She Cried That Day

Content warning: This episode talks about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives crisis. Please take care to protect your spirit.

Welcome to the final episode of Sonic Journey's pilot season. All season we’ve been listening to films from the 4th World Media family, and today we're joined by another emerging filmmaker, Amanda Erickson, who directed the feature documentary She Cried That Day. 

Amanda is a badass Native woman, and She Cried That Day is about more badass Native women. It gives an intimate look inside what families go through who are part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives crisis. In North America,  murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women. She Cried That Day is part of an impact campaign to bring affected families together in order to support each other and to effect policy change. 

Sonic Journeys is presented by 4th World Media, a matriarch-led organization dedicated to media justice, narrative sovereignty and the holistic care of underserved filmmakers.

Host and Creator: Stina Thomas Hamlin

Supervising Producer: Jenny Asarnow

Executive Producer: Tracy Rector

Theme song: Tooh Nílíní by Kino Benally

Consulting Graphic Designer: Joel Schomberg

Cover art: Mer Young

Connect with us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Sonic Journeys is an independent podcast. You can find it on Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get podcasts.

Transcript

She Cried That Day

Sonic Journeys 

Season 1 Episode 5

Release date: November 25, 2025

Stina Thomas Hamlin: Hey everyone, this episode talks about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives crisis.  Please take care to protect your spirit as you listen.

[clip from film of Dione]

There’s so many girls with big mouths in our family. [laughter] He can not get a word in!

[Intro soundscape]

Tracy Rector:  Welcome to Sonic Journeys.

[Music plays: Tooh Nílíní by Kino Benally]

Stina Thomas Hamlin:  Hey everyone I’m Stina Thomas Hamlin, and welcome to the final episode of our pilot season of Sonic Journeys.  I can’t believe that we’re here, but excited to be here.  This podcast is a place that we listen deeply and consider the sound of cinema. All season we’ve been listening to films from the 4th World Media family, and today we’re going to hear from another emerging filmmaker, director, Amanda Erickson and her feature film She Cried That Day.

Amanda is a badass Native woman, and the film is about more badass Native women.  It tells the story of a family that’s fighting for justice for the murder of their daughter, sister, and mother, Dione. And it gives an intimate look inside what families go through who are part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives Crisis.  You’ll also hear this referred to as MMIWR.  There is a serious crisis in the United States and Canada, where murder is the THIRD leading cause of death for Native women. And so many missing and murder cases go unsolved just like Dione’s.  Families and communities have to step in themselves and take on that burden to find justice, and that’s what this film is about.

She Cried that Day is on the festival circuit and it’s heading into a campaign where we’re trying to bring families together to support each other and also to effect change in policy.

We asked Amanda to listen back to some clips of the film and share some voice memos with us about how she used sound to bring the story to life.

Amanda Erickson: Hi I’m Amanda Erickson, I’m born for the San Carlos Apache of the White Water Clan, and I’m the director of  the documentary film She Cried That Day.  When I think about this film and the use of sound, I think a lot about the voices of the women in the film.  And one of the moments that I really enjoyed is where the family is around the table looking at pictures, and just kind of  hearing the laughter in the house.  

[hear clip]

I absolutely love this moment.  That whole hearted full laugh instantly brings me home. Like it captured the spirit of a Native family, and even though our film deals a lot with heavy topics, I wanted to ensure that we included those moments of laughter.

Stina:  The film opens with the crackling sound of a fire.

Amanda: This beginning moment of the film, that has such a strong sense memory for me. Um, I didn’t grow up within my culture, I grew up far away.  So a big part of my reconnection with my Apache side was about learning about ceremony and learning about traditions. And one of the first things that my dad did was take me to a sunrise ceremony. I just remember seeing the biggest bonfire I’d ever seen in my life.  And there was what felt like hundreds of people surrounding this fire, singing, praying, dancing.  So when I went out to New Mexico and started speaking with community that had been working on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives crisis, I walked away in awe of their power and their brilliance and had that same feeling as I did when I first saw young women dancing at the sunrise ceremony.  And so I wanted to find a way to bring those elements to our film. 

Stina:  Amanda worked with two composers on the film, Kristina James and Greg Yazzie. 

Amanda: I remember when I was speaking with Kristina and Greg, talking about finding these moments when we’re speaking about Dione to reflect a bit of her in the music.  I think this is a prime example of when we were able to capture that.

