Rape Cases on Indian Lands Go Uninvestigated

[kara]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12203114

my parents both called me about this series NPR is doing on assault of Native Americans on reservations, and how the issue of jurisdiction has allowed non-Native Americans free reign of women on reservations

in one story, a woman called 911 about an intruder in her house. 4 different police showed up and spent time outside arguing over who's in charge instead of going in to get him!!!

another story is some non-Native Americans attacked a young girl walking home, and no one is doing anything about it

:(

grrr. :(

[BrazenMuse]

Doesn't surprise me. Sad. Unsurprising however. Some reservations have quick and very vigorous police departments of their own...but the racial politics of the area make it hard to prosecute "good old boys out to have a little fun" - nothing new there at all.

[kara]

did you read the article on that NPR link?

did you see that part where they quote Mary Buchanan at the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women?

IF I GET THIS JOB, SHE'S MY NEW BOSS!!! :) :)

[kara]

the statistics are staggerring (sp?) on this section of the population here in the U.S.
where they argue the percentage of women abused is going down, here it's going up.

[kara]

http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR510352007





Congress Moves to Protect Native Women from Assaults

By Jim Lobe

Inter Press Service



Thursday 26 July 2007



Washington - Acting in major part on a recent report by Amnesty International and Native American activists, the U.S. Congress is moving to provide additional funding to protect Native American women who suffer disproportionate levels of rape and other sexual abuse.



The House of Representatives Wednesday approved a bipartisan measure that would provide one million dollars for the creation of a tribal sex offender and protection order registry to identify serial perpetrators of such assaults, most of whom are non-Indian.



The same measure, which was approved by a 412-18 vote, provides an additional million dollars to conduct a baseline study on sexual violence committed against indigenous women in the U.S. to better identify the extent of abuse and how best to address it. Both appropriations have already been approved by the Senate.



Amnesty, which published a 113-page report on the problem in April, praised the House action but called for more steps to address the problem.



"This vote is an important step toward justice for Native American and Alaska Native women" said Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty's U.S. section (AIUSA). "But more needs to be done."



He said Congress should provide more funding to that part of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that pertains to Native American women, particularly those provisions to ensure that tribal courts and police have the wherewithal to investigate and prosecute cases of abuse, especially in rural areas, and that the Indian Health Service and contract facilities can hire more Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners capable of conducting timely forensic medical examinations after assaults take place.



The Amnesty report, "Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA," found that indigenous women are at least 2.5 times as likely to be sexually assaulted in their lifetime as other women in the U.S. and that at least one in three indigenous women will be raped or otherwise subject to sexual violence in their lifetime.



At least 86 percent of reported rapes or other sexual assaults against indigenous women are committed by non-Indian men who are only very rarely prosecuted or punished, according to the report.



The failure to pursue justice in such cases is due to a number of factors, the report noted, including chronic under-funding of police and health services and a "complex maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions that is so confusing that it often allows perpetrators to evade justice entirely..."



Registered Native Americans, who make up about 1.4 percent of the U.S.' 300 million citizens, are distributed among some 560 tribal governments across the country.



While these governments are given substantial autonomy over their internal affairs, the federal government has steadily eroded their authority, including their justice systems, particularly in cases involving non-Native individuals or interests.



In one of the most far-reaching cases, the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that tribal governments cannot prosecute criminal defendants who are non-Indian even if the crime of which they are accused takes place on tribal lands.



In addition, tribal authorities, many of whose communities suffer the highest poverty rates in the U.S., are chronically under-financed, leading to major gaps in law enforcement and the availability of social and health services compared to non-Native communities.



The report, which was based on Justice Department data and research in three states with proportionately large Native American populations - Alaska, South Dakota, and Oklahoma - found indigenous girls and women suffered most from these deficiencies.



"American Indian and Alaska Native women are living in a virtual war zone, where rape, abuse and murder are commonplace and sexual predators prey with impunity," Sarah Deer, an attorney at the California-based Tribal Law and Policy Institute, told IPS in April.



