Nevin Kallepalli                                                                               

Selected Writing
UC Berkeley California Local Reporting Fellow at Shasta Scout.




𓆙




 


This Native man from Northern California has gone missing 
not once, but twiceA PORTION OF NICK PATTERSON’S SKELETAL REMAINS, FINALLY RECOVERED YEARS AFTER HE WENT MISSING, WERE LOST AGAIN BY OFFICIALS DURING HIS MISSING PERSON INVESTIGATION. THE STUNNING ERROR HAS COMPLICATED THE PIT RIVER TRIBE’S GRIEVING PROCESS AND LED TO SUGGESTIONS FOR POLICY CHANGES.
 Shasta Scout
After the partial loss of his skeleton, the question remains: where is Nick? It’s one that continues to haunt his mother and the larger Pit River Tribe. Their collective grieving process was forestalled by his body’s absence, which left them unable to perform his last rites according to Tribal tradition. Experts have a term for this disruption in mourning: ambiguous loss. It is a cross-cultural phenomenon that occurs in the midst of specific types of tragedies in which someone goes unaccounted for, whether an individual in a missing person case, or a collective group, as occurs in the fallout of war.