Overview

Annita Lucchesi is a Southern Cheyenne scholar; cartographer; and data scientist who created the most comprehensive database documenting Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) in the United States and Canada. As Executive Director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute; she built a dataset tracking over 2;800 cases of Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered; far exceeding any government statistics. Her research exposed how federal; state; and tribal law enforcement systematically failed to investigate or even record these cases; revealing that in many jurisdictions Indigenous women's disappearances were never entered into national databases. Lucchesi's work demonstrated that the MMIW crisis is not merely a pattern of individual crimes but a structural outcome of colonialism; jurisdictional gaps between federal; state; and tribal authorities; and the devaluation of Indigenous lives by law enforcement. The Urban Indian Health Institute study she contributed to found that 5;712 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women were reported in 2016 alone; but only 116 were logged in the DOJ's federal missing persons database. Her data sovereignty approach ensures that Indigenous communities own and control the data about their missing and murdered relatives; rather than depending on the same government agencies that failed them.

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Related Investigations (1)

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Sources & Documentation

1 documented sources from official records, investigations, and reports