LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Today, a virtual summit hosted by the Las Vegas Mayor's Faith Initiative looks at the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States.

The National Crime Information Center reported more than 5,700 missing Native American women and children in 2016.

Lynette Grey Bull, director of Not our Native Daughters, a nonprofit based in Wyoming, from the Northern Arapaho tribe and the Hunkpapa Lakota, part of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, will speak at the summit.

She said the wall-to-wall coverage on the search for Gabby Petito stands in stark contrast to cases involving missing Black or Native American victims.

"There is huge discrimination when a person of color who goes missing," Grey Bull observed. "They just don't have the same attention, whether it's from media or whether it's from law enforcement, or whether it's from Search and Rescue."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, homicide is the sixth-leading cause of death for Indigenous women, and rates of violence on reservations can be up to ten times higher than the national average.

Tyesha Wood, project coordinator of "Amber Alert in Indian Country," said her group aims to speed up response times by making sure tribal, state and local law enforcement are on the same page.

"We want the tribal communities to be empowered, to be able to say, 'We know what to do when a child goes missing in our community,'" Wood explained. "They have the resources, they have the contact information, they have the plan in place."

Della Frank, Indian education coordinator for the Clark County School District, noted social and economic factors vary widely for Indigenous people in urban versus rural areas. In addition, Nevada is home to 20 different tribes, and there are hundreds nationwide.

"And you can't just stereotype them and generalize with them, because there's 574 different cultures, languages, governments and judicial systems," pointed out.

In 2019, President Donald Trump created the Presidential Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives, which is coordinating a federal response, known as "Operation Lady Justice."

Enbridge is seeking to reroute a portion of its Line 5 around the Bad River Band's territory in northern Wisconsin.

The rerouting falls within the tribe's watershed, and tribal advocates argued it poses risks to tribal farming traditions.

Aurora Conley, chair of the Anishinaabe Environmental Protection Alliance and a member of the Bad River Ojibwe, said the potential environmental fallout could be disastrous for the region's wild rice fields. She explained wild rice, or manoomin, is more than an agricultural commodity to the tribe.

"This is why we migrated to this area," Conley pointed out. "We were told to keep going until we found the food that grows on waters, that being the wild rice. It's our job to take care of the rice. We were told if we could take care of the rice that we would survive, and we have."

According to the National Wildlife Federation, Line 5, which currently crosses the tribe's land, leaked 29 times from 1968 to 2017. A company spokesperson said an estimated $46 million dollars will be spent with Native-owned businesses and communities for the rerouting, and the project is undergoing reviews by state and federal regulators. The integrity of those reviews has been questioned by tribal leaders and environmental groups.

Last month, more than 200 organizations submitted a letter urging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to halt new construction on Line 5, including updates outside of Wisconsin, and conduct a top-down Environmental Impact Statement.

Osprey Orielle Lake, executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network International, signed the letter, noting the Biden-Harris administration made campaign promises to begin divesting the nation from fossil fuel.

"This struggle to stop Line 5 we think is really vital to protect Indigenous rights," Lake asserted. "Protect Indigenous cultural lifeways, and also to protect the water for all of us and the climate for all of us."

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) conducted its own draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Wisconsin reroute, which received more than 10,000 written comments.

Among other issues, Conley contended the document does not consider the cultural and historical importance of rice to the Ojibwe, and how damaging the crop would be a direct strike at their cultural identity.

"You can't commodify love," Conley emphasized. "That rice represents a gift of love from a spiritual essence that was given to us. And it's been our duty since the beginning of time to take care of that."

According to the DNR, northern Wisconsin's wild rice fields can produce more than 500 pounds of seed per acre, and are an important source of food and shelter for native and migratory wildlife.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education showed progress has been made at Arizona State University (ASU) in recruiting Native American faculty and students to the Tempe campus.

Arizona is home to more than 20 tribes and about 400,000 Indigenous citizens, but until the late 1990s they were underrepresented at state universities.

ASU founded the Center for Indian Education about 20 years ago in response to a growing number of Indigenous students on campus.

Bryan Brayboy, director of the Center, said there was a clear need to hire more Native faculty members.

"We wanted to get really intentional about listening to our students who were saying to us that they wanted more faculty that looks like them, and they wanted to be seen," Brayboy explained. "They felt invisible, and so we sat down, and we made a plan to try to address that."

Even though Native students make up only about 1% of ASU's enrollment, many are the first in their family and in their community to attend college. Brayboy noted it led them to recruit 60 Indigenous scholars to teaching positions.

He argued programs such as the Center are an integral part of the university's mission of inclusivity, research toward the public good and responding to the communities they serve.

"Native students and many of our nonnative students come to college, come to ASU in particular because they believe in the mission of the place, and they are interested in serving society," Brayboy asserted.

Brayboy pointed out the Center is also important because of Arizona's history of using schools as a means of assimilating Indigenous children to Anglo culture.

"It's not that we don't care about the past, we do," Brayboy contended. "It's important that guides us in all kinds of ways. But the hope is we are moving towards transforming society and transforming the lives of people by really thinking about what's possible."

He added while the Center is honored by the recognition, it will not rest on its laurels.

"People have said to us, 'Gosh, you're an overnight success,' and we're a 25-year overnight success," Brayboy stressed. "This has been in place for a long time as we begin to move toward these goals."

Indigenous Mainers are working on a plan to boost tourism for the state's five Wabanaki Nations.

The Wabanaki Cultural Tourism Initiative has received both a federal grant from Health and Human Services and a state grant from the Maine Office of Tourism.

As a member of the Penobscot Nation, Charlene Virgilio, executive director of the Four Directions Development Corp., the first Native Community Development Financial Institution in Northern New England, said cultural preservation is central to the project. Its goal is to create unique experiences to share the ways that Wabanaki people have long been stewards of the land and water.

"Canoeing, kayaking along the ancestral rivers that we have, traditional fishing methods, whatever," she said, "those kinds of things that will help preserve culture, but also help tourists experience that culture."

Four Directions and the initiative are set to participate in Gov. Janet Mills' annual Conference on Tourism today and tomorrow. Virgilio said authenticity is a key component for many Wabanaki communities interested in boosting tourism.

In addition to preserving and sharing culture, said Matthew Lewis, Four Directions' Wabanaki program and operations director and a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, this effort is a way to bring more revenue to Maine's indigenous communities and boost the local economies. For instance, he said, there are so many artisans in the community to engage with.

"Tourism can sometimes have a negative connotation with some communities, saying we don't want folks just driving through, taking pictures, doing the sort of like Disneyland package," he said. "We want meaningful engagement with the community, and meaningful engagement with the culture."

As they map out the robust four-season tourism industry they hope to achieve by 2030, Lewis said, they also have to consider what infrastructure is needed - from hotels and restaurants to workforce development and hospitality training.