This article was created for Propublica’s local reporting network in collaboration with Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatch to get stories in your inbox every week.
Leaders in Alaska and elsewhere have repeatedly promised actions to address the chronic failure of a country that did not resolve the murder or loss of Native Americans.
Federal law supported by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski called for improved data collection and information sharing between law enforcement and tribes. Gov. Mike Dunleavy said this again and again. Recently, he said the state government will work with Alaska Native Americans to deal with the crisis, just like May 5th.
“My administration will continue to support law enforcement, victim advocacy groups, native Alaska tribes and other entities by working together to resolve these cases and bring closures to victims’ families,” Dunleavy said in a news release last year.
But when a native Alaska group asked state law enforcement officials in June what they needed to understand the issue, one of the list of murders investigated by state police, the state said no.
Charlene Aqpik Apok launched data for Indigenous Justice in 2020 after discovering that government agencies were not being tracked to gather names of missing and murdered Indigenous people and read them at the rally. Over time, the nonprofit organization has built its own homemade database with the help of villagers, friends and family around the state.
In 2023, the state began publishing a quarterly list of Indigenous people’s names reported missing. However, the state has not yet published another important part of the group’s efforts: a list of killed Indigenous people.
So, on June 4th, the nonprofit submitted two public record requests to the Alaska Department of Public Safety on murders that it had investigated since 2022. The group first sought victims of all races, and then someone identified as from Alaska.
Apok said he doesn’t think the request is controversial or complicated.
However, the state refused the request a week later. The agency said the request would take “a few hours” and cited state regulations that allow employees to deny if they need to “edit or summarize” existing public records when they provide information to the requester.
“We do not maintain a list of victims of any type of crime, including murder victims, and to meet this requirement, DPS will need to manually review multi-year incident reports to create a record that matches what you are looking for.”
McDaniel did not provide a direct response when Anchorage Daily News and Propublica asked why they were unable to retrieve the murder record in a simple database query, or even if the work required manual review and was not required by state law, the agency simply didn’t create a list of murder victims.
(Alaska’s public records law provides free records of less than five hours to produce state employees, if providing records is useful in the public interest, if McDaniel needs to argue in denial, “hopefully a public agency can do so without hindering its functioning,” the state can still choose to waive the investigation fees.)
Data for Indigenous Justice appealed to James Cockrell, the department head, to reject it.
A nonprofit’s record request and state denial revealed that four years after Alaska established the Council on missing Native Americans, it is not easy to identify murders involving Native American casualties. The state currently employs four investigators focusing on such cases.
“If we can’t simply subtract the demographic we’re talking about, how do they know what cases are Alaska’s native or native for MMIP agents?” Apock said.
Tracking complete and accurate data on indigenous peoples who have disappeared or killed is because law enforcement could reduce individual cases and deny the size of the issue, Apok said.
“That’s the power of data. That’s the power of collective information,” she said.
Grace Norton has a photo of her nie, Ashley Johnson Barr, who was murdered in Cotzeview, Alaska in 2018. Cotzebue residents were walking along Shore Avenue and scattered rose petals to commemorate the indigenous people who were missing and murdered in 2023.
Instead of answering detailed questions from this story, McDaniel provided a one-page response that he receives thousands of record requests each year. He added that the agency is a “data transparency leader” for indigenous people who are missing, and “it’s absurd to imply that it has not been invested in this work due to the rejection of one record request from advocacy groups.”
He cited the disclosure of information about missing Indigenous people and the provision of law enforcement data to tribal governments as examples of transparency in information about missing Indigenous peoples in support of federal grant requests.
Anchorage, which operates the state’s largest city police station, recently reversed its policy of withholding the identity of certain murder victims. The police chief released records and opposed rights advocates for some victims after daily news reports revealed they had no basis for the law.
Meanwhile, statetroopers handle around 38% of all murders in Alaska, according to statistics reported by law enforcement agencies each year. From 2019 to 2023, the latest available data, troopers investigated an average of 22 murders each year. This means that agents may need to review just a few dozen reports to provide the requested name.
A Watershed report published in Canada in 2017 revealed the extent of the crisis for people who were missing and killed from Indigenous communities by Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute in 2018.
These reports stated that “we named exactly what many of us saw and felt, and we didn’t know that our experience was part of a larger group.”
In 2021, Data for Indigenous Judicial Justice published its first report on the Alaska crisis, highlighting that media and local governments did not collect data on cases of missing and killed people to analyze patterns. The council appointed by Dunleavy relied on Apok’s findings in attempting to explain the scope of the issue.
Police say they will not resume the case of an Alaskan woman who was found dead on the mayor’s property
Dunleavy and Murkowski have been speaking out about the issue ever since.
The governor’s spokesman did not answer any questions he received emails or hand-in-hand opinions about the state’s failure to provide Apok’s group with the names of murder victims. Murkowski’s office said it was spoken about the decision not to make the name public. The senator was not available for interviews and did not provide comment on the state’s actions.
Apok said her group will continue to request public records from the state, building its own database through community connections.
“We’re going to continue doing what we’re doing,” she said. “People keep saying our names.”
