Month: September 2020

Hope you enjoyed Kit Harington’s turn as a silent but strong macho man on Game of Thrones, because you’re probably not going to see him to do it again. In a new interview with The Telegraph (caught by IndieWire) said he had no interest in doing some Jon Snow clone in future movies and TV, saying that that time of male character was at this point in history finally passé.

“I feel that emotionally men have a problem, a blockage, and that blockage has come from the Second World War, passed down from grandfather to father to son,” Harington said. “We do not speak about how we feel because it shows weakness, because it is not masculine. Having portrayed a man who was silent, who was heroic, I feel going forward that is a role I don’t want to play any more. It is not a masculine role that the world needs to see much more of.”

Of course, we already knew Harington had no interest in returning to Jon Snow himself, but the reasons he gave for that were different. “Would I want to go back and do more? Not on your life,” Harington told the BBC. “If, like me, you go all the way back to the pilot of ‘Game of Thrones,’ that’s almost 10 years of your life. That’s really unusual in an actor’s career. It was a huge, emotional upheaval leaving that family.”

Does all this mean we’ll see a newer, more energetic Kit Harington, that he’ll reinvent himself as a song and dance man? Who knows, but we’ll see what side of him we see whenever the pandemic lets us see his star-studded Marvel movie The Eternals.

(Via The Telegrah and IndieWire)

I got married and started working in my early 20s, and for more than two decades I always had employer-provided health insurance. When the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka “Obamacare”)was passed, I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. I was glad it helped others, but I just assumed my husband or I would always be employed and wouldn’t need it.

Then, last summer, we found ourselves in an unexpected scenario. I was working as a freelance writer with regular contract work and my husband left his job to manage our short-term rentals and do part-time contracting work. We both had incomes, but for the first time, no employer-provided insurance. His previous employer offered COBRA coverage, of course, but it was crazy expensive. It made far more sense to go straight to the ACA Marketplace, since that’s what we’d have done once COBRA ran out anyway.

The process of getting our ACA healthcare plan set up was a nightmare, but I’m so very thankful for it.

Let me start by saying I live in a state that is friendly to the ACA and that adopted and implemented the Medicaid expansion. I am also a college-educated and a native English speaker with plenty of adult paperwork experience. But the process of getting set up on my state’s marketplace was the most confusing, frustrating experience I’ve ever had signing up for anything, ever.

Most of the problems stemmed from proving our income, which was confusing to report and hard to show accurately. I lost track of how many letters I got saying they needed more or different information. When I’d call the help number, the person on the other end always told me something different. It took nearly two months of back and forth, with dozens upon dozens of letters, phone calls, and website chats, to finally get my family set up with a healthcare plan.

During the two months, we weren’t covered under any insurance, I was terrified of something happening. We are a very health-conscious family and we take good care of ourselves, but what if one of us broke a bone? What if one of us had a freak medical event or needed an emergency surgery? What if we got into a car accident and had to be hospitalized? The list of possible scenarios, minor to major, constantly ran through my mind.

During the time we weren’t covered, I was keenly aware of three things: 1) All it would take was one big accident or diagnosis to wipe us out financially, 2) People in other developed nations never feel this fear, and 3) Prior to the ACA, far more Americans felt this fear all the time.

Once we were finally able to work out the necessary paperwork, it was fine. Our income at the time meant our premiums were low, and our coverage was comparable to what we had with my husband’s employer. I ended up getting hired on full-time with benefits a few months later, so our experience with Obamacare was relatively short-lived. But I can’t imagine the financial stress of trying to afford health insurance or worrying about paying for healthcare out of pocket without insurance—fears that millions of Americans lived with pre-ACA.

And we didn’t even have any pre-existing conditions that would have kept us from being able to get insurance prior to the ACA. Adding that factor in drives home how important that legislation truly is.

