Some welcome news for the movement to address the heartbreak of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and girls.
At the Fargo Forum, April Baumgarten reports in Savanna's Act passes US House, heads to President Trump's desk:
President Donald Trump is poised to sign a missing and murdered Native Americans bill that was backed by North Dakota leaders in light of the 2017 death of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind in Fargo.
The U.S. House approved Savanna’s Act Monday, Sept. 21, with a voice vote, meaning the bill is headed to the president’s desk, Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said in a statement. If signed, the Department of Justice will be required to develop protocols to address the issue of missing and murdered Native Americans.
That includes providing training to law enforcement on how to record tribal enrollment for victims in federal databases, implementing strategies to educate the public on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, consulting tribes on work regarding missing and murdered Native Americans, developing guidelines for cases and reporting statistics.
“Savanna’s Act addresses a tragic issue in Indian Country and helps establish better law enforcement practices to track, solve and prevent these crimes against Native Americans,” Hoeven said in his statement.
Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., introduced Savanna’s Act in the Senate in October 2017, less than two months after the 22-year-old LaFontaine-Greywind went missing. Her body was found Aug. 27, 2017, in the Red River just north of Fargo.
Prosecutors said Brooke Crews, who is serving a life sentence in prison for her part in the death of the enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Nation, cut LaFontaine-Greywind’s child from her stomach. Crews’ ex-boyfriend, William Hoehn, also is serving a 20-year prison sentence in connection to the kidnapping of the baby, Haisley Jo, who survived.
After unanimously passing in the Senate, Heitkamp’s bill died in the House when former Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia blocked it. The Democrat accused Goodlatte, the then-head of the House Judiciary Committee, of playing “petty partisan games.”
Heitkamp lost her reelection bid to Republican Kevin Cramer in 2018, but Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska who co-sponsored the bill, reintroduced it in January 2019.
Backed by Hoeven and Cramer, Savanna’s Act passed with unanimous consent in the Senate on March 11.
In speaking on the bill, U.S. Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., said Monday on the House floor that LaFontaine-Greywind's story exposed that data on missing and murdered Native American women is scattered across government databases "if it even exists at all."
Armstrong said LaFontaine-Greywind's story is not unique. Olivia Lone Bear went missing in October 2017 and was found almost a year later submerged in a truck in Lake Sakakawea. The FBI is investigating the 32-year-old Native American's death, as foul play has not been ruled out.
"Savanna's Act will begin to help address this crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people," Armstrong said, noting Native American and Alaskan Native women face a murder rate 10 times higher than the national average. "Because of outdated databases and lack of coordination between law enforcement agencies, there's no reliable way of knowing how many Indigenous women actually do go missing each year."
Trump has not publicly committed to signing the bill, but he has supported other legislation and executive orders regarding Native Americans. That includes ordering the establishment of a missing and murdered Native Americans task force last year.
Since moving to Northeastern South Dakota, the crisis has become more vivid to me, since one of my romantic partner's cousins, Lakota Renville, is among the unsolved murder cases whose death still causes grieving among the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of Dakota. The image at the top of the post is from the Facebook page, Lakota Renville: Unsolved Homicide, which appears to be run by her grieving sister.
In 2017, we posted in ND senators introduce two bills to address epidemic of missing & murdered Native women:
North Dakota's US Senators have introduced bills directed at ending the epidemic of missing and murdered Native American women, the Forum News Service's Blake Gumprecht reports in two articles, ND's US senators propose legislation to address 'epidemic' of missing and murdered Native women (October 1) and These are not isolated cases': Sen. Heitkamp highlights missing and murdered native women in introducing 'Savanna's Act' (October 5).
The latter article highlights the dramatic introduction of Senator Heitkamp's bill:
In September 2010, Stella Marie Trottier-Graves, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, went to a bar with her cousin. She was never again seen by family members after that night. Thirteen days later, they were notified that her dead body was found in the pickup of a male tribal member.
In 2005, Lakota Rae Renville, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe of North and South Dakota, met a man online and moved to Missouri to be with him. She was forced into sex trafficking and later that year her dead body was found, wrapped in carpet padding in an open gravel pit.
In April 1993, Monica Wickre, a 42-year-old mother of three, born and raised on the Turtle Mountain reservation, who lived near Aberdeen, S.D., disappeared. Two months later, her badly decomposed body was found by a canoeist in the James River near Aberdeen.
In winter 1979, Mona Lisa Two Eagle, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe of South Dakota, got into a pickup with two men. She never returned. Two weeks later, her father and brother found her frozen body in a pasture. She'd been beaten and left alone in a blizzard.
Nobody has been convicted in the disappearance or killing of any of these native women.
That was the fall of 2017. In 2018 we posted Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte blocking Savanna's Act in U.S. House and Forum MMIW editorial: Savanna's Act mustn't die.
On Twitter, Ruth Hopkins, a tribal member and spouse of the interim chair, shares another article about the bill:
Congress has finally passed Savanna’s Act, to combat the epidemic of missing & murdered Indigenous women. It’s named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, 22, a Native woman who was 8 months pregnant when she was murdered. Her baby was cut from her womb. #MMIW https://t.co/WUMGpuzUmc
— Ruth Hopkins ⚡️❤️⚡️ (@Ruth_HHopkins) September 22, 2020
84% of Native women experience violence in their lifetime & in some places, Native women are murdered at 10 times the national average. #MMIW #MMIWG #SavannasAct
— Ruth Hopkins ⚡️❤️⚡️ (@Ruth_HHopkins) September 22, 2020
We applaud those who brought this issue to the nation's attention. We hope it will give more people the strength and courage to speak and act.
Mike's family has long mourned the death of his aunt Rosalie, who was raped and murdered at a boarding school when she was nine years old, before WWII. No one was brought to justice for her death. It was during that time when--as an SWO elder once explained to South Dakota Representative and SWO Tribal Archivist Tamara St. John--it was okay to kill an Indian. The MMIW crisis is the legacy of that time.
Photo: A memorial to Lakota Renville at the SWO Agency Headquarters on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Via the Lakota Renville: Unsolved Homicide Facebook page.
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