Somebody Out There
Location: Kosovo
Project Date: Dec 12, 2024
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Aldeena Lopez walking near the family house.
Calvin Martinez' disappearance has left his mother Aldeena Lopez making repeated trips between Farmington and Albuquerque, searching for answers and holding onto hope.
“Every evening, I walk around the house and think he’s coming back.” Napi Headquarters United States
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Project Text
The Navajo Nation’s Struggle with Missing & Murdered Indigenous Relatives
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) crisis is a devastating tragedy disproportionately impacting Indigenous communities across the United States. Native people experience violence, disappearances, and murder at rates far exceeding those of any other population, yet their cases are often ignored or mishandled by the justice system.
This project focuses on the Navajo Nation, the largest Indigenous territory in the United States, spanning over 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The Navajo Nation’s vast and often remote landscape, combined with systemic challenges like underfunded police departments and jurisdictional complexities, makes it emblematic of the larger MMIR crisis. Despite its size and cultural significance, the Navajo Nation faces significant barriers in addressing the epidemic of missing and murdered relatives.
The numbers are staggering. In 2016, the National Crime Information Center reported 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native individuals, yet only 116 of these were logged in the Department of Justice’s federal database. Approximately 1,500 Native people are reported missing at any given time, with murder ranking as the third-leading cause of death for those aged 10 to 24. Historically, the MMIR crisis has disproportionately affected women, but recent data shows a troubling rise in cases involving men. In 2021, the National Crime Information Center recorded 9,572 missing American Indian and Alaska Native individuals—5,203 women and 4,368 men. These figures underscore the expanding scope of the crisis and the systemic neglect that forces families to search for justice on their own, often with limited resources and minimal support.
This work brings to light the stories of Navajo families who live with the weight of this crisis every day. Through narratives of grief, resilience, and unrelenting determination, this project seeks to illuminate systemic failures and amplify calls for accountability and meaningful change.