At the same time, as thankful as I am that we had an affordable healthcare option, I couldn’t help thinking about friends I have who live in other countries who never have to worry about any of this stuff. No complicated paperwork or bureaucracy to deal with. No waiting for bills to arrive in the mail after a doctor’s appointment to see what you owe beyond your co-pay. No calling the insurance company to figure out why something that seems like it should have been covered wasn’t covered.

The amount of of time, energy, agony, and stress Americans have to put into managing healthcare is absurd when compared to other highly developed nations, and even most less developed ones. We’re so accustomed to this garbage, I don’t think most people recognize that it doesn’t have to be like this.

The ACA was a step in the right direction and a necessary lifeboat for those who previously couldn’t get or couldn’t afford to get health insurance. But it’s not universal healthcare, which is quite frankly the bare minimum of what a society should expect from its government. The fact that the idea has somehow been spun into something radical or impossible when basically every other developed country has figured out how to do it, we spend more on healthcare than anyone else per capita already, and our health outcomes trail so badly behind other developed nations is completely baffling.

My experience with the ACA drove home to me why it’s a vital piece of legislation to protect, but also highlighted the desperate need for universal healthcare. It’s far past time for us to take that next step.

The Chicago Bulls have overhauled just about their entire basketball operations department this offseason, finally getting rid of Gar Forman and John Paxson at the top of their front office, replacing them with Arturas Karnisovas and Marc Eversley, who then fired coach Jim Boylen.

On Tuesday, the Bulls announced the hiring of former Thunder coach Billy Donovan, who was a Coach of the Year candidate this past season for what he did with an OKC team few expected to be a playoff team after trading Russell Westbrook and Paul George. Donovan and the Thunder both agreed to part ways after the season, with OKC appearing to go towards a full rebuild, but it was a mild surprise that Donovan would look to Chicago, who are likewise trying to build a playoff contender, as his next stop.

His top player with the Bulls will be Zach LaVine, who rather famously had some issues with Boylen’s coaching style, and the Chicago guard learned of the Donovan hire like everyone else on Tuesday. LaVine was streaming Call of Duty on Facebook Gaming when the news dropped and offered his initial reactions during the stream, calling him a “really good coach.”

LaVine seems fairly excited about his new coach, as he’ll get to play for someone who’s made the playoffs all five years he’s coached in the NBA and had tremendous success at the college level with the University of Florida. Making it six playoff appearances in a row will take quite a jump from the Bulls, but the good news is LaVine seems more than on board with the hire and that always makes things easier for a new coach when the star of the team is a fan.

Back in early March, SXSW was forced to cancel the 2020 edition of their festival as a result of the growing spread of the coronavirus. The festival joined names like Coachella, III Points, Lovers And Friends on a long list of festivals that were forced to do likewise. But the SXSW organizers are adapting to a future that may not be much safer in 2021, announcing an online edition of their annual showcase for next year. Entitled SXSW Online, the festival will occur from March 16-20 and it will include movie screenings, keynote speeches, conferences, and more. Starting October 6, 2020, SXSW will start accepting entires for the Film Festival and SXSW EDU, the latter of which will occur online from March 9 to March 11.

The online festival will be curated by SXSW’s programming staff and the festival will give priority to artists and presenters who were originally scheduled for the 2020 festival. SXSW CEO and co-founder Roland Swenson called the online festival a “challenge” in a press release saying, “The challenge of building a new future is one that we’re excited to tackle.”

This has been such a year of change and we, like the entire world, are reshaping our perspective on how we connect. We’re pleased to introduce SXSW Online as part of our program for 2021, and regardless of platform, we will continue to bring together the brightest minds from creative industries worldwide.

The announcement comes after SXSW received a class action lawsuit over its refunding policy after cancelling the 2020 festival. Rather than issue refunds to ticketholders, the festival revealed that they would instead only allow tickets for the 2020 festival to be exchanged for future events. A month after the policy was made public, the class action lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Western District Of Texas Austin Division. The complaint reads in part, “SXSW has, in effect, shifted the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic onto festivalgoers, […] individuals who in these desperate times may sorely need the money they paid to SXSW for a festival that never occurred.”

