Walking With
Hozho
In Memory of Ashlynne Mike
Content note: This story discusses the abduction and murder of a child.
My first assignment
I went to New Mexico to help a mother tell her daughter’s story. I came home understanding filmmaking differently.
In 2019, I traveled to northwestern New Mexico to film Pamela Foster, whose daughter, Ashlynne Mike, had been abducted and murdered. The film was for the AMBER Alert in Indian Country program.
Make room for her story.
We were asked to interview Pamela about the abduction and murder of her daughter. I remember the weight of what we were asking her to revisit, and how little we could do to ease it.
Our job was to listen. To make room for Pamela to tell her own story.
At the memorial
Afterward, we traveled with Pamela, her sister, and a close friend to the roadside memorial near Shiprock. Flowers, stuffed animals, and handwritten words covered a fence on an otherwise open stretch of desert.
The women offered a corn pollen blessing. They held one another and grieved. We kept filming, even as it became almost unbearable to point a camera at someone in so much pain.
And then a rainbow appeared.
At that exact moment a rainbow appeared. Then another.
Right over the place where Ashlynne had been found.
Bearing witness.
I know there are explanations for how rainbows form. But standing there with Pamela and the others, the experience felt much larger than an explanation. To us, it felt as though Ashlynne was giving her mother a hug.
It was an honor to witness it and share the moment with them.
Being trusted with a story.
The film became part of the AMBER Alert in Indian Country symposiums, where Pamela's story continues to reach people working to protect children.
That experience changed the direction of my creative life. It deepened my understanding of the responsibility of being trusted with someone else's story.
