Students start database for Indigenous victims
Students at the University of Idaho are working to create a comprehensive database of missing and murdered Indigenous people to help ensure these tragedies are no longer glanced over.
Senior student Christina Briggs-Mathers is working with her peers and associate professor Omi Hodwitz in the Department of Culture, Society and Justice to create the database.
“Right now we’re just trying to figure out the scope of the problem,” Briggs-Mathers said.
She said the project is not only a way to teach students how to code and research data, but to shed light on a problem so large in scale that Briggs-Mathers called it an epidemic.
It’s a problem that largely affects women, girls and Two-Spirits — the Native American term for the nonbinary and transgender population.
A 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1% who have experienced sexual violence.
Briggs-Mathers and her classmates have documented thousands of cases from 1980 to 2020. They research where the person is from, if and when bodies were found and if a perpetrator was caught.
They comb through community databases, newspapers, government data and scour the internet for any information they can find.
This project is unique compared to other available databases because of its large scale. It includes victims spanning across the United States and Canada.
“We’re trying to be the most comprehensive and gathering as many as we can,” she said.
While she cannot say for certain why this problem afflicts Indigenous populations on such a large scale, she believes it persists because these cases are often not taken as seriously as those involving white victims.
One trend that did catch her attention is that a perpetrator was more likely to be identified on the reservation as opposed to elsewhere. But that is also dependent on whether the victim’s body was found.
Briggs-Mathers will graduate this year and become a graduate student at Arizona State University. Other students will carry on the work of updating the database that will continue to evolve.
Briggs-Mathers said she hopes the database will make the issue too hard to ignore.
“I do hope that once it is big enough that there’s people who actually take notice and try to figure out what exactly is happening in these communities and what can we do about it,” she said.