Two-Spirit discrimination persists, as questions swirl around Aubrey Dameron's murder investigation

Written By: Sarah Liese (Twilla)

(GROVE, Okla.) Six years after Aubrey Dameron, a 25-year-old transgender Cherokee woman, disappeared from a popular summer destination on the Cherokee Nation reservation, multiple law enforcement agencies in the state have worked on her case. Yet, no details regarding her death have emerged, despite a thorough search for answers from Dameron’s loved ones and a well-known Indigenous investigator.

Aubrey Dameron, a young Cherokee transgender woman with brown eyes often outlined by dark eyeliner and medium-length brown hair, left her family’s house in Grove on March 9, 2019. Her nickname “Shorty” was tattooed on her upper left arm as well as a triquetra on her back. These details would later become plastered on social media and national news articles as Dameron’s disappearance lingered on.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T).

After not hearing back from Dameron, her family decided to call Lissa Yellow Bird, a private investigator, to dig up information.

Yellow Bird is Arikara, which is a part of the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota, and is a founder of Sahnish Scouts, a volunteer organization dedicated to filling in the gaps left empty by law enforcement. She was featured on an episode of WBEZ’s “This American Life," and her story is told in the book Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country.

Yellow Bird simply describes herself as “a humble Native woman trying to do the right thing.”

Yellow Bird’s investigation highlights the continuation of Two-Spirit discrimination

Yellow Bird arrived in the close-knit city of Grove a couple of months after Dameron’s family reported her missing in 2019. The city, with about 7,000 residents, houses a quaint downtown spanning a couple of blocks lined with a mix of mom-and-pop and corporate storefronts, including a barber shop, a fish and tackle store and a pizza chain.

When Dameron disappeared in 2019, the landmark McGirt ruling hadn’t happened yet and tribal and federal law enforcement weren’t involved. Instead, the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office was in charge of the initial investigation.

“It just seemed like they really didn't care about Aubrey,” Yellow Bird said about the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office. “You could tell that it wasn't a priority.”

It wasn’t the first time the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office faced scrutiny.

A decade before Dameron’s disappearance, four women came forward in a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s office and accused jailers of sexual assault and blackmail. The county eventually reached a $13.5 million settlement in 2011, but the abusive history lingers.

In an NBC News article, Dameron’s aunt Pam Fencer claimed a bloody sock was found about a half mile away from where Dameron was last seen, and the sheriff’s office sent it off to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation for testing, but never received conclusive results. Fencer worried Dameron may be a target of a hate crime because she was in the process of transitioning, according to the article.

Data shows Fencer’s fears are valid.

According to a 2024 Human Rights Campaign report, 2800 crimes were recorded against LGBTQ+ people in the year 2023, which accounted for one in four of all hate crimes reported that year. Some of these crimes included bomb threats to gender-affirming healthcare providers, including children’s hospitals, arson to LGBTQ+ businesses and assault against LGBTQ+ people.

Yellow Bird also expressed concern about how Dameron’s case was handled because of her identity.

Some people referred to Dameron as a Two-Spirit— a term coined in the 1990s that some Indigenous people identify with because of the masculine and feminine energies they embody or their connection to the LGBTQ+ community.

Yellow Bird compared the agency to all the others she’s worked with. “The detective kept saying, ‘him’ … He was born a male and blah, blah, blah.’ And just really displaying his ignorance everywhere.”

Yellow Bird was referring to Gayle Wells, a Delaware County sheriff’s captain investigating Dameron’s disappearance. Yellow Bird said Wells showed up late and disgruntled during searches, giving her the impression this case didn’t matter to him or the sheriff’s office.

“When you have 100 searchers right there, why would you not utilize that as a resource and try to let them know what protocols would work for you in helping solve this?” Yellow Bird said. “But we really never got that kind of reception.”

The discrimination Yellow Bird described is not new.

Scholars, such as Andrea Smith and Gregory Smithers, say that it began with the oppressive nature of colonization and Christianity and its impact on Native American cultures, languages and lifeways. The belief that Christianity, scholars argue, caused Two-Spirit beliefs and teachings to go underground or fade away. The impacts remain relevant throughout U.S. history.

Some early examples of gender binary and heternormative standards are evident in the term “berdache. The well-known encyclopedia Britannica said berdache derives from the Arabic word bardaj, which means “slave” or “kept boy” and was used by Europeans observing Indigenous men who fell outside the Western norms of male dress, social status, sexual orientation or community role.

Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, known for his theory of human development, utilized the term in his “Observations of Sioux Education” in 1939. He described Two-Spirit people as “anti-natural.” His findings built upon Jackson Steward Lincoln’s 1935 book The Dream in Primitive Cultures, which discussed a dream Lakota boys may have, revealing their more feminine identities.

“The moon having two hands, one holds a bow and arrows, the other the burden strap of a woman… When the man reaches to take the bow, the hands suddenly cross and try to force the strap upon the man, who struggles to waken before he takes it. …Should he fail and become possessed of the strap, he is doomed to be like a woman,” Erkison cites in “Observations of Sioux Education.”

The phrase “doomed to be like a woman” is highly revealing of how gay or non-binary men and trans women were viewed in the early to mid-1900s.

