Savanna's Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I want to speak to another matter this afternoon, a matter that as I think about my tenure in the Senate and those initiatives I have been engaged with that have really touched me in a way that make me want to work all that much harder because it is so challenging, it is so difficult, and in many, many ways, it is so dark that anything I can do to shine a light on it, I will do so.

I came to the Senate floor 2 years ago, joined by my former colleague from North Dakota, Senator Heidi Heitkamp. Heidi was on the floor speaking about a bill she had introduced, Savanna's Act, but together we were really working to speak to the urgency of addressing this epidemic, if you will, this growing number of missing and murdered Native women across America.

The awful truth in this country is that Native women are victims of violence in unprecedented proportions.

When I say unprecedented, I will give you some of Alaska's numbers just to kind of put it into perspective.

This month, October, is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and so in many of the communities in States across the country, we have been focused on these issues of domestic violence and what more we can do to address these issues of concern and safety.

Well, on October 1, the first day of this month where we are raising this awareness, the headlines in the State's largest newspaper stated that the rate of rape in the State of Alaska was up 11 percent between 2017 and 2018--an 11-percent increase in 1 year.

We are a State where, unfortunately, Alaska Native women are 2\1/2\ times more likely to be a victim of domestic violence. In Tribal villages and Native communities, domestic violence rates are up to 10 times higher than the rest of the Nation--10 times higher.

So think about as bad as it is in areas that you are in, in our Tribal villages and some of the Native communities, these rates are staggering.

In 2015, it was estimated that 40 percent of sex trafficking victims were Native Americans. Now, I know 2015 was a few years ago, but 40 percent of the victims who have been sex trafficked were Native Americans.

The rate of sexual violence victimization among Alaska Native women is at least seven times greater than non-Native females in the State. So think about that. There is an unprecedented level of victimization, of assault, of violence, of murder that is experienced by Alaska Native women.

These are statistics that really should shock the conscience. I know they shock mine. I have been exposed to them for so many years, but it continues to shock.

We all know these are not just statistics. These are mothers, these are sisters, these are aunts, these are cousins, these are friends, and these are women who are being violated at rates that are unacceptable anywhere in any State.

Now, I mentioned that some of the statistics are old, and that is part of the problem, trying to understand what it is that we don't know, so we need to get updated data, but what isn't old--and, unfortunately, seemingly, every day we get new statistics that are added to what we have already known.

It was just last week family and friends packed an Anchorage courtroom for the arraignment of a man who had been charged with murdering 52-year-old Veronica Abouchuk. She was a Native woman originally from the village of St. Michael. She had been in Anchorage for a period of time. She had been reported missing earlier this year, and then she was found dead near the Old Glenn Highway in April.

It was just a few weeks ago now--maybe about 3 weeks ago--the Alaska community was just horrified as we learned through the news of a video cartridge that had been found on a street, and what was revealed was a tape of torture and abuse of a Native woman.

That tape ultimately led to the arrest of this same man who is accused of killing Veronica. That video showed the torture and the murder of 30-year-old Kathleen Jo Henry. She was originally from a very small village, the village of Eek.

These are stories of women. We read about what they have experienced, what they have endured, and we think about their families who no longer have these women in their lives. You just can't view them in the abstract as statistics. What are we doing to respond to them as women, women who are vulnerable and are being preyed upon? What are we doing to act, to help?

I mentioned this is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. In Alaska, we have started calling it Domestic Violence Action Month. Going from awareness to action is really the key because I am here to tell you, in Alaska, we are very aware of how severe the problem of violence against Native women is--whether it is domestic violence, an assault, to them being trafficked and murdered. We know the statistics.

When I am talking with Alaskans about what we are seeing with missing and murdered indigenous women, the subject of trafficking keeps coming into every conversation because that is, seemingly, what is happening to so many who unfortunately go missing.

There are far, far, far too many stories that we then hear they were trafficked and then ultimately murdered. This nexus is what is really frightening.

I mentioned the data and understanding what it is that we know and what we don't know--how big is the problem, what is happening with our Native women that they are being victimized to the extent and to the level we see. We are beginning to make some progress. We are beginning to gather more data and understanding.

There is a lot we know we have to learn, but one thing that has become clear is that these crimes are permeating cities across America. They are in the cities, but they are also in our small, remote, and rural communities.

There is really no geographic boundary that we are talking about here. Initially, we had thought the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls was primarily a problem on the remote Indian reservations, but we had some good, strong reporting from the Seattle- based Urban Indian Health Institute. We learned a lot there about the gaps in the data. We learned that the number of Native women who go missing in urban centers is as significant as those who go missing on reservations or in rural areas.

