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WEST VALLEY CITY — A student-led documentary is shedding new light on an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people in Utah.
"Missing Murdered Unheard" had its first public screening on Friday, which was Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Awareness Day. The day highlights high rates of violence, sexual assault, homicides and disappearances of Indigenous people, particularly women. About 4,200 missing and murdered cases have gone unsolved nationally, and murder is the third-leading cause of death for Native American women.
Both Utah and Salt Lake City are among the top 10 states and cities with the most cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The impact of those deaths and disappearances was palpable Friday as dozens of people packed into the screening room and the surrounding hallway at the documentary screening. The majority wore red, a color that has become a symbol for raising awareness of the missing and murdered Indigenous women movement.
"This is very real in our city. This is happening close to home," said Yolanda Francisco-Nez, executive director of Restoring Ancestral Winds, during the screening. "You won't see it on the front page. ... You're not going to see our Navajo women who are ending up murdered on the streets of Salt Lake City."
The documentary, which was created by Salt Lake Community College students, features interviews with Utah advocates Michelle Brown, chairwoman of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Utah, and Carl Moore, co-founder of PANDOS (Peaceful Advocates for Native Dialogue and Organizing Support).
Both Brown and Moore critiqued the way Indigenous cases are handled by the media, governments, police and the general public. When Brown's nephew's mother was murdered in 2017, she remembers the first thing that came up in media coverage was the woman's mugshot rather than the fact that she was a victim of murder. The contrast in how Indigneous victims are treated became even more apparent in 2021, when the search for Gabby Petito, who was white, received widespread national attention.
"This is not the same persistence that we see for people of color or Indigenous women or men who are missing or murdered," Brown said during the documentary. "A lot of times law enforcement is not as helpful as they should be in these cases and families become their own detectives and start their own investigations and evidence gathering."
A lack of resources and jurisdiction issues over which governments can prosecute these cases lead to loopholes in the system that send the message to perpetrators that they can get away with crimes against Indigenous people, she added.
"The media doesn't shed that much attention on those things because, honestly, the general public doesn't really care," Moore said in the documentary, adding that he believes giving land back to Indigenous peoples is necessary. "It doesn't mean that everyone needs to go home; it just needs to mean that Indigenous people have power. Until Indigenous people have the power, we're going to continue to be violated at these higher rates."
Cris Beltran, the film's director and a Salt Lake Community College student, hopes the documentary will be the first in a series exploring missing and murdered Indigenous people.
"Just interviewing these people and wanting to learn more about this issue helped me. That's what people could do as well — just listen," Beltran said. "We don't understand fully what they're going through, how their families are being torn apart by this issue, unless we listen to them."
Brown said she was pleasantly surprised by how many in the community came out to support the event.
"I'm really excited and happy to see that this many people in the community care enough to show up and support these types of issues and to spread the word and educate themselves and others," Brown said. "A lot of the information that we're discussing isn't something that's taught in public schools necessarily; it's not part of the curriculum. So there's a large amount of people in the public — and this is not just for Salt Lake and Utah, it's across the nation — where they don't know the depths of the issue that has been happening for a long time."
Brown it's also gratifying to see legislators take up the issue. The Legislature recently passed a bill to extend a state task force focusing on missing and murdered Indigenous people. Brown hopes the task force will eventually tackle a statewide database to track the cases.
"We do not have an exact number of exact cases that have happened in the state of Utah, but I can tell you that there's a lot of cold cases that I've heard of from families and almost every Indigenous family that I've spoken to has some tie to this type of violence and has affected their family in many ways," she said.
