Visibility Is a Precondition for Action

I grew up on the Red Lake Reservation, which is one of the few reservations in the United States that is closed off (governed as a fully sovereign nation subject strictly to federal, rather than state, law). Hearing about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women was not a rare occurrence in my life, and it has deeply impacted the people I grew up with.

The hard part about trying to come up with systems that will help Indigenous women is that there is not a lot of data in any shape or form. There are case files, state databases, and tribal records, but nothing that lets someone from my community actually see the scale or geography of what was happening. The pattern stayed hidden unless you already knew where to look and had the technical skills to put it all together. Most families affected didn’t have either.

I built Marked in Red, an interactive web map that brings together data on MMIW cases and lets people explore it by location and over time. I used Next.js for the frontend, Supabase for the database, and Leaflet for the map. I handled everything myself, from planning to design to build.

What drove me was simple: I was building the tool I wished existed. When you are from a reservation, you understand that visibility is a precondition for action. Things do not get resourced, investigated, or legislated until enough people can see them clearly. I wanted to lower the cost of seeing.

Building it changed how I think about technology for communities. The tool does not solve the problem; no tool can. What it does is change who can see the full picture. A family trying to understand what happened to someone they love should not have to be a data scientist first. That is the job: take something that usually needs rare technical skill and make it available to the people who need it most.

That is what I want to keep doing.