In fact, last year there were 507 cases of Native women killed in urban areas. Of those, 282 were confirmed murdered, 127 were confirmed missing, and 98 cases are still listed in an unknown status. These cases exist across 71 urban areas selected for the study--from Baltimore to Orlando in the east coast and all the way up to the North Slope in the community of Utqiagvik.

According to the report, Anchorage was among the top 10 cities identified in this study, coming in at No. 3, with 21 cases of missing and murdered indigenous girls. Overall, Alaska was the fourth highest State in the Nation with 52 cases. Keep in mind that these are just the cases that have actually been reported.

Making sure that we are understanding the extent of the problem and the issues we are dealing with, the spotlight we are shining on the issue of murdered indigenous women is growing, but we need to answer those questions so we can move from awareness to action.

What are we doing? How are we doing? We are keenly focused--I am, certainly, keenly focused--on what we can do to improve public safety in Alaska. As shocking as many of these statistics are that I have shared with you, what we know is that in far too many communities in our State we lack law enforcement presence. These are remote communities. These are small communities, maybe 300 people. When you don't have law enforcement, when there is nobody there who can administer justice, who can be the law, it is a safe place for bad people to go and do bad things.

What we do to address this is on all of us. So as we are looking at public safety in rural Alaska, I reminded Attorney General Barr when he participated in a video conference at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention a couple of weeks ago--he made the comment that we want to make sure we have public safety throughout Alaska and that a woman shouldn't have to move to the city to feel safe, and I had to remind him--that in the cities, unfortunately, we are not seeing the level of safety that we would seek.

But we are making some headway, and I want to share with colleagues what we have just done in this Interior appropriations bill that we moved through in the full Senate just this afternoon, and I thank colleagues for that support.

For the first time, we are directing real dollars to prioritize the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women. We have included a specific focus there within the Interior approps bill for FY 2020. We provide funding to address the crisis with support for cold case investigations, equipment, training, and background checks. This will be an effort where we will work with the Department of Justice, with the BIA, with the administration, with the State, and with the Tribes.

We also encourage the Indian Health Service to look at programs that can help educate community health aides on trauma informed care, which also includes collecting medical evidence. Through the CJS approps bill that we passed, we build upon efforts to address the high rates of violence that are experienced in far too many Alaskan communities.

We have been advocating for the largest possible Victims of Crime Act fund set aside for Native communities that disproportionately face violence and have oftentimes extremely limited access to service.

We also secured significant funding for the Violence Against Women Prevention and Prosecution Programs, and for State and local law enforcement and Tribal assistance, we provide additional resources, as well as resourcing for the COPS, or the Community Oriented Policing Services Program, which is an initiative to increase the number of police officers and ensure they are properly trained.

So I think we are making some headway on the appropriations side, but I think we know there is more that we can do. We know there is more that we must do.

I thank Attorney General Barr, who came up to the State of Alaska in May at the invitation of Senator Sullivan and myself and many of our leaders around the State, including our Tribal leaders, and he was able to sit down at roundtables in Anchorage and was able to get up to Fort Yukon, on the Yukon River, and come down to Bethel and to go out to the small village of Napakiak, a community of about 350 people.

Following his visit, he was so struck by what he had heard and what he had seen, and truly what he felt in his heart, that he moved forward with a designation of a public safety emergency in the State of Alaska. He has been working with us to help specifically address how we can make these rural communities safer and what we can be doing with everything from training to basic infrastructure. It is something we are working collaboratively on.

We are also seeing so many individuals, organizations, and communities really speaking up about this issue. Again, it is like the data. If you don't know it, you can't respond to it. If the stories aren't shared, as hard and awful as they are, it is difficult to know how we respond. There are so many who are speaking up in different ways to bring light to the fact that so many Native women have not received justice.

There is a woman by the name of Amber Webb that I met when I was in Fairbanks for the AFN conference. She has created this really powerful visual symbol to honor missing and murdered women. She sketched the faces of more than 200 missing and murdered indigenous women from across North America. She sketched them on a giant white qaspeq. Qaspeq is the traditional garb of a woman. She chose the qaspeq because it symbolizes the adaptability and the strength of Native women. It is pretty impressive. It is about 15 feet high. But, again, it is a white qaspeq, with the portraits, the sketches, of these women.

In the center is the face of not a woman but a young girl, Ashley Johnson Barr. She was a 10-year-old girl who was kidnapped and killed in Kotzebue last year.

Being at Ashley's memorial services with the entire community of Kotzebue--it probably felt like the whole region--grieving the loss of that child in that brutal and awful murder in her home was something that never leaves you.

