Political Quotes

“I, too, want to thank the Senator from New Mexico for organizing today's effort on this very important issue. I rise today to join my colleagues in really shining a spotlight on a crisis that has brought terror and pain to Tribal communities across my home State of Washington and the Nation for far too long. It is an alarm that has been sounding, actually, for generations and one that has impacted literally countless families, robbing them of their mothers and grandmothers, their sisters, their aunts, their daughters. ``Family of missing Native woman demands answers in Wapato.'' In Yakima County: A year after her body was found, officials are now officially calling the death of this young woman a homicide. A year after. In Toppenish: 16-year-old . . . disappeared after Christmas Eve in 1971. Her sister refuses to give up the search. Those are just a few of the headlines that have appeared in news outlets in Washington State within just the last few months highlighting the scope of the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in our communities. For far too long, our Nation has ignored or misclassified the terrible stories of violence against women and girls in Tribal communities, who have been reported missing or murdered at much higher rates than their non-Native counterparts or, worse, not reported at all.…”