The full announcement form SXSW can be read here.

There are many ways that a soccer player can opt to take a penalty. Upon stepping up to the spot, they have to figure out where to put the ball, how hard to kick it, and what their run-up needs to be, all while hoping the opposing goalkeeper does not figure out their plan and that the pressure of a moment in which the overwhelming expectation is they will succeed doesn’t rattle them.

One of the most aesthetically pleasing methods taken by players is to run up to the ball and kick it so hard that the opposing goalkeeper has zero hope to stop it. This method was employed by Ollie Hogg of Aylesbury United, a semi-professional English side participating in the FA Cup. In a first round qualifying match against Moneyfields on Thursday, Hogg stepped up to the penalty spot and put his foot right through the ball. The issue was that this happened.

Now, in fairness, per Bayliss, this happened just minutes after Hogg employed this same technique and executed it perfectly. I mean, there’s no stopping that thing as it rockets into the top of the goal.

Still, I cannot get over the one that gets sent into orbit. That thing has a launch angle on it that would make your average Major League hitting coach proud. It manages to go out and over the stadium, and the sound the onlookers make is nothing short of stunning — if you listened previously on mute, please go back and listen again at the sheer awe of the crowd.

As for how this game ended, things ended up going to penalties after the two sides drew, 2-2. While Hogg made his attempt from the spot, Moneyfields came out on top, 4-3.

Billy Donovan and the Oklahoma City Thunder mutually agreed to part ways in what seemed to be a rare, honest use of that phrase, as Donovan and Sam Presti met over some beers to discuss their tenure together and agree to move on separately.

Donovan, who never reached the level of success the Thunder hoped for during his tenure, did a spectacular job this past season with a team few expected to be as good as they ended up being, as OKC earned the 5-seed in the Western Conference before losing in seven games to the Rockets in the first round. Still, entering what appears to be a full blown rebuild, Donovan chose to part ways and seek a new opportunity.

That new home will reportedly be in Chicago, where he will join the Bulls as their new head coach under a new front office regime, as was reported on Tuesday by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski (and confirmed by Darnell Mayberry).

Shortly after, the Bulls confirmed the hire.

Donovan went 243-157 in 400 games as the Thunder head coach, making the playoffs in all five of his seasons, although the last four saw first round exits. Still, he’s proven himself to be a quality coach in the NBA and for a Bulls team looking to make the leap into playoff contention, Donovan makes some sense to help get them there. What remains to be seen is whether he can take a team from perennial playoff contender to a title contender, but the Bulls are still a long way from that point and would be happy to cross that bridge when they get there.

For now, the Bulls are a team built around some young talent, led by Zach LaVine, but with a number of young pieces including Lauri Markkanen, Wendell Carter Jr., Coby White, and Otto Porter Jr. The task for Donovan will be extracting the most out of that young talent and partnering with Arturas Karnisovas and the new Bulls front office to build a roster capable of making that jump into the playoff tier in the East.

Five years ago, DC took one of their richest but most tainted characters — Supergirl, the source of a disastrous bomb from the less superhero movie-besotted year of 1984 — and successfully rebranded her as a popular CW show. Yet according to Deadline, when the show returns next year for its sixth season it will be its last hurrah.

Mind you, the last run of episodes aren’t even in the can yet. Supergirl’s sixth season is one of many shows to be impacted by the still rampaging pandemic, which has mostly shuttered scripted television and movies. Deadline’s source claims the show is scheduled to begin filming on September 28, in Vancouver, where infection rates are much lower than here. However, the deal over testing guidelines and safety conditions have yet to be finalized between local unions and the production studio.

Moreover, filming will have to start without its star, Melissa Benoist, who did double duties as superpowered Supergirl/Kara Zor-El and her human disguise, Kara Danvers, who like her cousin, Superman/Jor-El/Clark Kent, is a reporter. Due to scheduling conflicts, she will join production later in the year, which should prove to be another fun production challenge.

