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Tribe grapples with missing women crisis on California coast

Nathan Howard/AP

Yurok Tribal Police Chief Greg O'Rourke visits the last confirmed location on Jan. 19, 2022, where Emmilee Risling was seen before going missing in October 2021, in Klamath, Calif. The 33-year-old college graduate — an accomplished traditional dancer with ancestry from three area tribes — was last seen more than four months ago walking across a bridge near End of Road, a far corner of the Yurok Reservation where the rutted pavement dissolves into thick woods. Her disappearance is one of five instances in the past 18 months where Indigenous women have gone missing or been killed in an isolated expanse of Pacific coastline between San Francisco and Oregon, a region where the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk and Wiyot people have co-existed for millenia. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

By: Associated Press

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YUROK RESERVATION, Calif. (AP) — Five Native American women have disappeared or been killed along California’s rugged Lost Coast in the past 18 months.

The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build the first database of such cases in California.

The tribe also is working to gain supervision over foster care and build an Indigenous justice system that would ultimately handle all but the most serious felonies.

Tribal officials say reclaiming sovereignty over such systems is the only way to end the cycle of loss that’s taken the greatest toll on their women.

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Tribe grapples with missing women crisis on California coast

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