{"id":1327,"date":"2021-03-16T11:53:01","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T15:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dougbardwell.com\/sht\/?p=1327"},"modified":"2021-03-16T11:59:29","modified_gmt":"2021-03-16T15:59:29","slug":"human-trafficking-at-its-worst-in-indian-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dougbardwell.com\/sht\/index.php\/2021\/03\/16\/human-trafficking-at-its-worst-in-indian-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Human Trafficking At Its Worst In Indian Country"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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South Dakota<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

According to this piece on the NPR website by Kirk Siegler,<\/a> things are bad and getting worse when it comes to missing and murdered women and girls on Indian reservations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Listen to the full story in this NPR newscast:<\/p>\n\n\n\n