The reason for Supergirl’s cancellation is reportedly down to decreased ratings, although pandemic headaches probably haven’t made things any easier, as with a number of shows. At least the program will get a solid farewell, complete with a longer-than-usual season. So farewell to Kara, but you’ll see her later, at least in the funny pages.

(Via Deadline)

Atlanta hip-hop mainstays 2 Chainz and Big Boi are set to face off later this week, but rather than a rap battle or a Verzuz showcase, they’ll instead compete on an episode of Family Feud. 2 Chainz posted a set of photos from the set on his Instagram today, teasing the episode’s air date later this week: Thursday, September 24. The caption reads: “I just continue growing and growing! Kudzu Toni.” He also took the opportunity to plug his upcoming album, So Help Me God, due for release later that night.

While he hasn’t released any tracklist information for the album, he has shared a couple of singles with high-profile guest appearances: “Dead Man Walking” with Future, released at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and “Money Maker” with Lil Wayne, which Chainz later supported with an HBCU-hyping music video complete with marching bands and branded apparel. The album will also arrive just a few weeks after 2 Chainz’s 43rd birthday, for which Kanye West gifted him one of West’s strange, tank-like ATVs (what do you get for the man with a show called Most Expensivest, am I right?).

2 Chainz is also fresh off the release of his group T.R.U.’s debut album on Atlantic Records, while also working on ColleGrove 2, the followup to his successful 2016 joint album with Lil Wayne.

2 Chainz and Big Boi’s Family Feud faceoff airs Thursday at 8pm ET/PT 7pm CT on ABC.

Patrick Beverley was busy. He was busy back in July 2019, when he reportedly knocked on LeBron James’s door the night Kawhi Leonard’s trade to the Clippers was announced to deliver the not extremely sure in its own words promise, “It’s pretty much over for you guys now.”

He kept busy when the season got started, taunting fans at Oracle after the Clippers beat the Warriors in late October, telling Steph Curry, “You had the last five years, the next five years are mine.”

You could say that Beverley stayed busy all season, easily picking up where he left off when the Bubble got underway. He compared Nikola Jokic to Luka Doncic only in their propensity for “a lot of flailing” and shot down Michele Roberts, the executive director of the NBPA, in a players meeting during the game stoppages as she explained the potential financial ramifications of the pause. Beverley is a career talker, deft at flinging smirking barbs at anyone and everyone, but the talk was always best paired with basketball. This season, much of the talk came despite the Clippers not quite living up to lofty expectations.

The Clippers’ own loud, vaguely prophetic preseason trajectory mirrored Beverley’s. They’d made visible passes at Leonard, sending their people to sit in the stands in Toronto as part of a prolonged courting process that ultimately had Steve Ballmer crowing in victory during Leonard and Paul George’s first press conference in L.A. The team’s marketing machine quickly got to work, attempting to position the franchise as the blue collar alternative to the Lakers even as plans were unveiled for the team’s new $1 billion dollar arena in Inglewood.

In the fall, the team cut through the latent haze of its summer fireworks and started the slow climb to the prophesied top the same way any other club would have to, one game at a time. To its credit, the front office got out of its players’ way. The Clippers looked perfectly fine. Their schedule stacked them early against their Staples Center roommates, and two former champs in the Raptors and Warriors, they beat all three by double digits. But the losses that started to pepper their season, looking back, gave some clues as to what was coming. When Kawhi Leonard sat, they played like a barely above-.500 team, going 8-7 without him.

Leonard is a masterclass in basketball all by himself. Watching him play, there is a sense that he’s never quite in the game, its physicality and sharply tactile elements slipping around the hulk of him as he works lightly above it all, looming in another plane. He’s not an absent player — when Leonard dominates, the whole floor’s in his thrall — but to reach that higher, bullying cognitive state, his head has to be clear, while the engrossing repetitions necessary in contextualizing the court — calling plays, slowing things down, constant communication — is best left to somebody else.

