Lynette Grey Bull.Photo: Dateline NBC
For Indigenous females aged 19 and younger, murder is the third leading cause of death, reports theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention.
TheNational Institute of Justice, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, found that more than four out of five Indigenous women have been subject to violence, and more than 50 percent have experienced sexual violence.
In some counties, Indigenous women are 10 times more likely to be killed than white women, according to the institute.
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Those numbers helped pushU.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland– the first Native American appointed to a presidential cabinet – to form aMissing & Murdered Unitwithin the Bureau of Indian Affairs in April to pursue justice through a coordinated federal agency response.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.Dateline NBC
On Friday,Dateline NBCturns its attention to the epidemic with a one-hour special that features the case of Carla Yellow Bird, who was murdered in 2016 on the Spirit Lake reservation in North Dakota, and the determination of investigator and advocate Lissa Yellow Bird – the victim’s aunt – whose search for answers finds cracks in law enforcement. Three men were convicted and sentenced for their roles in Carla’s murder, reports theGrand Forks Herald.
The special, titledThe Secrets of Spirit Lake, is part of NBC News’s week-long seriesThe Vanished. An exclusive excerpt is shown below:
The epidemic galvanized a movement, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, dedicated to helping families get answers about lost loved ones but also to “navigate the jurisdictional nightmare that they face,” according to the nonprofitMMIW USA Facebook page.
“I’m a full-blooded Native American woman and the statistics that hang over my head is that I am the most stalked, raped, sexually assaulted and murdered out of every ethnicity in this country,” activist and survivor Lynette Grey Bull, who lives on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, says in the special.
“It’s heart-wrenching, to really think about the measure of how we are invisible to America,” she says.
Haaland tells NBC News’s Andrea Canning in the special: “This is a crisis that’s been happening in our country since colonization, and it’s very, very deep. And so I’m grateful that we’re seeing some action on it right now.”
TheDateline NBCspecialThe Secrets of Spirit Lakepremieres Friday (10 p.m. ET/9 p.m. CT).
source: people.com
