Your parents may have told you there are no real monsters. Your parents were wrong. This week, Amnesty International issued a report that proves it.
One in three Native American or Alaska Native women will be raped at some point in their lives. Most do not seek justice because they know they will be met with inaction or indifference.
Before you jump to a conclusion about the men in these communities, understand that the great majority of these horrific assaults are coming from outsiders. Outsiders who understand that these women are often isolated in remote areas, outsiders who know that the community authorities have little power to stop them, and who know that federal prosecutors have shown little interest in taking these cases.
They know this is a place where they can commit rape with impunity. And it's not just rape that's going unpunished (as if that could ever be "just"), it's other violence and murder of the most brutal sort imaginable.
It struck me particularly hard to hear stories from Standing Rock, where I've spent time myself and met some wondeful people, among those sites covered in this report. NPR's coverage of this story (by far the best I found in the media) highlights the story of Pretty Bird Woman. Standing Rock is so large (over two million acres), and the number of police so few, that it was almost a day before anyone showed up to investigate Pretty Bird's disappearance. Despite plenty of evidence that she had been kidnapped -- including bloody bedding -- it took more days before the FBI put in an appearance. Pretty Bird was found beaten to death, her body left beside a dirt road.
Driven by the tragic loss Pretty Bird's sister, Jackie Brown Otter, started the first women's shelter for Standing Rock. Her retelling of the incident is heartbreaking. (To add to the tragedy Pretty Bird Woman House is in danger of closing due to lack of funds.)
This kind of indifference to suffering is intolerable anywhere in the world, and it's particularly awful to see this further evidence of the disdain we hold for the sovereign peoples who share our borders. If you're wondering why the local authorities would wait around on the slow to arrive FBI, it's because they have to. Under the archaic 1885 Major Crimes Act, the reservation authorities aren't allowed to investigate crimes against their own people.
Under the act, seven major crimes--if committed by an Indian in Indian country--were placed within federal jurisdiction, regardless of whether the victim of the crime was an Indian.
Believe it or not, this law is still in force.
The Major Crimes Act was a great intrusion into the internal sovereignty of the tribes in that it deprived the tribes of the ability to try and to punish serious offenders in Indian country. The theory underlying it was that Indian tribes were not competent to deal with serious issues of crime and punishment.
I know there are a lot of scandals at the front of the line, but the next time someone gets Gonzales on the stand, why not stop for a moment and ask him why the FBI is so slow to respond to crime against Native Americans, or why the number of these cases taken by the Justice Department is so low?
In the meantime, send a note to your congressperson -- today would be good -- urging them to support additional funds for law enforcement and forensics in these communities (needless to say, there is no CSI: Standing Rock). And tell them to dump a law that, at its heart, enshrines the idea that some people are less entitled to justice than others. It's well past time for the racist 1885 Major Crimes Act to be eliminated.
Most of all, work to see that congress fully funds the Violence Against Women Act. The current act calls for 10% of funds to go to tribal areas.
(Note: As Amnesty International points out in their report, there are over 550 different groups of recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes in the USA, and probably an equal number of groups that haven't been accorded "official" status by the government. Though I've given their enormous range of cultures very little space in this article, there is far more diversity among these groups than can be expressed by the fiew.)