Native American families kept in dark about deaths
It was the winter of 2021 when Philbert Shorty’s family found his abandoned car stuck in the mud outside the small community of Tsaile near the Arizona-New Mexico state line. “We knew something happened from the get-go,” said his uncle, Ben Shorty. “We couldn’t find any answers.”
Family members reported the 44-year-old man missing. And for the next two years, they searched — hiking through remote canyons on the Navajo Nation, placing advertisements on the radio and posting across social media in hopes of unearthing any clues.
The efforts produced nothing. They had no way of knowing he’d been killed more than a week before they reported him missing.
They remained unaware even as US prosecutors finalized a plea deal last summer with Shiloh Aaron Oldrock, who was charged in connection with Shorty’s death as a result of a separate investigation into the killing and beheading of Oldrock’s uncle. The 30-year-old Fargo, D, man told authorities his uncle had threatened to kill him during an alcohol-fueled fight that came eight months after the pair conspired to cover up Shorty’s death by dismembering and burning his body on Jan. 29, 2021.
In both cases, Oldrock told investigators, a night of heavy drinking and fighting ended in death at his uncle’s home
near Navajo, NM.
The details of this tale are more gruesome than most. Yet to those living in Indian
Country, the elements underlying the tragedy are all too familiar. Generations of unaddressed trauma combine with substance abuse to create a dangerous recipe that often ends in violence, and law enforcement resources and social support programs are too sparse to offer much help.
Shorty’s story is one of many across the United States and Canada, where high rates of missing persons and unsolved killings involving Indigenous people have captured the attention of policymakers at the highest levels.
In 2019, former President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a task force. Congress followed in 2020 by passing two key pieces of legislation aimed at addressing the crisis. US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who had championed legislation as a congresswoman, has been working under the Biden administration to solve some of the systemic problems and jurisdictional challenges that have left victims’ families feeling invisible.
The Interior Department is nearly three weeks passed a deadline for responding to a set of recommendations from a special commission that spent months traveling the country, speaking with family members, advocates and police officials about how best to tackle the epidemic.