Tiffany Reid.
By age 16, reserved Navajo teen Tiffany Reid had begun to find her voice.
“She was a quiet person,” her older sister Dejandra Reid, 38, tells PEOPLE. “But with those that she was comfortable with, she was a little bit loud, and she had a really soft voice and a soft laugh.”
She also had “a big heart for kittens,” says Dejandra. “She was always trying to bring kittens home.” That affection fed Tiffany’s desire to become a veterinarian, along with her emerging passions for singing and music — in junior high school, she’d picked up the flute when it was offered in a band class — and writing poetry, a talent that took Tiffany out of state at least once to compete in a poetry slam, where “she did pretty good,” her sister says.
“When she started doing the poetry writing,” Dejandra says, “she started coming out a little more and started coming into herself.”
On the morning of May 17, 2004, the high school sophomore from the Shiprock, N.M., Navajo reservation left home to walk the mile or so to Northwest High School, as usual.
When she didn’t return home for dinner, Tiffany’s mom, Dedra Wheeler, started to worry. By the next morning, the panicked Dedra contacted the school and learned that her daughter had never arrived the day before. Then she called the police.
“They told her to wait to file a missing persons report,” says Dejandra. “It didn’t seem urgent to them.”
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Whether indifferent or not, that perception reflects larger hurdles that members of Indigenous communities say they face when a loved one goes missing. A patchwork of 574 federally recognized Indian Nations in the U.S. makes crime reporting a challenge, with victims bounced between local, state and tribal authorities that often fail to communicate or cooperate with each other, wasting “precious time,” says Cheyenne descendant Annita Lucchesi, 30, a founder of the nonprofit research group Sovereign Bodies Institute.
Even worse, some agencies don’t devote enough attention to cases of missing Indigenous women at all, she says, giving rise to aMissing & Murdered Indigenous Womenmovement to advocate and draw attention to the cause.
“We live in a world where Native people, especially women and girls, are treated as less human,” Lucchesi tells PEOPLE.
Age-progressed image shows what Tiffany Reid, who disappeared in 2004, may look like today.National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
Dedra, who was diagnosed with breast cancer, searched desperately for her daughter before her death in 2019, says Dejandra. Now it’s Dejandra who carries those hopes forward.
“Every time I see a girl who resembles my sister,” she says, “I tell myself, ‘Tiffany will be back.'”
Contact the Navajo Nation Division of Public Safety at 928-871-6390 with information.
source: people.com
