Image courtesy of The Auburn Examiner
Twenty two-year-old Gabby Petito’s death was nothing short of tragic. A week after being filed as a missing person, Petito’s body was found in Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyoming. With the official cause of death being ruled as strangulation, her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie is being pursued as a suspect.
Petito was traveling across the country with her boyfriend. On August 12th, police in Utah recalled seeing the couple get in a physical altercation, where “the guy was slapping the girl.” After having some time apart, as advised by the police officers, Petito and Laundrie were seen on August 27th after a “commotion,” but it was assumed that they continued their trip as usual. Petito was in regular communication with her mother throughout her trip, but worry rose after her mother received no texts after August 30th. The last text sent was: “No service in Yosemite.” After no communication for nearly 2 weeks since that date, Petito was officially declared a missing person by authorities.
Petito’s death captured the media’s attention, with a Google search of her name producing over 340 million results. Internet sleuths did the best they could to find clues with what information had been made available to them. Petito’s death mattered to the people. The active search for her whereabouts resulted in the quick discovery of her body on September 19th. Even now, revelations in the case are being made slowly, giving everyone a better idea of what happened to her. But is the same amount of attention being given to find answers and justice for missing Indigenous peoples?
In Wyoming, the largest state by land and the least populous state in the USA, 710 Indigenous peoples were reported missing between 2011 and 2020. Despite only making up 3% of the population in Wyoming, Indigenous people make up 21% of the homicide cases. The cases of violence against Native Americans have not attracted much media attention, surprisingly. For example, Mary Johnson, a Tulalip tribe member, was reported missing ten months before the Petito case, yet her story has been barely talked about in the media. A Google search of her name yields only around 6,000 results.
But neither Mary Johnson nor Gabby Petito are statistics. They were daughters and friends and human beings.
And so were Jocelyn Watt and Jade Wagon, daughters of Nicole Wagon, who all were members of the Northern Arapaho Tribe. Jocelyn Watt was found murdered in her own home in 2019, and to this day, her case remains unsolved. Her sister, Jade Wagon, was found in a field, with the police concluding the cause of death as drugs and hypothermia. Nicole Wagon protested, believing her daughter’s death to be murder, but no one listened to her. While the cases of the two sisters are unconnected, neither case has been investigated in as much depth as they should be. Therefore, there is not as much information available about their cases as there is for the case of Gabby Petito. Unfortunately, Nicole and her family are just one example out of the many violent murders of Indigenous people in Wyoming that have been ignored and left alone.
When the media covers Native American lives, they are often portrayed in a negative and dehumanizing light. They are also contrasted commonly with missing white people. One cause of this may be missing white woman syndrome, a term which refers to how the media focuses heavily on disappearances of young, attractive white females. This is a common practice in the media and can cause the cases of BIPOC women to be pushed into the shadows. When families of the missing Indigenous women try to file a report, they are often met with questions such as, “Has she run away?” “Is she addicted to alcohol or drugs?” or “Is she a prostitute?” Discrimination gets in the way of investigating the pressing matter - a missing person. It is of no surprise that racial bias exists in the criminal system, whether that is in charging a criminal or finding a victim; the BIPOC community are continually persecuted and ignored.
In order to bring about change in how crime is handled, what can we as students do? We are a generation who gain information from media outlets such as Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook, or from news stations like CNN or the New York Times. First, we must educate ourselves on matters of institutional and structural racism and how that affects the daily lives of people from so many different ethnic backgrounds. Second, we must understand important terms and concepts, such as systemic racism, which refers to a type of racism that is deeply lodged in the laws and rules of society, or discrimination, which refers to negative behaviours and speech directed towards people from different backgrounds.
After acquiring all the knowledge, what’s left for us is to put it into practice. Question why a certain case is garnering so much attention, whilst being empathetic. Be curious of the world around you and do your own research, instead of relying on popular media outlets. Raise awareness by having conversations. And then maybe, as a generation influenced by the media, we can influence the media itself to see what we want to see.