“It’s not just women”: Amber Crotty shares truths of missing people

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is the phrase that is frequently used when people talk about the epidemic of missing Indigenous peoples, but Navajo Nation Council Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty said that on the Navajo Nation the statistics actually point to a larger number of missing and murdered men than women.

Crotty used the term Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) to refer to the epidemic throughout her speech at the Flagstaff Indigenous Peoples Day event Oct. 9.

Crotty is a member of the 24th Navajo Nation Council, serving on the Budget and Finance Committee and the Naabik'íyáti' Sexual Assault Prevention Subcommittee. She is of the Kinyaa'áanii Clan and her maternal grandfather is Deeshchii'nii. She is originally from Tó Halstooí (Sheep Springs, N.M.)

“Our former Navajo police chief had told us, there's only seven missing Navajos. And we knew that was not the case,” Crotty said of her early involvement with the MMIR community.

Through community forums, talking to families and building trust, Crotty and her team were able to build their caseload, and the statistics they got showed a very different picture than what the Navajo Police were saying.

“By 2019 we had a caseload of 164 missing Navajo persons that have been documented,” Crotty said. “Of them 30% were identified as female, and 40% as male.”

Crotty added that data does skew a bit because not taken into account is how those missing self-identify, or those from LGBQT communities, which there are many crimes against on the Nation.

“The very high, vulnerable population is if you are a Navajo male, if you've experienced some sort of violence in your home, and if you are in the age range of 31 (the average age of those missing),” Crotty said. “And that starts changing the perception of who we're talking about.

“You may have heard of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. And that's the effort that came from our community relatives but as we start hearing from our family members, and having them part of the conversation, it was clear from the start that we were losing a lot of our male relatives to the streets, we were losing male relatives to violence, and no one was out there actively looking for them.”

Sex trafficking

Of the missing persons in the 2019 caseload, 21% of these cases involve young girls under the age of 18.

Crotty wore her famed yellow, purple and red scarf in honor of Ashlynne Mike's favorite colors. Ashlynne was 11 when she was kidnapped in Shiprock, N.M. in May 2016 after getting off the school bus. Ashlynne was brutally raped and murdered, and though she was reported missing to the Navajo police, it took much longer than it should have to get the proper actions in place to create official searches. This tragedy set out a whole movement that spurred proper resource allocation on the Nation for such events.

“We told our council, our governing body, ‘we cannot stay silent any longer,'” Crotty said. “Our children need to be safe, our grandmas need to be protected and we need to hear from our community members. So we created the first Navajo Nation sexual violence inter-working group.”

Crotty said that throughout the different communities, sex trafficking stories tend to be similar, and they have noticed trends.

“What we know with human trafficking training, is they exploit a lack of love that that individual carries,” Crotty said. “The trafficker will literally look someone in the eye and say, ‘You look beautiful.' A young girl tells him, ‘Who are you talking to? Don't talk to me that way!' and walks away, the trafficker knows, okay. But when a young girl says ‘really, you think i'm pretty?' ‘Oh yeah, i'll take care of you.' We lost her, we lost him.”

Cyber trafficking is huge, and the same tactics are used.

“We're helping a young girl who was trafficked online,” Crotty told the audience between tears. “Lured her, said he'd take care of her, came to pick her up, took her five states away, and we were lucky to recover her. She was a high school student, had a lot of trauma in her family, was living with her grandparents — she just wanted someone to love her.”

Making Change

One of the biggest problems with Navajo Police is limited resources, Crotty said.

On Navajo land, there are 200 police officers and 30 criminal investigators that cover approximately 18 million acres.

“That means there's less than one officer for every thousand Navajo citizen compared to the U.S. national average of 16-24 police officers for every 1,000 citizens. Law enforcement on Navajo responds to an average of 40 homicides per year. That's four times the national average based on per capita.”

“Our goal is to increase our police officers from at the minumum 500 to at least 750 police officers.”

Crotty has been involved with launching the Missing & Murdered Diné Relatives database and hub, available at navajommdr.org.