These three Alaska Native women are at the forefront of working to bring justice to the scores of missing and murdered Indigenous people in the state.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The movement for justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons has been building over the past few years. In Alaska, women gathered at statewide conventions to remember and mourn the loss of their sisters, mothers, aunts, cousins.
Ingrid Cumberlidge is the MMIP coordinator for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alaska. She collaborates with tribes across the state, getting their input and working with them and tribal police agencies to address the problem. “It was probably the one thing I would come back to work for,” Sears told Alaska’s News Source in an interview. “I kind of feel like everything that I did in law enforcement, growing up in Alaska, kind of led to this position.”
“My focus is kind of all over the place right now, because it’s still new,” she said. “I’m looking at a handful of cases right now — cold cases. The most recent one being a year and a half old, the oldest one being almost 40 years old, kind of putting some new eyes on the case, the evidence, seeing if there’s anything I can tease out of that.”
“I also want to lay the groundwork for somebody else to take over this,” she said. “... One of my end goals is to go to the villages, go to the different tribes, and have them partner with the state troopers on working on missing and murdered Indigenous people ... It’s never going to be a stop gap; there’s never going to be a stop to it. But lowering the numbers.”
“I was coming from an island of about 7 by 11 miles, and about a thousand people, so I was coming from a really remote area, and I had lived a pretty sheltered life with my folks,” she explained. “But just imagine, I mean, think about it,” Cumberlidge said. “You’re 18 years old and to be able to see that happening and how easy it was for a young woman to go missing. The impact of that was a lifelong impact.”
Even though she started this position during the pandemic, Cumberlidge says awareness and visibility of the MMIP movement has increased. Others have gone missing and declared dead. Samantha Koenig, a young Anchorage woman who was kidnapped from the coffee stand where she worked, and killed byHer background in research moved her toward the lack of data for cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people, and to co-found the group Data for Indigenous Justice.
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