Today Arizona Luminaria is launching a new database dedicated to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and Transgender People — the first of its kind in Arizona.
This is the culmination of my year-long, Indigenous-led project, which wouldn’t have been possible without support from the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists.
Reclaiming Their Stories
A first-of-its-kind database dedicated to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and Transgender People in Arizona
My ultimate goal with the project is to amplify the voices of Indigenous families at the heart of this injustice by going beyond typical crime coverage and centering their personal stories. I also wanted to compile and present data about this issue in a way that hasn’t been done before in Arizona to better understand its magnitude.
This is not the full accounting of Indigenous people who are missing or have been murdered in Arizona, but rather a reflection of the cases Arizona Luminara has been able to verify so far. Unfortunately, we may never know the true scope of this issue due to factors like underreporting, poor record-keeping and racial misclassification, among others. The actual number of people affected is likely far greater than what’s currently reflected in the database and I will keep working toward uncovering their stories.
To gather the data, I filed over 100 public records requests, mostly with law enforcement agencies across the state and some of which are still being processed. The database also draws from other existing databases, such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), news reports, social media and accounts from family members.
Currently, there are nearly 100 people included in the database, spanning almost 70 years. The highest number of homicide cases were in 2016 and 2017, while the highest number of missing person cases was in 2021. A majority of the women and girls are between the ages of 19 and 32 and a majority were identified as Navajo.
This ongoing work is also supported by the Data Driven Reporting Project. If you have a story you’d like to share, please contact me at ccurtis@azluminaria.org or through this online questionnaire.
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