A business call took us away from the committee hearing on HF70 (and its "clone HF111; both bills to create and fund a Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women Task Force). We had written about the legislation on Tuesday in Public Safety hears MMIW bill today; yesterday, House GOP games would have stopped it.
The bill's author, Mary Kunesh-Podein, DFL-New Brighton, and other committee members discussed how it should be passed as a stand alone bill in both houses and sent to Governor Tim Walz.
The hearing for the bill:
Session Daily's Tim Walker reports in 'Minnesota will not let indigenous women continue to vanish':
Mysti Babineau was raped for the first time when she was just 9 years old. Three years later, she and her grandmother were violently assaulted, resulting in the death of her grandmother and deep knife wounds to Babineau’s hand.
Such traumatic and violent events are all too common among Native American women and girls, Babineau told the House Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform Finance and Policy Division Tuesday. An unknown number of Native American women and girls also disappear each year, she testified, most presumably dead or victims of sex trafficking.
Babineau and several other Native American women spoke in support of HF70, a bill that would create a task force to track the number of missing Native American women and girls in the state, and to analyze the systemic reasons for the high rate of disappearance in that population.
The division approved the bill and sent it to the House Ways and Means Committee.
The goal of the task force would be to better understand the causes of violence against indigenous women and to reduce and prevent violence where it is happening. The task force would include members of the indigenous community, law enforcement, policymakers and the public. . . .
The bill would appropriate $67,000 in Fiscal Year 2020 and $33,000 in Fiscal Year 2021 to fund the task force.
The companion, SF515, sponsored by Sen. Patricia Torres Ray (DFL-Mpls), awaits action by the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee.
Here's the press statement Kunesh-Podein released after the hearing:
Legislation authored by Representative Mary Kunesh-Podein (DFL-New Brighton) to create a new state task force to address the endemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Minnesota (H.F.111) received its first public hearing today. The House Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee listened to heartbreaking personal stories from families impacted by violence committed against indigenous women. There is currently no state or national system in place to collect data on missing and murdered Native women in Minnesota.
“We can send a message that Minnesota will not let Indigenous women continue to vanish,” said Rep. Kunesh-Podein. “No one should wonder if their daughters, their sisters, their mothers and loved ones will return when they walk out the door. Native women are not a disposable community.”
If approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Governor Walz, the new task force will provide analysis regarding the systemic causes behind the number of missing Native American women in the state. The goal of the task force will be to better understand the causes of violence against Indigenous women and to reduce and prevent violence where it is happening. The task force will include members of the indigenous community, law enforcement, policymakers and the public.
Stats and Figures:
- Murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian/Alaska native women.
- 5,712 cases of MMIWG were reported in 2016 and only 116 were logged in a DOJ database.
- Misclassification is a serious problem. From the 1960s through the early ‘80s, the Seattle Police Department used “N” to signify either Negro or Native American.
Photo: Ojibwe Elder Grandmother Mary Lyons, who testified at the hearing.
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