While Perrier and the panel mainly illustrated the crisis in relation to sex trafficking, the nonconsensual selling of people for sexual exploitation, it stretches further. You can also blame the serial rapists, murderers, abusers, inefficient county police departments, apathetic federal investigators, capitalistic private prisons, soulless fossil fuel companies and their man camps, under-funded and male-dominated tribal law enforcement departments, ignorant federal governments, and scrambling state legislators.
Yet instead of Indigenous women being buried by government-enforced anonymity, the opposite has happened. Indigenous women couldn’t count on their governments to listen, especially when the people there had so little factual knowledge of their communities. So they stormed them. They ran for seats in state and federal legislatures, they formed grassroots movements, they flooded social media. They launched investigations when the police would not. They sat on panels and they walked out of them when exclusionary language was deployed. They have repeatedly acted, filling a centuries-long void of inaction left open by the governments that make up the United States.
via Inside the Fight for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
