According to this piece on the NPR website by Kirk Siegler, things are bad and getting worse when it comes to missing and murdered women and girls on Indian reservations.
After the lose of a friend’s 19-year-old daughter on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, Molina Richards decided something needed to be done, and began to work on the problem.
To that end, Richards wrote and recently won a grant from CARES Act funds available to tribes to open a shelter for women and homeless teens on the reservation. The first of its kind safehouse will be staffed around the clock. It will also be a badly needed refuge for people who are otherwise walking out in the cold all night, organizers said, moving from boarded up gang-run houses, to drug parties, their feet swollen, or far worse.
Also working on the problem, last week, State Rep. Peri Pourier, representing the Pine Ridge Reservation to the west of Rosebud, convinced her colleagues to pass a bill that, that could create a full-time missing indigenous persons specialist as part of the State Attorney General’s office in South Dakota.
“Sometimes the dots aren’t connected that this is a human trafficking issue,” Pourier said. “But the most vulnerable of our populations is indigenous women and children.”
Of the 109 people currently listed as missing in South Dakota, 77 are believed to be indigenous. Last month alone, 19 native people went missing, according to state figures.
Listen to the full story in this NPR newscast:
or read the full story here on NPR.org.
If you live in South Dakota, now would be an excellent time to start writing Governor Noem and asking her to sign the proposed legislation.
