UpFront

Native American women are facing an epidemic of violence

More than 80 percent of Indigenous women in the United States have experienced violence in their lifetime.

Indigenous women in the United States are going missing and getting murdered, at an alarming rate. A rate 10 times the national average on some reservations.

Ninety-six percent of the time, the crimes are committed on Native land by a non-Native perpetrator. But because tribal courts and tribal police, for the most part, do not have the authority to prosecute crimes committed on reservations by non-Native perpetrators, there is rarely ever any accountability for these crimes or justice for the families of the victims.

This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill is joined by Mary Kathryn Nagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a lawyer focused on tribal sovereignty and safety for Native women and children, and Kerri Colfer, a member of the Tlingit tribe of Southeast Alaska and National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center’s senior Native affairs adviser, to discuss the roots of this epidemic of violence, and what is being done to end it.