandering naked through two Native American reservations and a small town clustered along Northern Californias rugged Lost Coast.

But things escalated when Emmilee Risling was charged with arson for igniting a fire in a cemetery. Her family hoped the case would force her into mental health and addiction services. Instead, she was released over the pleas of loved ones and a tribal police chief.

The 33-year-old college graduate an accomplished traditional dancer with ancestry from three area tribes was last seen soon after, walking across a bridge near a place marked End of Road, a far corner of the Yurok Reservation where the rutted pavement dissolves into thick woods.

Her disappearance is one of five instances in the past 18 months where Indigenous women have gone missing or been killed in this isolated expanse of Pacific coastline between San Francisco and Oregon, a region where the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Tolowa and Wiyot people have coexisted for millennia. Two other women died from what authorities say were overdoses despite relatives questions about severe bruises.

The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build Californias first database of such cases and regain sovereignty over key services.

I came to this issue as both a researcher and a learner, but just in this last year, I knew three of the women who have gone missing or were murdered and we shared so much in common, said Blythe George, a Yurok tribal member who consults on a project documenting the problem. You cant help but see yourself in those people.

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The recent cases spotlight an epidemic that is difficult to quantify but has long disproportionately plagued Native Americans .