"In many tribal communities, rape and molestation are so common that young women fully expect that they will be victims of sexual violence at some point," she noted, adding that the weakening of tribal justice systems by the federal government has made it far more difficult for victims of sexual violence to gain redress.



Indeed, federal and tribal statistics may understate the degree of violence suffered by Native American women, according to the report, which noted that fear of retaliation and the lack of confidence that the authorities will take allegations of assault seriously tend to reduce reporting of sexual assault throughout the United States, as well as in Native American communities.



One support worker in Oklahoma, for example, told AI that only three of her 77 active cases of sexual and domestic violence had been reported to the police.



And many women interviewed on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota said they could not think of a single Native American woman within the community who had not been subjected to sexual violence at some point in their lives, and that many had suffered several assaults, by different perpetrators.



Native American women were victims in nearly 80 percent of confirmed cases of rape and murder in Alaska over the last 15 years, according to a medical professional responsible for post-mortem examinations of such cases in the state who was interviewed by AI. Native Americans make up only 16 percent of Alaska's total population of about 675,000.



Jurisdictional issues have often been a major obstacle to successful prosecution of sexual assaults, particularly in states such as Oklahoma where land owned by nearly 40 different tribes adjoin each other and are often intersected by state land in a "checkerboard" pattern.



"Being an Indian woman rape victim in the state of Oklahoma usually means that law enforcement officers spend as much time trying to determine the appropriate responding authority as they do in protecting you from the rapist," Renee Brewer, family violence co-ordinator with the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, told Amnesty. Cases involving multiple jurisdictions often result in no prosecution at all.



While jurisdictional problems are serious, tribal authorities also often lack the means to respond in a timely way, let alone investigate and prosecute, cases in the rural areas that make up many U.S. Indian reservations.



In South Dakota's Standing Rock Reservation, an area of almost one million hectares (2.3 million acres), tribal police have at most three patrol officers on duty during the day. Amnesty found that women who report sexual violence there often have to wait for hours, even days, before receiving a response from the police department, if they receive any at all.



In Alaska, the situation for Native American women in rural districts, a third of which have no police presence at all, is even more dramatic.



In addition to under-funding Native law enforcement agencies, the federal government has also denied adequate resources to the Indian Health Service, according to Amnesty, which found that even in cases where health facilities were relatively close and accessible, they often lacked qualified staff or even inexpensive rape kits that would be helpful to any eventual prosecution.



The fact that non-Native perpetrators cannot be tried in tribal courts has actually drawn sexual predators to tribal areas to assault women, because they know that federal prosecutions are rare in those areas, according to Deer.

[kara]

The fact that non-Native perpetrators cannot be tried in tribal courts has actually drawn sexual predators to tribal areas to assault women, because they know that federal prosecutions are rare in those areas, according to Deer.

that's some of the scariest part of it

[kara]

Leslie Ironroad was 20 years old when she moved from one side of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas to the other — the town of McLaughlin, S.D., home to one gas station, one diner and her friend, Rhea Archambault. She roomed in Archambault's spare bedroom.

"I make star quilts, so she was helping me make patterns," Archambault said recently, sitting at her dining room table. "She was just a nice little girl."

One night four years ago, Ironroad left the house to go to a party a few miles away. Early the next morning, she called Archambault's brother in tears asking to be picked up.

"She said, 'Can [you] go get Rhea to come get me 'cause these guys are going to fight me,'" Archambault said. "And so he said, 'Well where you at?' And she was just crying and hangs up."
Leslie never made it home.

When Archambault found her friend in a Bismarck, N.D. hospital, she was black and blue.

"'I said, 'Leslie, what happened?.' She said, 'Rhea, is that you? Turn the lights on, I can't see.' But the lights in the room were on. She said, 'Rhea, I was raped,' and she was just squeezing my hand," Archambault recalled.