In Toronto, Leonard had a floor savant in Kyle Lowry, someone whose future-sight of how things could unfold, in any dozen of possible scenarios, came just as lightly and by reflex. Lowry ground all possible barriers down so Leonard could make cutting through the paint, or finding a clear corner to fade from, look like water-walk. In San Antonio, buttressed between Tim Duncan’s leadership, an overall equilibrium that kept offense and defense forever flowing into each other, the playmaking of Tony Parker, and Manu Ginóbili’s sprawling, fearless range, Leonard was protected. With no pressure to lead, he was free to pop up, fadeaway, step quietly through all the space being created for him, and afforded endless lethal routes to the rim. In L.A., there was no such sage.

Without leadership, the Clippers are a collection of good, but easily stymied, players. Denver was able to adjust. Whether they needed the three games they took to do it or added two for dramatic effect will stay a club secret, but they clamped down on defense to frustrate, chase, and do whatever was needed to mar the Clippers’ favorite looks. Without an efficient leader to reorganize and redirect, Leonard, George, Lou Williams, and Montrezl Harrell tried in vain to go through through the walls the Nuggets were putting up.

There were plenty of other ways the Clippers lacking leadership cost them. The post-Game 7 blame shifts, while vague, named absent chemistry, fatigue, and a lack of understanding when it came down to, in Leonard’s words, the “exact spots we need to be,” but all these ephemeral excuses cut to a harder point: they had so much time to figure it out.

Per Cleaning the Glass, the starting five the club relied on in the postseason of Marcus Morris, Ivica Zubac, Beverley, George, Leonard played 298 possessions together in the regular season. The trio of Leonard, George and Williams together played 452. The team, as a whole, played 6,903. The Lakers, comparatively, ran their playoff lineup through 634 possessions, and that’s still second to the team’s regular season lineup that included Avery Bradley, who opted out of the restart. The Lakers also have a roster of largely new, occasionally discordant pieces, but they also have James, someone who not only excels at putting the onus on himself to close the gap between a freshly constructed team and its championship aspirations by fostering a very specific organizational culture, but who patently demands of teammates put up or shut up.

As much as the Clippers front office worked tirelessly to separate themselves from the purple and gold presence that haunted their home on alternating nights, it may have served them to study the devil they knew. In James’ sophomore year under the marquee lights of Showtime, the Lakers brought back only five players out of last year’s mainstays and a brand new coach. Add in a late acquisition of Dion Waiters, an even later sub of J.R. Smith, and Rondo’s initial absence from most of the restart, and the Clippers look like old friends by comparison.

Another team not all that concerned with how their fresh chemistry could be tested are the Heat, who entered the ECF with a 10-2 record. Their secret, forged from Pat Riley’s unflinching system and honed by the bold, crafty coaching of Erik Spoelstra is so loud it isn’t really one at all — they talk, all the time, they never stop. And to the verbal cues they touch, toss hand signals, all of it combining into a confidence that’s cyclonic, whipping around the court without leaving air for even a breath of doubt.

What the Clippers lacked was the road testing. The team’s leadership, seasoned as it was with Rivers knowing the ropes since 2013 and a tenured front office braintrust so intent on giving the team all the tools it needed to triumph in the postseason, saw the road of the regular season as a thing to get over instead of through. It was impossible to hand Leonard a team constructed for a championship and expect him to lead it while maintaining a strict (and, to be fair, necessary) schedule of load management — you can’t drive from the bench. They wanted him perfect for the playoffs, but the team suffered because in his first year as a true, singular leader, he couldn’t see what made it tick.

Even Denver, now the surprise out of the West, was a story as subtle as a mountain will sit stubbornly, forgettably, at the horizon, not showing its full scope until you yourself draw any closer. Nikola Jokic and Gary Harris were drafted in 2014, Mike Malone hired a year later, Jamal Murray drafted in 2016, Paul Millsap snagged as a free agent in 2017, all gradual changes working toward something bigger with Denver’s largely unchanged bench as a ballast.

