Native news sources:
Update: It is with a heavy heart that I announce that Keisha was located deceased.
March 22, 2022 was the last day anyone saw Keisha Lene Kootswatewa alive.
She was 32 years old — a Hopi woman with a story written onto her skin in ink and identity. Tribal designs along her shoulder, a rose curling across her forearm, TEWA stamped boldly into the other. A mother. A daughter. Someone who loved. Someone who belonged. Someone who should be home.
Keisha disappeared from Teesto, Arizona after being seen at a residence with her boyfriend.
No one ever saw her leave.
No one can say where she went next.
And no one has heard her voice since.
People like to say women wander, leave, start over.
But women with children do not vanish into dust without reason.
And certainly not alone.
Three days later, two Navajo men — Micheaux Begaii and Damien Niedo — vanished from the same community. Rumors swept through like fire: a house party. A shooting. The men killed. Keisha taken alive at gunpoint. But rumors are not evidence, and no bodies have been found — not hers, not theirs.
What we have is absence.
What we lack is truth.
Her family admits life was complicated — heartbreak, new friends, the wrong ones, the kind who disappear when questions get loud. They say sometimes she’d go quiet for a week or two.
But never this long.
Never years.
Her children are growing up without answers.
Her family wakes every day hoping her name won’t be swallowed by the silence that too often follows missing Indigenous women.
Keisha’s story matters because she matters.
Because every Indigenous woman deserves justice.
Because we refuse to let her vanish a second time — into memory instead of earth.
Someone was with her.
Someone saw what happened.
Someone knows where she is.
And until her story breaks open, we say her name loudly.
If you know anything — even if it’s small — speak.
Hopi Tribal Resource Enforcement — 928-734-3000
Navajo Nation Police, Dilkon District — 928-657-8075
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