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Two years ago, the House Subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples of the United States held a hearing on the murder and disappearance of Native women. Native women are murdered on reservations at a rate ten times the national average; there were more than five thousand reported cases of missing Native women in 2016 alone, and many more cases go unreported. Among the witnesses at the hearing was Mary Kathryn Nagle, the legal counsel for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Nagle, in her testimony, noted that tribal nations do not have legal jurisdiction over non-Natives who commit crimes on reservations. This is one of the reasons, she said, that those who assault or murder Native women are so rarely caught and prosecuted. The Supreme Court revoked that jurisdiction in 1978; it was restored, in 2013, by a new provision in the Violence Against Women Act, which was reauthorized that year. But
Here is what we know.
First the good news:
The good news for tribes and Native American children’s advocates and adoptive families is that the court upheld important aspects of the act. The en banc court holds that Congress was authorized to enact the Indian Child Welfare Act and concludes that this authority derives from Congress’s enduring obligations to Indian tribes and its plenary authority to discharge this duty. In other words, the act is constitutional.
In this 2019 photo, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. speaks during a news conference in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
In 325-page opinion, en banc 5th Circuit splits on preference for tribes in Native American adoptions abajournal.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from abajournal.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Chronicle Staff April 5, 2021
Sheila Tousey and Rainbow Dickerson in Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “Manahatta,” which streams as part of the theater’s 2021 season. Photo: Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2018
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Two centuries of colonization in ‘Manahatta’
The past isn’t past at all in Mary Kathryn Nagle’s “Manahatta.” “Indeed,” she writes in a note at the top of her script, the past and present “are one and the same.”
The show, whose 2018 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production is streaming as an early entry in the theater’s digital and in-person hybrid season, takes place in both the 17th and 21st centuries.