If you can help, please contact me via the email address in my profile (remove the obvious words) or reply in the comments. If you have any other suggestions or tips for a small nonprofit shelter, those are welcome too! (and yes, they are a 501(c)(3).
According to a recent Amnesty International report, more than one in three American Indian and Alaskan Native women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Far too often, perpetrators of these crimes go unpunished. Domestic violence is also a serious problem, inflicting physical and emotional damage on both women and children. Often victims have nowhere to turn due to poverty, remote geography and tangled legal jurisdictions. In these dire situations, local domestic violence advocates and women’s shelters can make dramatic differences in helping women cope with the after-effects of violence, and helping them escape from situations where further violence is likely. However, these shelters are chronically under-funded. One such shelter, Zintkala Waste Win Oti ("Pretty Bird Woman House"), has run out of funding and will be forced to close in May if new resources can’t be found to sustain it.
The shelter was founded by Jackie Brown Otter after the kidnapping, rape and murder of her sister (whose Lakota name means Pretty Bird Woman). It serves the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which is on the border of North and South Dakota. The reservation covers over 2.3 million acres, and with a per capita income of only $8,615, it's one of the most destitute regions in the United States.
From January 2005 to August 2006, 125 domestic violence cases were filed with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Court-15 cases per month. Pretty Bird Woman House was involved with most of those cases, and without that program's help, many cases would have been ignored or withdrawn. If Pretty Bird Woman House does not receive continued funding, it is a foregone conclusion that the women and children who would have been served by the program will have to struggle along on their own. Domestic violence on the Standing Rock Reservation will not be addressed and families, who constitute the spirit of the Reservation, will be weakened and disenfranchised once again.
With adequate resources, the shelter would like to fund a director for the program, two advocates, and a children's advocate, food and supplies for the shelter. They would also fund transportation for families to obtain related services, or to relocate completely in order to escape the violence in their lives. However, in the short-term, without a small amount of funding, the shelter will not be able to keep their phone lines open through May.
