How The White House is Seeking Justice for Native Americans by Rose Dunleavy

 

From: U.S. News and World Report

How the White House Is Seeking Justice for Native Americans

Indigenous communities have long been plagued by violence and poverty. The White House is working to change that.

By Rose Dunleavy, Contributor Oct. 19, 2020, at 2:32 p.m.

Rose Dunleavy is the first lady of the state of Alaska. She was born in the Northwest Arctic.

ON SEPT. 14, 2018, Ashley Johnson-Barr's body was discovered just outside the Inupiat community of Kotzebue, Alaska. For eight days, the smiling 10-year-old's missing person's case had dominated the state's news coverage. Having grown up just 25 minutes from Kotz myself, the news of her murder was devastating.

While her killer was caught, justice remains out of reach for so many Indigenous victims of violence. For every Ashley, scores of families are left to wonder if their mother or daughter will ever be found or their killer apprehended. From Wyoming's Wind River Country to members of Canada's First Nations, the crisis of violence against Indigenous women and girls transcends state and national borders. Here in our own country, presidents of both parties have tried and failed to find lasting solutions.

To his credit, President Donald Trump has remained committed to our cause. The U.S. Department of Justice, for example, recently awarded over $560 million in grants to support public safety, crime victims and youth programs in tribal communities.

When Attorney General William Barr visited rural Alaska last year, he took our concerns seriously, joining our efforts by declaring a public safety emergency and devoting tens of millions of dollars to combating crime and assisting victims.

More importantly, he took our plight to the president, who responded by creating Operation Lady Justice, a historic nationwide effort to bring justice to missing and murdered Indigenous people. The job of the task force is to develop protocols to handle unsolved missing or murdered persons cases, and to provide closure to the many families who have gone without it for far too long.

This summer, the task force accomplished a major milestone with the opening of a cold case office in Anchorage, Alaska. This new office joins five existing Operation Lady Justice offices in Arizona, Montana and several other important locations. These are tangible resources that represent a long-term commitment to our nation's first peoples.

The president also has called for much-needed reforms to the Indian Health Service. This year, First Lady Melania Trump was briefed on a White House task force's recommendations for eliminating child abuse in a system that serves 2.6 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

The task force's 10 recommendations range from annual awareness training conducted by child welfare experts to withholding pay from retired employees convicted of exploiting children. The administration stands ready to implement these common sense solutions to ensure the terrible abuses seen in the past are never repeated.

But the health of our native communities requires more than simply solving cold cases and preventing crimes. In one county that's part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, men have a life expectancy of about 63 years. For many Native Americans, economic opportunities are hard to come by. Like the rest of the nation, addictive substances are readily available where jobs are not.

One common theme discussed during the administration's roundtables with tribal interests is the importance of broadband infrastructure in addressing long-standing quality-of-life deficiencies. To that end, the administration hosted the first-ever National Tribal Broadband Summit, the second of which took place last month.

At the U.S. Department of Transportation, the new Tribal Transportation Self-Governance Program will provide tribal governments with more autonomy and less restrictions on how they spend their federal infrastructure dollars. Programs like these offer an important contrast to previous administrations who believed that Native American sovereignty was a gift from the federal government.

I am under no illusions about the difficulty of the challenges we face in rural Alaska or among tribal populations throughout the United States. For 17 years, my father served as the first chairman of the NANA Regional Corp., an organization tasked with creating economic opportunity for the Inupiat people of the Northwest Arctic. I celebrated his successes and shared in his struggles as he fought for a better future for our people. But in the current administration, I see allies: a president who is committed to a long-term partnership between tribal interests and the federal government, and a first lady who understands that poverty and victimization should never be a birthright.

As the mother of three bright young women, this gives me great hope. Between the administration's work and our state's historic efforts to increase public safety and economic opportunity in rural Alaska, I'm confident we can leave behind a safer, more prosperous world for all of our children.