This published work by Erikson is cited three times in the Indian Rights Association collection, which houses correspondences, publications and photographs that foreground the IRA’s goal to prevent the exploitation of Indigenous people and push for assimilation policies. The social activist group was founded in 1882 in Philadelphia by non-Native people aiming to “bring about the complete civilization of the Indians and their admission to citizenship” through means of land ownership and education.

The idea that being trans, gay or non-binary is “deviant behavior” was a standard narrative in the 1900s. Doctors performed lobotomies, electroshock treatments and prescribed drugs to cure homosexuality, and it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association changed its stance that homosexuality was not a mental illness.

This deviant behavior ideology of gender and sexual minority groups is arguably a growing conviction today, as the Trump administration enacts more anti-trans and anti-2SLGBTQ+ executive orders.

But as Yellow Bird noted, many Indigenous belief systems stretched beyond the gender binary and heteronormative standards of American society. Some Indigenous cultures, such as the Crow and Lakota people, revered Two-Spirit people, viewing them as holy individuals or medicine men and women.

“They were highly regarded. They were respected,” Yellow Bird said. “And this is not what happened to Aubrey… It's kind of a backwards attitude that we had to deal with in trying to get help to find her.”

Aaron Kopp, a filmmaker and Boston University professor, followed Yellow Bird around during her quest to find clues about what happened to Dameron.

Kopp said he filmed Yellow Bird on and off for about a year, showcasing her work with Sahnish Scouts in multiple states, trying to document the larger issue of MMIP.

“I don't have any doubt whether or not Aubrey's case was mishandled,” Kopp said in a phone interview. “I'm not an expert, but I know enough to know the chances of finding someone dramatically decrease the longer they're missing. And I have no reason to doubt the family. In the early days of the investigation, the sheriff's department seemed to do basically nothing for a considerable amount of time. …And just that mere fact alone says to me that they were not on the ball.”

KOSU reached out to the Delaware County Sheriff’s office numerous times to get an interview about the investigation into Dameron’s disappearance, but the attempts were unsuccessful.

Remains found, but case has yet to be solved

Quapaw Nation Marshals found Dameron’s remains in Ottawa County close to the Benjamin Quapaw Mine, near South 565 Road and East 30 Road in late January of 2025. This area near the Oklahoma-Kansas-Missouri border was designated as a Superfund site in 1983 due to lead and zinc mining that contaminated the surrounding environment, though efforts are underway to clean up the area.

“Since March 2019, numerous interviews have been conducted and leads follow up on by the Delaware County Sheriffs Office, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, Cherokee Nation Marshal Service, BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) Missing and Murdered Unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the Quapaw Nation Marshal Service stated in a press release, announcing the remains discovery.

The Delaware County Sheriff’s Office initially handled Dameron’s investigation until they let the Cherokee Nation Marshal Service take the case after the landmark McGirt ruling, which restored criminal jurisdiction to the five largest tribal nations, including the Cherokee Nation.

Cherokee Nation Acting Marshal Daniel Mead recently confirmed the FBI has taken over Dameron’s case, but he did not explain when this happened or why.

The Deputy Chief of Investigation at the Quapaw Nation, Michael Mullin, would not answer questions about the discovery of Dameron’s remains and suggested questions be sent to FBI spokesperson Kayla McCleery.

McCleery declined to answer questions about the case or how it was handled, saying in an email, “we do not discuss the actions or inactions of any other department or agency and it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to speculate on the nature of any historic crimes that may have occurred.”

The Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has yet to release autopsy findings, leaving the door open to speculative theories, many of which have been shared online, given the salient attention to Dameron’s story from mainstream media.

Despite lack of answers, Dameron’s legacy lives on 

Amidst searches for answers, multiple memorials were held for Dameron across Oklahoma, closing one chapter in this ongoing case.

In Oklahoma City, the Indigenous-led non-profit Matriarch held a vigil honoring Dameron in February.

Those who knew her best shared memories, while others paid homage, such as well-known Cherokee musician, Agalisiga Mackey, who performed her favorite Fleetwood Mac song, “Dreams.”

“She was so proud of her identity as a transgender woman, and we are forever missing her and her powerful legacy of kindness she has left behind,” Dameron’s aunt, Pam Fencer said at the OKC memorial. “From princess dresses to ball gowns, she was always confident in herself. We hope you carry the love you share for Aubrey to everyone else.”

Attempts to interview Dameron’s family were unsuccessful.

In the small city of Grove, people who met Dameron will also carry her legacy with them.

Sandy Love, the office manager at the local newspaper Grove Sun, recalled multiple times she interacted with Dameron when she owned a flea market store. Love said she could “make your heart smile” on the worst of days.

“She had the sweetest personality and she was kind,” Love said. “She had a way of making you feel happy.”

Love was not employed at Grove Sun when Dameron went missing and would not speculate on rumours she heard in town about what happened to Dameron out of fear for her safety.

“It's so scary that that can just happen to you,” Love said. “You can just disappear off the face of the earth for years and nobody can find you. And it's so wrong.”

Dameron’s case remains open and no information is being released from local, state or federal law enforcement, leaving her family, friends and supporters without answers and a way to heal.

Allison Herrera contributed to this report, which was supported by Verified News Network. This reporting was also supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T).