CRIT event honors MMIWP, unites families in remembrance

Families on the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation gathered Tuesday, May 5, to remember missing and murdered Indigenous women and people and to press for stronger response to cases that too often cross tribal and state lines. The event in support of MMIWP turned remembrance into a public accounting of loss for relatives in and around Parker.

Councilman Tommy Drennan helped organize the gathering with Janice Patch, and community organizers including Ivy Ledezma, Valerie Welsh-Tahbo and Ginger Swick-Scott were tied to the event. Young girls spoke about relatives they had lost, siblings remembered missing sisters, and families spoke of mothers and grandparents who never came home. The focus was not only grief, but visibility, with the reservation community insisting that the people missing from their homes and the people killed in their communities be named in public.

The timing mattered. May 5 is observed nationally as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Awareness Day, and the CRIT event fell in the middle of the 2026 National Week of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives, which ran May 4-8. That broader movement has long linked MMIWR cases to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking and sex trafficking, and federal Indian affairs officials say Native American and Alaska Native women face higher rates of murder, rape and violent crime than national averages.

For families in La Paz County, the practical question is where cases go once they are reported. The Bureau of Indian Affairs says its Office of Justice Services Missing and Murdered Unit focuses on analyzing and solving missing and murdered cases involving American Indians and Alaska Natives. Arizona Luminaria has also built a first-of-its-kind MMIP database for Arizona, a response to the state’s patchy public record on the crisis.

The scale of the problem remains stark. An Arizona report cited in 2026 counted nearly 1,100 open missing-person cases statewide, although not all involved Indigenous victims. Another report cited the same year said at least 160 Indigenous women and girls in Arizona were documented as murdered between 1976 and 2018.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes gathering showed how much of that burden still falls on families themselves. In Parker and across the reservation, the need is not only for remembrance, but for clearer reporting pathways, better coordination and enough resources to keep cases from fading from view.