Archambault called the Bureau of Indian Affairs police, a small department in charge of all law enforcement on the reservation. A few days later an officer arrived in the hospital room, and Leslie scratched out a statement on a tablet laid across her stomach.

Ironroad told the officer how she was raped and said that the men locked her in a bathroom, where she swallowed diabetes pills she found in the cabinet, hoping that if she was unconscious the men would leave her alone. The next morning, someone found her on the bathroom floor and called an ambulance.

A week later, Ironroad was dead — and so was the investigation. None of the authorities who could have investigated what happened to Leslie Ironroad did — not the Bureau of Indian Affairs, nor the FBI, nor anybody else.

People who know the men who likely attacked her say they were never even questioned.

Archambault couldn't believe nothing came of Ironroad's report.

"She named all the people that were there, the ones that were hitting her, the ones that were fighting her, she named everybody — what more else?" Archambault asked.

Unreported, Uninvestigated and Unprosecuted

This case was not an isolated incident. NPR spoke with at least a dozen people on Standing Rock — rape counselors, doctors, tribal leaders and victims — people who were either assaulted or know women who were in cases where no charges were filed.

The story of what happened to Ironroad, and more importantly what happened to the investigation of her death, is a window into what is happening on Native American reservations across the country. Cases like hers are going unreported, uninvestigated and unprosecuted, according to tribal officials.

The Justice Department found that one in three Native American women will be raped in her lifetime. In many cases, on rural reservations like Standing Rock, NPR found that there aren't enough police to investigate sexual assaults, and few of the cases are prosecuted.

On Standing Rock, there's one person in charge of law enforcement: Bureau of Indian Affairs police Chief Gerald White.

"I consider any sexual assault a serious problem. I mean, we don't take them lightly," White said at the police headquarters on the reservation. "Every sexual assault that is reported to us — we investigate them to the fullest."

When asked what happened in the Ironroad case, White responded, "I looked back and there was nothing that could substantiate that happening. I'm sure she passed away, but as far as her being involved as a victim of sexual assault, I couldn't find anything to support that ... You know, if a person doesn't report, then how can we investigate it, if we don't know about it?"

Overwhelmed and Overworked

Although Ironroad did report her attack to a BIA officer in her hospital room, authorities did not conduct an investigation. Through records, interviews with officials at the hospital, the state medical examiner's office and the police department, and conversations with more than a dozen people familiar with Ironroad's case, NPR learned the officer in her hospital room was BIA police officer Doug Wilkinson.

Officer Wilkinson resigned from the Standing Rock police department two months ago. NPR tracked him down in the small town of Little Eagle, S.D. In a phone conversation, he confirmed the basic details of the story.

Wilkenson said a lot of sexual assault cases like Ironroad's are never investigated. He said he was too overwhelmed and overworked to keep up with the number of calls for rape, sexual assault and child abuse he received each week.

When it came to federal prosecutors, he admitted, "We all knew they only take the ones with a confession ... We were forced to triage our cases."

Wilkenson has now joined a ministry and says he hopes to help survivors through preaching.

"I felt like I was standing in the middle of the river trying to hold back the flood," he says, describing his decade as a federal police officer.

On Standing Rock, there are five BIA officers for a territory the size of Connecticut. On this and other reservations, police are stretched thin and often can't or won't make arrests.

[kara]

Allocating the Limited Resources

Fourteen years ago, Archie Fool Bear, who sits on the Standing Rock Tribal Council, was chief of the BIA police department on the reservation, heading a force three times as large as today's. Now, he says, tribe members are coming to him with terrible stories of rapes and crimes, even though he can no longer do anything about them.

"We know with that size of force, I know from experience, there are cases that are going to be sitting on the shelf or cases where people don't want to come forward because they have no confidence in law enforcement," he said.

Money for new officers can only come from one place: Washington, D.C. The Bureau of Indian Affairs' director Pat Ragsdale sits in his office just across the street from the White House grounds. Ragsdale says he knows cases may be falling through the cracks. He'd love to have more officers, he says, and expects the situation to improve with $16 million in new funding that the Bush administration has proposed, which would add about 50 new BIA police officers.

