Earlier this week, the United States Senate finally held an oversight hearing on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). Three Native American women testified on Wed. with personal anecdotes to the US Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, in an attempt to analyze the “silent crisis” of MMIWG and the perpetual violence against Native American and Alaskan Native women and girls. In the US, sexual violence against and missing and murdered rates of Indigenous women and girls is higher than any other marginalized group. Many hope that the hearing will result in a federal inquiry on MMIWG that would allocate more legislative priority and funding to the issue.

Montana Democratic Senator Jon Tester asked the Senate to identify which federal agency is responsible for perpetual inaction on this issue, be it the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), or tribal law enforcement. Outgoing US Sen. Heidi Heitkamp revealed that only the BIA’s Director of Office of Justice Services, Charles Addington, stayed through the whole hearing. All other officials—from the FBI and the National Institute of Justice—left before its conclusion. The lack of officials overseeing the entirety of the hearing reveals the deeply rooted institutional and systemic racism within the US government and its officials.

“The purpose of this hearing is not to talk about if we have a problem. It’s to talk about what you’re going to do about it,” said Sen. Heitkamp. “When these crimes go uninvestigated, when they go unsolved for long, long periods of time, or ignored for long, long periods of time, that’s your failure. It’s not the community’s failure, it’s your failure.”

Earlier this month on Dec. 7, a bill known as Savanna’s Act was unanimously passed in the Senate and is now on its way to the House of Representatives. The proposed bill would require more accessibility and accurate data on MMIWG databases within the US. The act would also mandate the reporting of an annual record of MMIWG statistics to Congress. This bill was introduced by Sen. Heitkamp in Oct. of 2017, following the murder of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a soon-to-be mother and tribal member of Spirit Lake, ND. According to the National Crime and Information Center, North Dakota alone had 125 reported cases of MMIWG in 2016. This bill serves as a potential beginning of a mobilization for a federal inquiry on the MMIWG epidemic.

Following this year’s midterm elections, New Mexico’s Deb Haaland and Kansas’s Sharice Davids became the nation’s first Native American Congresswomen; one of Haaland’s top priorities is to initiate a federal inquiry on MMIWG. Haaland wants to compile a database, independent of that kept by the US federal government, due to the government’s inaccurate data and lack of investigation on MMIWG as a result of settler colonialism. There has been significant lack of Indigenous representation in government that has allowed the MMIWG epidemic to grow throughout the US and the world. However, Indigenous activists and their allies in Canada have taken steps to change this through a federal inquiry which Haaland hopes to mimic in this country.