"On Monday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski and a Democratic colleague, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, reintroduced a bill aimed at preventing violence against Indigenous women and girls.
Named for a North Dakota woman killed in 2017, Savanna’s Act would improve data collection on missing and murdered Native women.
Murkowski said records are so limited, authorities don’t even understand the scope of the problem.
'And this is where it gets so frustrating,' Murkowski said. 'We don’t even know what we don’t know with this. We don’t know if our statistics are right. We know that they’re bad, but we don’t know how bad.'
The bill would also increase tribal access to federal crime databases and require federal agencies to consult with tribes on reporting guidelines and other measures to protect Indigenous women and girls."
Read the full article here. Learn more about this topic in our Gender Based Violence and Intersecting Challenges Impacting Native American & Alaskan Village Communities special collection.