I didn’t want it to be overtly sad because that isn’t Dione. And so I kind of like this sort of Tinkerbell moment that happens here. Those soft little notes that you hear, it’s a lightness that I feel like you see in the family's eyes when they talk about Dione growing up or their happy memories with Dione, their eyes light up. 

Stina: Amanda used sound to bring Dione’s presence into the film, through music and also archival footage.

[clip from film, Dione talking]

Amanda: The graduation video, oh it was such an amazing find! Because we have pictures of Dione but for a long time didn’t have a way to hear her voice. And so when Christine gave me this DVD, I was just like yes, this is what we really needed! She’s cracking jokes, just hearing her take center stage for a moment, you get a sense of who she was. 

Stina: The film follows Dione’s sister, Christine, as she tries to get justice for her family and others, and at the end, the sound calls us back to where we started rooted in ceremony and culture.  Christine speaks at a rally for Dione, and for all the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives.

[clip from film, Christine]

Christine:  We are the strong ones, we show up repeatedly, we bare the responsibility, and in order to sustain this fight we have to be our own advocates.

Amanda: We’ve now watched her go through hell and back. Even though she hasn’t gotten justice for her sister, even though the fight is still continuing.  There is a victory in her own healing. There is a victory there and there is hope there. 

[clip from film, Christine]

A new path of prevention of this cycle of violence and abuse. In our families and in our own homes, because that’s the only change that we can really make today.  [Applause]

Amanda: And then to hear the clapping, the applause, it fills your heart. This is community coming together to support each other that is what can help keep families moving forward and keep continuing their fight for justice for their loved ones. There’s so much strength and power in that. I feel it in this moment.  I feel that with the saying of the names of our loved ones that are still missing or have been taken by violence. There is a strength in saying their names out loud. For people to know who they are. They do have a voice, they do matter. I love when you have that kind of classical and instrumental building to this crescendo and in the background you are hearing that crackling of the fire again from the very beginning.  And then you’re hearing the jingle of the dress from the sunrise ceremony.  It was just bringing everything together.  Powerful, powerful, Native women that I am still in awe of.  I always will be in awe of their strength, their courage to share their story with us.  I am so thankful for that. 

Stina: Thank you so much Amanda for sharing how you developed the soundscape for this film and now, and now we’re going to listen to the first seventeen minutes of She Cried that Day.

Native woman: When I had my dance, I felt the strength, the prayers.

Native woman:  Life is going to be hard and you have to take all the blessings that are coming to you as you're dancing.

Newscaster 1: When you see the young girls at the Sunrise Dance ceremony, it's a sign of resilience and resistance.

Christine: A lot of times, this is my only self-care, just get out of my head for a little while. Growing up in Gallup, I think fighting was just a part of the life of a kid in our town. Dione's advice was, if you ever get into a fight, you want to one, two and jump back. That's always stuck with me. You have to be able to project yourself.

So I am making a spirit dish right now. I just like to say a little prayer and in honor of Dione's birthday yesterday was her 47th birthday. Put out some food for her and anybody, any other spirits that are passing through. Then we'll come back again later on and check on it and put it out. Bury it usually.

I'd rather celebrate her birthday than the memorial of when she passed of her death, but of course that's a hard day to forget also.

Dione: When she was born to call her Poo Bear, she was Poo Bear. She started to call her Poovey and Poovey turned into Poodie.

Newscaster 1:  A shocking statistic. Native American women in the United States are 10 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the population. Why and how thousands of Native American women have mysteriously been killed or have vanished.

Newscaster 2: A broken system in the ongoing problem of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. New Mexico, with the most cases, New Mexico continues to have the most Indigenous people disappear, the highest murder rate of Indigenous.

Newscaster 3: What's happening with our Native women right now, cases are not taken seriously.

Newscaster 2: Members of a New Mexico task force on missing and murdered indigenous women want to hear from victims and their family members in the coming year.

Host of meeting: With that, I'd like to hand it over to Christine Means.

