Our Right to Know: Chelsea Curtis

By Sydney Sims

You could call it journalistic intuition. However, Chelsea Curtis said it simply started as an observation.

A crime reporter by trade, Curtis noticed that there was no ongoing dedicated reporting on the Native American community in Arizona, or following crimes that happened from reservation to reservation and the implications that cycle plays on generations of families.

“Arizona has 22 federally recognized tribes, including the Navajo Nation, which is the largest in land size, but also population in the nation,” she said. “To me, it was just interesting that there wasn’t one designated reporter covering criminal justice issues. I just felt like there were so many people that were being affected, but rarely could, pinpoint a name, pinpoint a specific case, because they just weren’t getting coverage.”

In that gap of information, she saw an opportunity to highlight hidden stories that could help connect trend lines between missing and murdered Indigenous people. At the time, she was covering policing issues for The Arizona Republic, which sparked her interest to dive deeper into tribal communities.

Given her own heritage as a member of the Navajo Nation, Curtis believed she would be well suited to take on the project she first presented while interviewing for a job with the Arizona Luminaria.

“Arizona Luminaria was hiring for a general assignment reporter, and I applied for it,’ she said. “In the interview, I said this project is what I want to do. And they were like, we actually know somebody who can help with that.”

AZ Luminaria connected Curtis with Tara Gatewood at the International Women’s Media Foundation. Gatewood, who leads the organization’s Indigenous Fund, agreed to fund the small non-profit newsroom with a one-year grant so Curtis could create a statewide database focused specifically on missing and murdered Indigenous women, transgender women, and two-spirit people.

But, it hasn’t been a small feat.

Curtis has submitted over 100 public records requests to various law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. Some have been fulfilled while she is still waiting to hear from others.

“Initially, I was requesting just a list of cases relating to Native Americans,” she said.  “From there, I started narrowing that down because records can be costly to just focus on women. So, I was requesting for all Native Americans, and then I was purchasing the actual reports for just women, but there were a lot of instances where I didn’t get responses.”

The lack of response Curtis is the biggest challenge in creating a database of this sort. And,  because indigenous tribes are federally recognized as sovereign nations, there are, oftentimes, discrepancies in laws among tribes.

Along with their own police forces and legal procedures, tribes often have their own open record laws – if they have any at all. Doubled with the culture of mistrust Curtis says many Indigenous communities harbor towards the American federal government, and many tribes have unique laws regarding who can gain access to information.

“They have that right to designate what their own laws are and who gets what information,” Curtis says. “I’m doing my best to navigate that in a way that’s sensitive to the tribal communities, but also trying to be an advocate, in a way, for free press and journalism so it’s a little complicated.”

A consortium of Indigenous and other journalism groups has issued a pledge to encourage tribal government officials to commit to transparency on behalf of their citizens and outline specific measures to reach this goal.

Another barrier is misidentification of ethnicity and gender in some of the cases, which Curtis says happens especially in the cases of transgender and two-spirit victims.

Two-spirited refers to a concept in native American culture where a person embodies both feminine and masculine spirits.

With what she has gathered, Curtis has been able to find trendlines and connections in unique cases that span tribes statewide, like intimate partner violence and substance abuse.

“At least initially, in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People movement, there was this belief that a lot of Native American women were going missing or being murdered by Nonnatives,” she said. “The more the data is being uncovered, the more that we are learning that a lot of the women that are being impacted are by Indigenous men … a lot of times they are intimate partners. And, in many cases, these incidents stemmed from substance abuse like alcohol and drugs.”

Curtis and AZ Luminaria have, since, secured additional funding from the Data Liberation Project, to expand the current database, alongside profiles of the victims. The database has garnered a ton of positive attention from both the Indigenous communities and advocacy groups. “I just wanted to make it publicly accessible. I wanted to be out there comprehensive, people to know names,” she said. It was important to me to highlight that they are more than just numbers. They’re people.”

The immediate next steps are to continue working through the data, with hopes of extending research to missing and murdered Indigenous men.

But even in expansion, her mission will be the same: using data to advocate for more comprehensive coverage of the missing and murdered Indigenous people crisis.

“This database is just the beginning,” she said. “I want this project to serve as the foundation.”