Spread among 200 tribal jurisdictions, 50 new officers comes out to well below one per tribe. Director Ragsdale says they plan to cluster the officers on reservations where they are needed the most.

On Standing Rock, getting an officer to respond to a call for help can mean waiting for days or even months. The reservation's only women's shelter is still waiting for police to come after someone cut all of their phone lines two months ago.

The shelter's director, Georgia Littleshield, can attest firsthand to the lack of police response. When her daughter's boyfriend, a non-native, broke her daughter's nose, her daughter filed a report and attached statements and photos from the doctors. But when Littlefield called special investigators the next morning, an officer told her that her injury was not considered a broken bone, but broken cartilage and that the case would not be prosecuted.

"This is a lawless land where people are making up their own laws because there's no justice being done," Littleshield said.

A study from the Justice Department found that Native American women are two and half times more likely to be raped than other women. The majority of victims said they were raped by men from outside the reservation, according to a victimization survey.

Many of those victims wind up at the Indian Health Service Center. When Ironroad arrived at the center, her injuries were so severe that doctors told the ambulance to take her two hours north to Bismarck.

The health center does not have rape kits to collect the vital DNA evidence needed to prosecute attackers. They are also inadequately staffed and cannot spare an exam room for the hour it takes to complete the rape examination.

For that, women must go to Bismarck, but most women don't want to go because they don't know how they will get back home.

Staff physician Jackie Quizno says she sees rape cases several times a month. When she and other doctors turn over their information to the BIA police and federal prosecutors on the women they see, she says nothing happens.

"I have only been involved in one court hearing where I was actually called to testify," Quizno said, who has worked at the center for more than five years.

A Federal Responsibility

Tribal leaders say the Justice Department ignores them, and one of the department's own former top officials agrees.

"Our committee was frequently met with indifference," said Thomas Heffelfinger, who until last year chaired the department's Indian Affairs Committee, which tried to get resources to Indian country. He said department officials "simply don't recognize the magnitude of the problem and the degree to which it is a federal responsibility."

Mary Beth Buchanan, acting director of the Justice Department's Office of Violence Against Women, disagrees. She says Indian sexual assaults are a priority, especially for U.S. attorneys.

"Most prosecutors in Indian country are very committed to assisting in the prosecution of these cases and are very sensitive to the problems associated with crime in Indian country," she countered, citing millions of dollars the department has funneled to a new pilot project to reduce violence and a new study that will examine the rate of sexual assaults on reservations.

However, actual figures are difficult to pin down. Justice officials and local U.S. attorneys say they can not provide the number of sexual assault cases they decline from Indian reservations or even the number of cases they take.

A 2004 study conducted by the department found that the number of suspects investigated by U.S. attorneys for crimes on Indian land declined 21 percent from 1997 to 2000.

On Standing Rock, where the bright green grass seems to stretch as far as the sky, women like Ironroad can live and die without any federal official taking notice.

The tribe's chairman, Ron His Horse Is Thunder, stood on the porch of his log cabin overlooking the plains where his people have lived for thousands of years.

"Rape amongst our people was one of those unheard of crimes, he said. "Not because people didn't talk about it, but at one point in time, it didn't occur."

That is no longer the case, and the chairman says that as long as the tribe must depend on the federal government to police and prosecute people on their own land, anyone who comes here may well be able to rape or assault women, like Leslie Ironroad, and get away with it.

"There's a word amongst our people," he said, pronouncing an Indian phrase. "Simply stated, that we are all related, but it's more than just me and my cousin being related. It means that anything that happens to the tribe or one its members will affect everybody."

Two weeks after NPR began requesting documents and interviewing officials, the Bureau of Indian Affairs reopened the investigation into Leslie Ironroad's death. Officials say the results are still pending.
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