Christine: Good morning. A, we are here to ask for your help. Saturday, April 25th, 2015, my sister woke up in the Colonial Motel in Gallup, New Mexico. The Gallup Police Department was called to motel room number 155, 3 times that day. At 6:00 PM It was for 9 1 1 because she was unconscious. She was not alone in the room throughout the day, she was with her boyfriend, a known offender. They had a long history of domestic violence. The two of them, Gallup Police Department, knew who he was. Neighbors reporting that he was yelling. Witnesses that reported violence happening in the room, arguments, fighting. Her boyfriend gave a statement to the police that she had fallen. She must have hit her head.

His statement is what the police ran with. That night she was flown out to UNM Hospital. She arrived here in Albuquerque. She was unconscious. She had bruises all over her body. She had tubes going in and out of her body to keep her alive and at the time the UNM hospital staff reported to us that she probably wouldn't make it, and we knew that he had done this to her. In the days followed, we did everything we were supposed to do. We worked with the police. The police made statements that it was suspicious. They were actively investigating it as a homicide. They said, let us do our jobs.

As of today, November, 2019, it has been over four years. No charges have been filed, so at this point in time, my sister's death is unclassified and if nothing happens from outside political public pressure, this we know the charges will not come because we could go and sit at the district attorney's office. We can make the phone calls, we can go in person. We can demand justice. We can be as a polished, polite, respectful, educated as we want to be on all of this and it will not move the system that has allowed for this to on so long. We want charges filed for the death of my sister. She was a murder victim. It was homicide and the precedent has been set in Gallup, New Mexico. If you want to get away with murder, do it there and make sure that it's a Native woman because they won't come looking for who did it for you. This, I know I've seen it.

Troy Velasquez:  I am an enrolled member of Laguna Pueblo. That's where I was raised. In my line of work, I knew people went missing. We investigated, we worked on cases, and being Native American myself, I didn't know. When I started participating in the task force and I started seeing numbers, that's when I said this is pretty alarming, right? Our accounts are probably higher of Native Americans that are missing a lot of confusion, right? A lot of chaos. It has to do with the jurisdiction. A, it has to do with these imaginary lines that we've drawn for law enforcement and our communities

Stephanie Salazar:  With the different land status In New Mexico, there's state land, federal land, tribal lands, and so when you have all these different borders that are set up artificially, law enforcement can only go up to here and then once they cross that line, they're no longer covered by the insurance. If something goes wrong, they could be personally liable. It creates challenges because we know that crime doesn't just exist within these artificial barriers that have been set up for us, and a lot of times, I think some of the perpetrators are well aware that once I cross that border, they can't touch me. Without accountability for bad actions, it is telling you this is a vulnerable population. We can target them if we want to because we can get away with it.

Troy Velasquez: The tribal law enforcement, if you're a tribal member and you're working for your own people, that can be difficult. As a tribal cop, it might not be so much as getting people off of arrest, but you go out there and you stop cars, you're going to know everybody. Or what if it's a domestic violence call and it's your neighbors? They sure have their work cut out for them and I do respect them. Having been in those boots myself, they're underfunded, they're undertrained, and we don't have enough of them. And part of that goes back to probably their pay as well, right? How much are we paying these guys and gals to be tribal cops? Is it competitive with what they could be making in the city?

Daryl Noon: Navajo Nation is over 27,000 square miles, 11 million acres. To give you an idea of just how vast the area is, whenever I have to go to a meeting either in Tuba City or the northwest corner, it's a three hour drive. Service area is over 5,000 square miles. The community is always upset about our response times or lack of response, and I don't think they truly understand what's happening, so it's tough. First and foremost is lack of resources. We've been shorthanded for years. We recently had a consultant team come in and basically tell us we need at least 500 officers to conduct the basic functions of a police department. The entire time that I've been here, I don't think we've eclipsed 200 certified officers. Our officers go to a lot of these calls, these critical calls by themselves, and they've got to wait for backup. Culture plays a part in everything we do. I'm not a traditional Navajo person, but a lot of the people who work here are, when it comes to death, death is something you don't talk about. We are trying to change the mindset to understand that just one person missing is too many.

Caitlynn: Oh gosh, that is not classic Dione. Don't do that to her. That is not her. Oh my gosh, look

Debbie: Look at this. You see how big the hair got. Remember that hair? Did you guys have to do that when you had to get your hair up there? Yes. I don't know. I don't care what age your child is, you remember them like this, and when they're this age, you never think that they will grow up and go through these things. You never just think you'll never lose them. But we lost her. We did before we ever really lost her. We had already lost her

Caitlynn: Grandma. Is this you?

