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Safety for Our Sisters: Ending Violence Against Native Women draws vitally needed attention to the pressing and pervasive issue of violence against Native women, who suffer disproportionately high levels of rape, domestic violence and attacks at the hands of strangers. The symposium explores the causes and consequences of this abuse and considers social and legal issues involved in these acts of violence. This project received support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.
Sari Horwitz, a three-time Pulitzer-prize winning reporter for the Washington Post, moderates the symposium. Horwitz is the author of the Post’s award-winning series “Justice in Indian Country.”
Symposium speakers include:
Sarah Deer (citizen of the Muscogee [Creek] Nation of Oklahoma), a lawyer and professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), a partner at Pipestem Law, P.C., where she specializes in federal Indian law and appellate litigation.
Cherrah Giles (Muscogee), Board Chair of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center and an advocate who has worked to protect Native women and children.
Marita Growing Thunder (Fort Peck Assiniboine Sioux Tribes), a student at the University of Montana who started the Save Our Sisters walk in 2017.
Jaime Black (Métis), a multidisciplinary artist based in Winnipeg, Canada, and the creator of The REDress Project, which focuses on the issue of missing or murdered Indigenous women.
Image: Loxie Loring helps lead a march to remember her daughter, Ashley Loring, who vanished from Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation in June of 2017. Nate Hegyi /Mountain West News Bureau.
