Lummi Nation gets grant to combat violence against women
The U.S. Justice Department will double the funding it gives tribes for public safety programs and crime victims as it tries to tackle the high rates of violence against Native American women, a top official said.
Lummi Nation was among Washington state tribes receiving money, getting a $450,000 grant to battle violence against women.
The Nooksack tribe got $241,211 in the same round of funding, for public safety and community policing.
The Justice Department’s third-highest ranking official said more than $113 million in public safety funding will be doled out to 133 tribes and Alaska Native villages to try to address the issue.
An additional $133 million will be awarded in the coming weeks to tribes to help Native American crime victims, Jesse Panuccio, principal deputy associate attorney general, announced Wednesday in Santa Fe.
The announcement comes after a series of stories by The Associated Press helped put an increased focus on the deaths and disappearances of Native American women and girls. Panuccio noted that tribal leaders have called for more robust investigations into those cases and human trafficking.
“We recognize the serious nature of the problem we’re facing, and we are trying, through a variety of strategies — both through the funding and the use of our own prosecutors and building up awareness — to address these issues,” Panuccio said.
For decades, tribes largely had been unable to directly access money in a U.S. program aimed at supporting crime victims nationwide — even as federal figures showed more than half of Native American women faced sexual or domestic violence at some point in their lives.
On some reservations, Native American women are killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average.
Legal experts and victims’ advocates blame underfunded police departments that lack the resources to investigate crimes and lingering jurisdictional gaps among federal, tribal and local law enforcement agencies that often result in cases going unprosecuted.