What’s it Really gonna take to address the crisis of murdered and missing indigenous Native Americans? Over the past few years, there’s finally been more light shed on the thousands of missing and murdered Native Americans and Alaska Natives whose stories have gone underreported and uninvestigated, devastating Native families and communities. Last week, the Department of Justice finally decided to take action on addressing this crisis. On Wednesday, it announced plans to assign lawyers to a new initiative, called the Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Regional Outreach Program, whose sole purpose is to investigate the disappearances and murders of North American Indigenous people.
Two Indigenous physicians are aiming to have the first Indigenous-focused School of Medicine and Health Sciences. They hope that within five years they can start admitting students. Allison Kelliher, Koyukon Athabascan, and Donald Warne, Oglala Lakota, found through their work at different academic institutions that there were many leaders in medical schools and schools of health sciences that did not have “the lived experience of Indigenous peoples.” “What we observed, what we really need in Indian Country, in terms of high quality, is health care providers. First of all, we’re not creating health care providers we need but also our areas of focus are not on the correct things,” Warne said.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
