@tailyrirvine

My uncle died the day I was supposed to leave for this assignment. I pushed it back a couple days and I made my way across Montana shortly after the funeral to hear stories of their lost loved ones. My grief danced with their grief as they told the stories of their children and siblings’ life and death. I could never express the amount of respect I have for the families and individuals who let me, or a reporter, photograph and write about the worst moments of their lives for public consumption. As I grieved privately in my car and hotel room, they mourned openly in front of my lens knowing many eyes across the country would see them at their most vulnerable. Their stories breath life into statistics and allow readers to, like I did, connect with their grief. They are invaluable to our work. In pieces like this, I hope the families find some solace in sharing their loved ones with the world but what I hope for more than anything is that we eventually reach a place where marginalized groups are no longer forced to display their pain to the public to hold institutions accountable. Some families were unable to get information on their relatives death until this reporting began. A mother lost her baby boy on Mother’s Day at a jail blocks from their home. She now places flowers on the fence of that jail every Sunday. To hear her story and the others please listen in this important piece about Native Americans dying in jails due to negligence with exceptional, in-depth reporting from @natehegyi and some powerful work from @sharonchischillyphoto, whose haunting image of the hand I included at the end. I hope you let the words and images sit with you for a long time. Thank you @npr and @emilybogle for the assignment.