At some point in life we have to look to younger generations to take the wheel when it comes to systemic problems in our communities. They are the ones who will lead the charge to create cultural shifts, shifts in mindsets and real and lasting change.
This is why I was so thrilled to interview Brittany Hunt and Chelsea Locklear, two highly educated and very passionate young Native American women who want to see the indigenous population treated fairly and with respect. Their focus is a little unorthodox—they cover the stories of missing and murdered indigenous people, mostly from the area where they grew up, Robeson County, North Carolina. And these are not always strangers. The women are part of the Lumbee Tribe whose members make up roughly 43 percent of the county’s population. These are their friends, their neighbors, people they went to school with.
Creating A Podcast With A Purpose
Brittany and Chelsea are the host of “The Red Justice Project” podcast. The show is about drawing attention to the serious problem of violence against indigenous people and seeking justice for them. But even more than that, it’s about creating a cultural shift where indigenous people’s lives are worth just as much as anyone else’s life. Intellectually, most of us would agree with this statement, but missing indigenous people don’t get a lot of news coverage, and their cases often go unsolved.
In episode 20 of What Remains Brittany and Chelsea share the details of some of the most horrendous cases they’ve covered—a young woman stabbed repeatedly and burned who reveals the identity of her killer just before she dies, another young woman missing for years who was buried just one hundred feet from her home.
And, they weigh in on the Missy Poitra case whose unidentified skeletal remains were found in a storage unit in Durham more than a decade after she was last seen. It would take five more years to identify her.
