"Ashley Heavyrunner Grant disappeared from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in June 2017, one of thousands of indigenous women recorded missing in the United States and Canada in recent decades.
For professional cartographer Annita Lucchesi, a descendant of the Cheyenne Tribe, the loss was personal - Grant was her student at the Blackfeet Community College.
Now Lucchesi is putting together an atlas of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, seeking to map the geographic distribution of such cases.
'Mapping is an indigenous way of knowing,' Lucchesi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone from California.
'It can yield really powerful results, especially for social issues that are hard to discuss, like missing and murdered indigenous women.'
A 2014 national report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimated 1,181 indigenous women disappeared or were murdered since 1980.
In 2016, the U.S. National Crime Information Center reported 5,712 cases of missing native women."
Read the full article here. See the Gender-Based Violence and Intersecting Challenges Impacting Native American and Alaska Native Communities special collection for more information on this topic.
