Eugenia Charles-Newton could still be missing.

Instead, she’s sitting at her desk in the chamber of the Navajo Nation Council. On a hot March afternoon, the chamber is cool and silent – as silent as she had been for decades.

It’s been about six months since she began talking publicly about her disappearance more than 20 years ago, when she was just a teenager. It hasn’t gotten any easier.

She felt groggy. She couldn’t move. She slipped in and out of consciousness, the passage of time marked by the cycle of sunlight and cold night air seeping through cracks in the wall.

She had been held for several days, she discovered later. During that time, she said at a meeting of the Navajo Nation Council last September, she had been beaten and raped repeatedly by a man from the reservation.