Melanie Stansbury

As a woman in STEM, I want to just note that it's being led by an amazing group of women, including Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, who is the first woman ever in American history to oversee a NASA countdown and launch.

Nothing in Castro-Huerta invites the Department of Justice to distance itself from its treaty trust duty and responsibility to safeguard the lives of our women and children.

The biggest problem I see with Castro-Huerta is that the Court erroneously concluded that state governments somehow have a greater interest in protecting Native victims than their own Tribal Nations.

We are hearing the need to get more resources to support tribal courts, to beef up DOJ, and BIA, and law enforcement.

We want Congress to act quickly.

I believe that this decision by the majority of our Supreme Court is a direct affront to tribal sovereignty and to Tribal Nationhood.

Congress has taken the correct first step through this Subcommittee's Oversight Hearing to hear from Tribal Nations about the impacts of the Castro-Huerta decision.

What can Congress do to hear from Tribal Nations in order to find a reasonable consensus in Indian Country to respond to Castro-Huerta?

I wish I could say that state and local governments have prioritized the protection of Native women and children, but they have not.

Obviously, this is the most important and pressing question of the day is how do we meet our goal of reducing our carbon emissions by 2035, 2040 so that we don't cross this catastrophic tipping point?

Part of being able to take effective action on climate change requires that we know that the methods and the tactics that we're using to tackle emissions and sinks is actually effective.

We know that we have to take action as quickly as possible.

In New Mexico we have a saying that 'agua es vida,' water is life because it is the vital resource in the arid Southwest upon which everything else depends.

Climate action cannot wait, and we must take decisive action now to address both the causes of climate change and its impacts.

Climate change is already here, it's already on the ground, it's already impacting our communities.

Considering these and other attacks on our core democratic institutions, it is more important than ever that we act at the Federal level to protect voting rights.

That was so important for ensuring that our Tribal nations could control access to the ballot box.

We are seeing suppression of Native votes across the country.

I am proud to be from a State that understands that voting rights are the foundation of our democracy and must be protected.

I think it is crucial that we take these examples and really incorporate them into the voting rights laws...

That is 605 family members, brothers, sisters, parents, children, co-workers and neighbors. And every single one of those lives lost was a preventable tragedy.

New Mexico is ground zero for the opioid epidemic. We have one of the highest rates of drug overdose in the United States.

The conversation has dramatically changed, and how the voices of the pueblo leadership... are now actually a part of the narrative.

Ensuring that our tribes have not only a seat at the table, but that their knowledge, practices, and priorities are really at the center of that work is so critically important.

New Mexico is home to 23 Indigenous communities, tribes, and pueblos, and our tribes and pueblos have been here since time immemorial.