Ever since his arrival in the U.S. Senate 11 years ago, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana has been a strong advocate for American Indians. As a freshman senator he asked for a seat on the Committee on Indian Affairs, where he later served as chairman and, when Democrats lost their Senate majority in 2014, as the ranking member.
A year ago, he was one of the five original co-sponsors of S. 1942—Savanna’s Act—introduced by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota to “direct the Attorney General to review, revise, and develop law enforcement and justice protocols appropriate to address missing and murdered Indians ...” Those five co-sponsors were all Democrats, but ultimately every member of the committee backed the legislation, which they sent on November 14 for a vote in the full Senate.
The bill is named for Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a 22-year-old Spirit Lake Dakota and Turtle Mountain Chippewa woman who was murdered when her 8-month-old fetus was cut from her body, which was dumped in the Red River in August 2017. The woman who did so was convicted of conspiracy to murder last February and is serving a life sentence without chance of parole. Her boyfriend was later acquitted.
Here’s Tester before the committee’s vote last week:
In case you can’t play the video in the tweet, here’s Tester:
“We’re a state of 1,050,000 people and [...] from the first of the year ‘til about the first of August we had 30 missing Native Americans, all but one were women. Only one had been found. This is a problem. We could have a hearing on this and bring FBI director Wray, bring in the BIA law enforcement folks, and find out what the heck is going on. If this was in any town, pick one, Fargo, North Dakota, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, or any other town, and we were losing people at this rate [...] we’d be up in arms about it. So, for a number of reasons, from an awareness standpoint, from an accountability standpoint, and ultimately from a solutions standpoint, I would just ask, and I’ll help anyway that I can, Mr. Chairman [and] Ranking Member, that we have a hearing on this in front of this committee, and bring the applicable parties in, ask them the tough questions and get some answers because this is not acceptable.”
LaFontaine-Greywind obviously isn’t the only indigenous woman who has recently gone missing and sometimes turned up dead. On tribal lands, women in some communities are murdered at 10 times the national rate and their disappearances occur at a higher rate too. But nearly three-fourths of American Indians and Alaskan Natives live in urban areas, not on or near reservations, and many cities don’t keep track of whether murder victims or missing people are Native or not.
Researchers who queried police departments in 71 U.S. cities found 506 indigenous missing and murdered women had been counted. But from media accounts and conversations with people in indigenous communities, they were able to identify 150 additional women whom the police had not identified as indigenous. Because 60 percent of police departments failed to answer their inquiry, those numbers undoubtedly fall well short of the actual total. The researchers wrote that the women are missing "not once, but three times: in life, in the media, and in the data."
One of the researchers, Annita Lucchesi, of Cheyenne descent, told National Public Radio: "So much of the conversation on this issue has been focused on reservations. This is happening to our urban women too. It isn't just a matter of jurisdiction—it's a matter of racism."
Savanna’s Act includes provisions to:
- Improve tribal access to certain federal crime information databases. The bill would update the data fields to be more relevant to Native Americans, and mandate that the Attorney General consult with Tribes on how to further improve these databases and their access to them. The Attorney General would then submit a report to Congress on how the U.S. Department of Justice plans to implement the suggestions and resolve the outstanding barriers Tribes face in acquiring full access to these databases.
- Require the Attorney General, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Health and Human Services to solicit recommendations from Tribes on improved access to local, regional, state, and federal crime information databases and criminal justice information systems during the annual consultations mandated under the Violence Against Women Act.
- Create standardized protocols for responding to cases of missing and murdered Native Americans. These protocols would take place in consultation with Tribes, which would include guidance on inter-jurisdictional cooperation among tribal, federal, state, and local law enforcement.
- Require an annual report to Congress with data.