An Arizona reporter is trying to create a database for missing and murdered Indigenous women
Download mp3 (11.44 MB)In the last few years, we’ve seen more attention paid to a devastating — and evasive — issue for Indigenous communities: missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit and transgender people. There is now a statewide task force focused on the issue, there are federal initiatives and response plans.
But we still don’t have good data on just how big the problem is. That is true for a lot of reasons — not the least of which is a lack of trust in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
Chelsea Curtis is working to change it. Curtis is a reporter for Arizona Luminaria in Tucson, and she is in the midst of a massive reporting project attempting to create a database for missing and murdered Indigenous women. As a reporter at the Arizona Republic, she saw the impact that their database tracking police shootings had.
Interview highlights
CURTIS: I'm Navajo, I grew up on the Navajo nation, and I try to connect a lot of my stories back to what I know my identity. And I know that so many stories are undercovered, and the more I got into covering crime and criminal justice, I just realized this was something that's not covered heavily in Arizona's tribal nations. And I felt there was a need there for it — police shootings as well, but also the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples injustice. There just wasn't enough coverage of it happening And so it kind of stemmed from that, this idea of wanting to do more criminal justice reporting focused on tribal nations. And I kind of snowballed from there into this.
A lot of people probably have heard the phrase missing and murdered Indigenous peoples, missing and murdered Indigenous women. But many people may not know what that means. So, describe just how big of an issue this is to begin with.
CURTIS: Yeah. So, you know, it's really difficult to even know how big of an issue it is because the data is so lacking. We're having to start from ground zero just to even figure out just how bad this is. But when you look at FBI stats related to violence against Indigenous women, they're just disproportionate. And I think if you dive deeper into that into actually identifying what that data is and finding that data, we'd have more answers. But you hear from Indigenous communities all the time saying that this is an issue. For years that they've been trying to get attention to and just no one has been listening and no one has been really dedicating the time until recent years with the you know, more state governments getting involved. But it's still slow moving.
So you're attempting here to create a database of this, to map it. Even this is a huge project because so much of the challenge is in getting the data itself. Where do you begin?
CURTIS: Yeah, so the data isn't tracked or compiled in any official capacity. I know that the state task forces, I believe they're hoping to do something similar to that. I don't know where they are in that process. But I also think it's important to have this data accessible to everyone, especially to the tribal nations. And they can use this data as a tool to address this themselves. So that's my hope is to create an accessible database — not something that's just, you know, behind closed doors with just certain government officials.
And so to start, I am requesting tons of public records. I think I'm at like 100 public records requests with the police agencies across the state. I'm basically asking for a list of case numbers related to missing and murdered Indigenous people. And then from there, I'm kind of narrowing it down and requesting those specific reports to then pull the data information myself into a spreadsheet.
So you're digging through old cases, new cases, cases that probably don't even exist. You also have a way to contact families who think they know somebody or have a family member like this who may not even have a case number, right?
CURTIS: Yeah. Yeah. So through this process I've learned, you know, there's so many different public record systems with certain capabilities and limitations. And, a lot of the times, one of the bigger limitations I'm running into is a lot of the older cases are paper form and they haven't been digitized and they're kind of hard to find without specific information — like a person's name or a case number, sometimes. And I obviously don't have every case number. I'm trying to figure that part out. And so as a way to reach people and get people to become involved if they want to, I created a questionnaire that they could fill out and fill out as much information as they can about a loved one who has gone missing or murdered. And then maybe from there, I'm able to find the records that I couldn't find through the process I'm doing now. And then I'm also doing this because many times cases aren't reported to police at all — just distrust or whatever the reason may be. And so I'm hoping that this is another avenue to give people a chance to tell their story that maybe was never formally reported in the first place.
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