On one sleeve of the qaspeq is sketched the face of Sophie Sergei. Sophie was killed in 1993. She was at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in one of the dorms. Her case was cold for 25 years. For 25 years, her family had no idea who brutally killed her and left her in a bathtub of blood in a campus dorm room. That case broke loose with some DNA testing not too many months ago. Her family is hoping that one day there will be justice for their daughter, but the faces on that qaspeq represent way too many lives lost.

Some of what we are facing in Alaska, when it comes to public safety, is the lack of public safety in rural areas and an inability to ensure that people are safe in their homes. When you look at the statistics that we have, when you look at the issues you face, sometimes you have to say: Maybe the way we have been doing things for this long just isn't working out in these areas. Maybe there needs to be a different dynamic.

I recently introduced what we are calling the Alaska Tribal Public Safety Empowerment Act. It builds on a legislative provision that Congressman Young has introduced. It is a pilot for Alaska Tribes to address violence against Native women. In that bill, we empower Tribes to exercise domestic violence criminal jurisdiction on a pilot basis, similar to what we did in VAWA 2013 for those in Indian Country. We allow Tribes to assume local control over local public safety matters. We cannot deny safety or justice to an individual based on jurisdictional issues. This addresses one critical piece, and that is the Tribal empowerment.

There is another very important element, and that is coordination among law enforcement agencies. I hear way too often from Alaskans who tell me that they don't actually count a missing Native woman as missing because the last time anybody saw her, she met somebody, she left a village, she went to Anchorage, and nobody really heard of her again. But what we know is that one of the most vulnerable times for these young women is the transition from a village to a hub community or to a city. We have heard from law enforcement that Native people, especially these young Native girls, are targeted by traffickers when they first arrive in Anchorage or Fairbanks or a hub community. It is important that we both understand the scope of the problem and address coordination between our State, our Federal, and our Tribal governments. That is what Savanna's Act and this counterpart legislation, the Not Invisible Act, do together.

I reintroduced Savanna's Act with Senator Cortez Masto earlier this year. This was an effort where I was proud to carry the torch for Senator Heitkamp, who has truly been a leader on this issue. Our bill combats the epidemic of murdered and missing Native women and girls by improving the Federal Government's response to addressing the crisis. Savanna's Act increases coordination among all levels of law enforcement, increases data collection in information sharing, and empowers Tribal governments with the resources they need in cases involving missing and murdered indigenous women and girls wherever they occurred.

This second bill that I mentioned, with Senator Cortez Masto, is the Not Invisible Act. What we have seen for far too long is that Native families and communities mourn the loss of family members, sometimes with the resolution of their cases of a murdered sister or a missing loved one, but often the cases remain unsolved.

As I mentioned earlier, we were shocked in Alaska by the case of Kathleen Jo Henry and the related case of Veronica Abouchuk. But what is just as shocking is that the Abouchuk family has already--already-- experienced the loss of one of their sisters, Martha Toms, who was killed in 2005 and whose case is still unsolved. So they have had tragedy compounded upon tragedy.

These bills, Savanna's Act and the Not Invisible Act, attempt to bring the issue of violence against Native women and the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered Indians to the attention of the Nation. These families have faced unspeakable loss and, until recently, have felt almost invisible, frustrated, and really just let down by this system--the complex system that was supposed to protect them.

But to truly honor the memory of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind and acknowledge her family's loss, we have to close the jurisdictional loopholes that criminals exploit. We have to improve the coordination among law enforcement at all levels of government, and we have to provide the necessary resources.

The Not Invisible Act designates an official in BIA to coordinate violent crime prevention efforts across Federal agencies. It also establishes a commission of local, Tribal, and Federal stakeholders to make recommendations to the Department of the Interior and the Department of Justice on how to combat this epidemic of disappearances, homicides, violent crimes, and trafficking of Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

We know we have a trust responsibility to our Native people, but also we have a duty of moral trust when we talk about keeping all Americans safe. We all have to be part of the solution. By passing these bills, we are saying that we are not going to accept what we have dealt with and what we have faced for far too long.

I think we have to have a sense of urgency to keep Native women and girls safe. It shouldn't be anything that is partisan. There is nothing partisan about trying to protect women. There is nothing partisan about trying to protect Native women. There is nothing Republican or Democratic about the reality that we all deserve to have the same level of protection and justice as every other woman in this country.

So I am back here on the Senate floor with the same message I had a couple of years ago with Senator Heitkamp, and that is to urge colleagues to move beyond awareness to action. Let's take up Savanna's Act. Let's take up the Not Invisible Act. Let's act. Let's provide for the safety that all these women should expect.

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