Lost girls

Lost girls is a phrase Fat Crack Ortiz uses for women whose lives have been marked by separation from family and community, and whose return or recognition might help others find a way home. The expression gathers together very different histories: Delia Ortiz’s life away from the reservation, Lani Walker’s upbringing by Anglo parents, and Roseanne Orozco’s murder and the loss of her unborn daughter. It is not presented as a formal category with fixed membership. Instead, its force comes from the connections Fat Crack and Brandon Walker make among these women, and from the possibility that a loss kept private or overlooked might still be named and answered.

Meaning and Scope

Fat Crack describes Delia as one of the Tohono O’odham’s lost girls and suggests that, if she returned home, others might do so as well. His appeal makes belonging more than a question of where someone lives: Delia has a husband, Philip, whose business and social life are established elsewhere, and she expects that he would resist moving. Fat Crack nevertheless proposes that reconnecting with her roots could benefit them both. The phrase therefore carries an invitation, but not a guarantee; the choice belongs to Delia, and the obstacles to returning are part of what the expression acknowledges.

Lani’s history gives the phrase another meaning. Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz took her as a baby from the hospital and brought her to the home of Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd, who raised her. Fat Crack tells Brandon that he and Diana saved Lani and are giving her back to the People. That formulation holds two truths together: Lani’s upbringing with the Walkers is part of her life, while her connection to the Tohono O’odham community remains consequential. Her return is imagined not as erasing the family that raised her, but as making room for her to belong to her people as well.

Roseanne and the Fourfold Pattern

Roseanne’s place in the expression is bound to violence and an unanswered family loss, rather than to the possibility of an ordinary homecoming. More than thirty years after Roseanne’s death, her mother, Emma Orozco, tells Brandon that she wants to know what happened. Her husband, Henry, had urged her to forget the past; after his death, Emma speaks as Roseanne’s mother and persists in seeking answers. Brandon recognizes the courage required for her to bring the subject before a stranger and a white man, especially when direct questions are considered impolite in Tohono O’odham life. Her insistence makes the past present without making her grief public property.

The discovery that Roseanne’s unborn child was a girl gives Brandon a way to connect her to Lani and Delia. He understands Roseanne and her daughter, along with Lani and Delia, as four lost girls, recalling the teaching that all things in nature go in fours. This is Brandon’s interpretation, shaped by lessons from Fat Crack and Rita Antone; it does not make the women’s experiences interchangeable. One was killed, one was separated from her mother even in death, one was raised away from her community, and one lives at a distance from her roots. The fourfold pattern gives their separate stories a shared frame while preserving the different circumstances of each.

Return, Inheritance, and Care

The phrase also concerns who can help repair a separation. Fat Crack tells Brandon that he has been chosen to speak for Roseanne, connecting the old case to the living people seeking answers. In another act of succession, Fat Crack entrusts Looks at Nothing’s medicine pouch to Lani. Brandon understands the transfer as a passing of responsibility, possibly part of a lineage extending back to the medicine woman Kulani O’oks. He struggles to reconcile traditional healing with Fat Crack’s Christian Science faith, and wonders how Lani might become both a physician and a medicine woman. Fat Crack and Lani, however, appear confident that these roles can coexist. The inherited pouch makes return more than a theme: it places knowledge and responsibility in Lani’s hands.

Delia’s possible return similarly has consequences beyond her own household. Fat Crack believes she could serve as a role model for other lost girls, while recognizing that her marriage and Philip’s life elsewhere complicate the choice. His suggestion does not reduce Delia to an example; rather, it identifies how one person’s decision may open a path that others can consider. Across these episodes, coming home is offered as an act of reconnection, not as proof that separation never happened.

Memory and Institutional Recognition

The expression acquires additional weight against the history of neglected investigations. Roseanne’s presumed murder on the reservation fell outside the jurisdiction of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department; responsibility belonged to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Papago Tribal Police Force. Brandon recalls that tribal police lacked training, equipment, and money, while FBI investigations into reservation murders were often cursory. The case’s failure to produce answers thus reflects not only a family’s grief but also unequal institutional attention to violence on Native lands.

Later access to records offers a limited opening. Brandon remembers that a study supported by a grant from Arizona State University had digitized Indian Health Service hospital records, including material reaching back to the 1950s. Roseanne’s July 1970 appendectomy should therefore be documented, but the existence of a record does not mean investigators can readily obtain it; Brandon expects the hospital to resist a request from him as a white outsider. Emma and her family eventually act without waiting for tribal council permission: after dark, her grandson and Sam Tashquinth exhume the child’s remains. Their decision gets the remains to Brandon, but it compromises the chain of evidence. The episode exposes a painful tension between procedural requirements and a family’s urgency to pursue answers after decades of delay. In this context, Lost girls describes not simply those who are absent, but lives whose separation and suffering risk remaining unrecognized unless family, community, and investigators make the effort to remember them.