"The way he had her, I'm just glad she's still with me today," said Alicia Cook, whose daughter was assaulted last week by law enforcement outside her Rapid City middle school.

The officer arrived to break up a fight between two 13-year old girls. However, advocates say the video shows one of the girls being "grappled and punched with an open-palm heel strike." The officer, Richard Holt, a 6'6" 250-pound 28-year veteran of the force, employed upon a child an open-palm heel strike — a military combat technique.

Sadly, a Native girl being brutally beaten down in South Dakota by law enforcement, didn't make the evening news nationally or even generate a trending hashtag. Cases like this are typically overlooked. These tragedies that take or demean the lives of Native people often fall by the wayside, leaving an incomplete picture of the violence Native people — and children — face in this country that has displaced their own. The rest of America is then left wondering (or more likely entirely unaware) as to why Native people have the worst outcomes of any ethnic/racial group in the country.

Native people have the terrible distinction of having the highest levels of rape, murder, and suicide, death by police, bar none. Therefore, we can not afford to miss a moment to remind the general American public how toxic environments, created in service of the American dream, make our children vulnerable to the #MMIWG epidemic. The harrowing truth is that the threat of violence is not limited to man-camps but is all around us in our everyday lives.

This is not to say other issues facing Indian Country that do receive adequate coverage should not receive it. It is gratifying and necessary to see coverage of the flooding of Pine Ridge or the fight against pipelines at Standing Rock. Yet, it is also shocking to be confronted with the fact Lake Andes, South Dakota, a Yankton Dakota community, has suffered without support for seven months. Hundreds of residents (mostly children and elders) have been left to live in flooded homes surrounded by toxic water.

However, persistent problems that are not as easily understood in a soundbite go even more shamefully underreported than the few issues that do receive attention nationally.

On Oct. 30, in a tragic culmination of the misery the Ihanktonwan Dakota (Yankton Sioux) people have been enduring, a young mother and her 3-year old child died during an explosion in their home due to a propane leak. Her best friend and housemate survived but has burns over 20 percent of her body and was flown to Minneapolis for care. Her one-year-old ejected from the house by the blast survived, relatively unscathed. They had been relocated by the tribe from their flooded home at White Swan Housing to a rehabbed meth house 20 miles away. They had not wanted to leave their community and still traveled home each day to eat meals with their relatives and neighbors. And yet, even this got almost no notice in the media or on Native social media.