This season, including the March-June hiatus, has been happening for nearly 12 months. A historic near-year of bought time to address what had loomed since the Clippers first handful of games. Whether Ballmer and Rivers were initially intent on laying tracing paper over Toronto’s blueprint, or tried to protect who they saw as their best chance to win, the team never stored up enough experience together to fuel them when it came time to close.

Chemistry comes from work, whether it be a collection of personalities coalescing after going through the wringer or a group that’s been blitzed and battle-tested, who’ve learned not just from wins but adjusted quickly after losses. It’s cited as quickly in the story of the underwhelming Clippers as it is in the narrative surrounding a team has that makes it all the way, but trace chemistry back to its origins on a team where it’s humming at a discernible volume and you’ll find a secure sense of trust. When a team’s winning, trust and how it manifests — passing, communication, the versatility to adapt in tight spots — can be something rolled easily into a category of intangibles, a permeating element that touches everything a team does well, not necessarily supported by any one stat but crucial to in-game execution. When trust wanes, as etherial as it can seem, all of those “intangibles” visibly suffer — players go ISO, chatter quiets, shooting cools, and team confidence wilts.

Rivers acknowledged the absence of trust on the floor in Game 7, saying postgame, “We start missing shots and you can see us trusting less and less and less.” Williams, too, lamented on this while looking back on the season as a whole, saying that “A lot of the issues we ran into, talent bailed us out. Chemistry didn’t.”

The Nuggets, on the other hand, have it in spades. They have learned from every game in the playoffs, proving a team not considered elite defenders could improve enough on that end of the floor to clamp down on the Clippers, relentlessly rattle their shot selection, and muck up any semblance of half court offensive cohesion. They hustled, going after loose balls where the Clippers wouldn’t, kicking the ball around to tire out a team already looking gassed. Successfully under the Clippers’ skin, Denver dismantled any confidence L.A. had left, picking passes from overhead like low-hanging fruit, slicing languid lanes to the basket, pulling up from practically anywhere they wanted. A team doesn’t come back 3-1 without an unwavering, self-generative wellspring of trust. The Nuggets did it twice.

The problem with treating chemistry as eventuality, like treating talent as a tangible reserve, crystallizes on a team like the Clippers, stacked so thoroughly with personalities that chemistry essentially inverts. When the majority of a roster sees themselves as team figurehead or embodiment — their concerns and problems on and off court the most pressing — there’s no collective understanding as to what the team even is, let alone aspires to be.

“You go from last year, we were the team that wasn’t expected to make the playoffs to going and being a championship-caliber team when you bring in two high-level guys, that’s an adjustment,” Williams said. He was right, but it was an adjustment nobody on the team ever bothered to make.

As a nebulous identity, the franchise became a useful vacuum in sucking up any blame being tidily brushed aside. George said in June the team expected to “come in and win it all,” there was no plan “to take a year to get used to each other.” After elimination, George shrugged, “This was not a championship or bust year for us.” He could be revisionist because there was hardly a team narrative to follow, everything up to then had been individual lines in a cast of leads imagining their own stories.

Even Rivers, his third trip back to this exact same place, could give no definitive answer to something that had been heralded as surefire suddenly stuttering out. Prior to Game 7, Rivers told his team to “play free,” a strange and tenuous notion for a group with title expectations that faced elimination. There was no form, no follow through, like any measure of heart shown was just going to weigh them down.

“I mean, listen, obviously I could have done something more,” Rivers said regretfully after the loss, and while the overwhelming response is to ask why he did not, the burden of blame, like the absent mantle of leadership, never rested squarely on Rivers. Having gotten through this prolonged season without ever coming together, there’s still no team to really isolate or analyze, only a sense of each player, “talent” as Williams called them, slowly backing away into their respective off seasons. Rivers can’t plan for what still doesn’t exist.

