Page 21 - GIC Manifesto.m

In North America, the US-Canadian border continues to impede any substantial progress on
the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) & Two Spirit tragedy. It is a priority
of GIC to proactively work on initiatives to reduce the terrible toll of this catastrophe on our
communities. A lack of effective cooperation exists not only between law enforcement agencies,
but also between tribal nations, due to the status-quo of jurisdictional paralysis. The trust
and confidence of Native communities in law enforcement must be addressed and improved.
Concurrently, more responsive and effective support systems for victims’ families are essential.
The problem does not stop at, or differ, on each side of the US-Canadian border: it is the same
problem with the same tragic impacts on our communities. The traffickers don’t stop at the
border, and we cannot. GIC has measures that can be implemented - and undertaken -
expeditiously, in anticipation of cross-jurisdictional cooperation.

In the US, GIC supports Savanna’s Act, named in memory of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind,
a citizen of the Spirit Lake Tribe who was murdered in August 2017. Like all MMIW victims,
Savanna was a human being, not a statistic. In December 2018, GIC introduced amendments
to Savanna’s Act with the Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association and Rocky Mountain
Tribal Leaders Council. By summer 2019, those amendments had bipartisan support in
the House and Senate. The Act is a positive step forward, but this unremitting devastation
requires more than policy changes in cross-jurisdictional data sharing. Inter-jurisdictional co-
operation is essential, though for tribal nations and tribal law enforcement, the question of
jurisdiction itself, and the training, investment, and overhaul of tribal law enforcement
structures to effectively counter the crisis, is a pressing need. That on some reservations
Native women are murdered at a rate ten times the national average, and that 84% of Native
women have endured assaults in their lifetimes, speaks to the urgency for change.

Be they johns who victimize trafficked indigenous women or photofit perps, the preponderance
of assailants who prey on Native women have something in common: they are not Native.
In A Comprehensive Report on MMIW, Lisa J. Ellwood dismantled the assumption once promoted
MMIW