Christine: Tisha! Look at your mom. Look how young she was, and she'd already had you and Caity. She looks like Auntie Lacey for sure at this age.

Debbie: Dione was always, she always wanted to be older than she was. She never was this little girl for very long. She wasn't.

Christine: She was always really fun. So it was like, cool. This is my fun big sister. She does fun things and I see she gets in trouble for them, but for me it was never a problem. I never had to deal with the repercussions. Dione is the oldest and then Karen, they're just a couple years apart. I was the baby. They were the older sisters, so we'd just kind of hang out behind them and hope that we could play with them. We were so different. Me and Dione, we were very different. I could not understand the way she thought. I always take things very seriously. I've got a plan. I'm going to A, B, C, D execute and I'm going to document things and I'm going to organize my life, and she would always laugh at my attempts to be in control of a situation.

Tonisha: Thank you everybody for coming. I was so happy to see my dad stand up and talk. There's so many girls with big mouths in. Our family cannot get a word in. All we do is talk and he listens.

Christine:  My sister Dione used to get in a lot of trouble when she was young, she was the bad one. My parents were always chasing her, literally chasing her.

Tonisha: That picture was taken at great grandma's house in South Dakota. I remember we picked her up. Why did she come with us?

Debbie: She had been beaten up and had black eyes. She had black eyes. She had been beaten by the same guy. That's why she was wearing the sunglasses. She had black eyes. My mom was so hurt when she saw her.

Her last boyfriend, they were together 10 years. That's when it changed up to that point. She had a home, she had a car, she had a good job. She was with her girls taking care of her girls. She met Anthony and that was the end of that. Well, of course it was really hard to watch it, but I never gave up on her. Never, never. And I never intended to. I kept trying to convince her though, just stay with me. She wanted to go back and she was so, she wasn't in any kind of pity mode regardless of what her situation was. She was always so upbeat, make you laugh, and thank you everybody

Christine: It's hard to keep that relationship. It's so hard to be compassionate and patient when you see your sister hurting willingly, putting herself in danger, a sibling. It was something that I couldn't comprehend at the time, and I think here in Gallup growing up, you see so many people on a street and a lot of attitude in a place like this are very discriminatory. Like Drunk Indian, there's a drunk Navajo. Ugh, look at them. They're ugly, they're gross. There's a problem in this neighborhood. My mom always told us, you never know where they came from, somebody's child, and they never wanted to grow up and become a drunk on the street. That was never in their life plan.

She had Tisha at a very young age. Our family tried to be very stable for them. My parents took in the girls and then I just tried to be a good support system to them to make sure that things were okay in their lives. And I've just tried to always be a stable adult figure in their life.

Christine: We didn't come from a perfect life. I think we're the culmination of all of the craziness that Indians have been put through, the relocation, the termination policies, and talking to my family and the boarding schools and it's really taken a toll and it's so great to be able to have a family that I can talk to about it and we can sit and we can acknowledge it and think, why are we like this? Oh, it's because of this. And I think that's why I'm a psychology major. I love to think about why I think

Debbie: She was different that day. She was still in bed, so I told her, come on Dione, let's go. Come with me for a while. And Dione never cried, but she cried that day.

Stina: She Cried That Day is directed and produced by Amanda Erickson.  I also produced the film along with Tracy Rector.  The original score is by Kristina James and Greg Yazzie. Sound recordists are James Gallup and Marianna LaFollette. Re-recording Mixers are Matt Gundy and Scott Hirsch. 

This podcast is Sonic Journeys! It’s produced by 4th World Media.  And we are a matriarch led organization dedicated to media justice, narrative sovereignty and the holistic care of underserved storytellers. 

And this is our last episode of this season, so please, if you haven’t done it so far, follow us on Instagram and Linkedin, we’re always at 4th World Media.  And if you can, rate and review us and also tell all your friends.  We’re hoping to be back for a season two next year.

Our Supervising Producer is Jenny Asarnow.  Our Executive Producer is Tracy Rector.  Our theme song is Tooh Nílíní, by Kino Benally. Consulting Graphic Designer, Joel Schomberg. Cover art by Mer Young.

Sonic Journeys is created and hosted by me. 

I’m Stina Thomas Hamlin, thanks for sticking around and listening.