Missing Indigenous women: Activists spur a reckoning
Eugenia Charles-Newton could still be missing.
Instead, she’s sitting at her desk in the chamber of the Navajo Nation Council. On a hot March afternoon, the chamber is cool and silent – as silent as she had been for decades.
It’s been about six months since she began talking publicly about her disappearance more than 20 years ago, when she was just a teenager. It hasn’t gotten any easier.
“It felt like, like it wasn’t real,” she recalls, falteringly. “But it was. I mean, it was real.”
The first thing she remembers noticing, after regaining consciousness, was how cold the ground was. It didn’t make sense. After all, it felt as if only moments before she had been at a flea market on a bright, hot summer day. Now, darkness surrounded her. She could kind of make out a roof overhead. She wondered if she was dreaming.
She felt groggy. She couldn’t move. She slipped in and out of consciousness, the passage of time marked by the cycle of sunlight and cold night air seeping through cracks in the wall.
She had been held for several days, she discovered later. During that time, she said at a meeting of the Navajo Nation Council last September, she had been beaten and raped repeatedly by a man from the reservation.
“And ... nobody came looking for me,” she is saying now. “Nobody came out.”
She pauses to lift her glasses and wipe tears from her eyes. Her phone vibrates on the table, but she ignores it. She is silent for almost a minute.
“It wasn’t that my family didn’t love me; it was because the police told them it was going to be OK,” she says. “They believed what the police would tell them. And [the police] never came out, they never ...” Her voice trails off.
