Sky Views: Forgotten or ignored? The murdered native American women

Sky Views: Forgotten or ignored? The murdered native American women

Hannah Thomas-Peter, US correspondent

In America's indigenous communities, it is dangerous to be a woman.

Read this alarming summary from the Indian Law Resource Center:

"More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than one in two have experienced sexual violence.

"On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than 10 times the national average."


And they go missing.

Disappeared, vanished, often without explanation.

Some might turn up in rivers, wrapped in duct tape and plastic, like Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, who was discovered in the Red River near the Canadian border in August 2017.

Image: Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind's body was found near the Canadian border

If there can be any solace from her brutal death, it is that it inspired a bill in congress.

But many women and girls have never been found and never will be.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that in 2014 murder was the third leading cause of death for American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls between the ages of 10-24. The third.

The senate committee on Indian affairs calls this a "silent crisis".

In Canada the problem is so acute that the government launched a national inquiry, due to report next month.

So many women, many from indigenous tribes, have disappeared or turned up dead along one lonely stretch of motorway in British Columbia that it has its own macabre nickname - The Highway of Tears.

The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs calls this a "silent crisis".

Most of those cases remain unsolved.

Why is this happening?

It is a toxic combination of under-reporting, under-policing, social and racial injustice and almost criminal indifference.

Some reservations don't even have a single police officer, and there is a deep distrust of those authorities that do exist.

There are myriad social and economic problems that beset marginalised communities everywhere, including complicating factors like high rates of substance abuse.

One study, for example, found that almost 12% of Native American and Alaska Natives' deaths are alcohol related, more than three times the national average.

Layer on top of all this the well-documented systemic and personal racism towards minority individual and groups.

And then add that to a confusing web of jurisdictions between federal, state, local and tribal police.

It is a perfect storm.

The full extent of that storm is almost unknowable, but conventional wisdom holds that the suffering endured by indigenous women and children is chronically under-reported.

These already significant problems are exacerbated by a woeful lack of data.

Image: Romona Wilson is a victim of the Highway of Tears

The Urban Indian Health Institute found that of the 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls in 2016, a figure that is unlikely to represent the true number, just 116 of those cases were logged in the Department of Justice's federal missing persons database.

The same organisation identified 153 dead or missing women whose cases simply did not exist in any database.

Washington State is considered to have made some progress after politicians there passed a law that forced state police to gather numbers on murdered and missing indigenous women.

Before that there was nothing that required them to do so.

The impact of violence and abuse is traumatic enough, but it is compounded when those who could help fail to even record the problem properly let alone work out how to solve it.

These failures, to me, represent a second wave of violence against one of the most vulnerable populations in North America.

Worse still, it is a travesty that has been rolling on quietly for decades.

There are currently bills going through congress to try to improve collaboration, data gathering, and access to information.

But progress is inexcusably slow.

America must do better.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

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