In a presser hosted by NBA Canada after the Nuggets series win, Murray was asked repeatedly for the secret behind how they’d made it happen. Murray, polite, credited his teammates and the identity they’ve built together over the years. But, with a pause at another question on his success, Murray dipped his head thoughtfully and delivered the only potential dig: “There’s a thing called mental work, too.” He talked about the ability to stay focused, clearing out what isn’t important to the game being played and zero in on the work that needs to be done. It is not an eventuality, but a directive to dig in and take responsibility, to create something lasting with the team around you.

Effort is what Murray was getting at, playing like it matters. In the last game the Clippers would play all season, that effort was clear, painful only to the Clippers. Denver never “played free,” but anchored by joy and tied with trust they ascended. Next season, the Clippers could stand to be boxed in by that kind of belief.

The epidemic of violence against Indigenous women in America is one of the country’s most disturbing trends. A major reason it persists is because it’s rarely discussed outside of the native community.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women under age 19.

Women who live on some reservations face rates of violence that are as much as ten times higher than the national average.

The problem stems from a lack of community resources, prejudice, poverty, and poor communication between Native communities and law enforcement.

Red dress display to honor missing and murdered Indigenous women.via Kerron L / Flickr

Many women disappear from remote reservations without a single law enforcement officer. “The resources are spread so thin, it allows people to fall through the cracks,” Billy J. Stratton, an expert in Native American studies at the University of Denver, told CNN.

But the problem goes much deeper than law enforcement.

“When you’re talking about a group of people who is among the lowest socioeconomic class in the US, they’re more susceptible to violence than others,” Stratton said.

“Poverty is the main driver; dispossession, lack of empowerment, isolation, and those other social problems I think flow from that,” he added.

Violence against Native people also gets very little attention from the mainstream media.

“I live on a reservation, it’s word of mouth. We can report [someone missing or dead] to the authorities,” Tillie Aldrich, an Omaha Tribe of Nebraska member, told Teen Vogue.

“If we have a non-Native [person] missing in a city 25 miles north of us, it’s all over the news, the newspapers, posters going up,” she continued. “If we have someone missing, one of our Native missing, they try to keep it quiet.”

The response to cases of violence against native American women is so poor that in 2016 there were 5,712 cases reported of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, but only 116 cases were logged by the Department of Justice database.

However, a new bill passed by Congress hopes to reverse this trend in violence and law enforcement inaction.

On Monday, the House of Representatives passed Savanna’s Act, which will go to the desk of President Trump for final approval.

The bill is named after Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a member of the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe from Fargo, North Dakota. In 2017, at the age of 22, while eight months pregnant her unborn child was cut out of her womb and she was murdered. The baby survived.

The bill requires federal, state, tribal, and local law enforcement agencies to update policies and protocols to address missing or murdered Native Americans.

It also requires the U.S. Department of Justice to develop new guidelines for response to missing or murdered Native people and provide database training to law enforcement agencies at all levels.

“Savanna’s Act addresses a tragic issue in Indian Country and helps establish better law enforcement practices to track, solve and prevent these crimes against Native Americans,” Senator John Hoeven, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said in a statement.

“We appreciate our House colleagues for passing the bill today and sending it on to the president to become law,” the statement continues. “At the same time, we continue working to advance more legislation like this to strengthen public safety in tribal communities and ensure victims of crime receive support and justice.”

“Passage of Savanna’s Act brings us one step closer to ending this epidemic by upgrading critical data and improving communication among law enforcement,” Republican Representative from Montana Greg Gianforte said in a statement.

The bill is a positive first step toward combating the issue of missing and murdered Indiginous women, but much more will have to be done before the problem is solved.

“Stopping the #MMIW [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women] crisis will take years and maybe decades,” Sarah Deer, Muscogee, a professor at the University of Kansas, told Teen Vogue.

“It must be a multi-faceted movement led by family members of missing Indigenous women,” she added. “Those families are the experts on this crisis and should be the leaders of the movement.”