national average.13 Our high school drop-out rates are nearly twice as high as the national average,14 while our youth are three and a half times more likely to commit suicide.15 According to U.S. Department of Justice records, one in three Native American women are raped in their lifetimes, a figure that is two and a half times greater than the average for all U.S. women. In 86 percent of cases of rape of Indigenous women and girls, the rapist is non-Native, which results in many crimes going uninvestigated by either U.S.
