Women in Indigenous communities have borne the brunt of violence for centuries. Now, thanks to newly introduced legislation, they may finally get some protection.
After years of a weakened tribal court system, this month Congress proposed a comprehensive bill allowing Native women in Indian country the ability to prosecute a crime committed against them by a non-Indian perpetrator.
The new law is part of the proposed 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and for the first time ever, it includes a “tribal title,” a provision that gives tribal courts jurisdiction over crimes committed by non-Native offenders—sexual assault, sex trafficking, stalking, and child abuse, as well as obstructing justice and assaulting tribal law enforcement officers—and surprisingly, the bill appears to have enough Republican support to become law.
“The [United States] government that colonized them has told these local governments that they are not fit to protect their own,” Elizabeth Reese, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School and an expert on American Indian tribal law, told The New Republic.
Despite the fact that Congress approved a provision in the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 that restored tribal authority to prosecute crimes of domestic violence by non-Native perpetrators, the provision didn’t cover tangential crimes such as sexual assault, child abuse, or obstruction of justice, leaving Native people’s without the full ability to carry out justice on their own land and Native women particularly vulnerable.
The statistics of violence against Alaska Native women and Native American women are staggering.
A 2016 report from the Policy Research Center of the National Congress of American Indians, shows that 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime and 55.5% have experienced physical violence by intimate partners in their lifetime. Almost half of all AI/AN women have been stalked in their lifetime, and Native women face murder rates more than 10 times the national average in some counties.
Another report found that according to the National Crime Information Center, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal missing person database, NamUs, only logged 116 cases.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian and Alaska Native women and that rates of violence on reservations can be up to ten times higher than the national average.
President Joe Biden is a staunch supporter of reauthorizing the VAWA of 2022.
Biden has said it “will expand prevention efforts and protections for survivors, including those from underserved communities,” and will “provide increased resources and training for law enforcement and our judicial system.”
“It will strengthen rape prevention and education efforts, support rape crisis centers, improve the training of sexual assault forensic examiners, and broaden access to legal services for all survivors, among other things,” Biden said in a statement in early February.
The new legislation needs 60 votes to advance in the Senate, with at least 10 Republicans in support of it in order for it to pass. The bill currently has 11 Republican sponsors.
The tribal title in the 2022 reauthorization additionally hopes to address the previous exclusion of over 30 tribes in Alaska, Native Hawaiians, and those in Maine.
“So many of our Native women are without any level of public safety within their villages. So what we’re trying to do is to allow for special jurisdiction on a pilot basis to allow for some level of justice through the tribal courts,” Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who sponsored the tribal title, told The New Republic. “It’s been a long time coming. We saw it in 2013 in how it helped protect Native women in the lower 48. We want to be able to do the same for Alaska Natives.”
According to reporting by ProPublica, more than a third of Alaska communities have no local police of any kind and almost all are primarily Alaska Native. In some remote villages that do have police, the jobs are so low-paying and undesirable that criminals are the only applicants. As a result, convicts and even sex offenders have been hired as city police officers.
“Perpetrators know when they can get away with things,” Michelle Demmert, a law and policy specialist at the Alaska Native Women’s Resource Center, told The New Republic.
Thanks to restrictive language, Penobscot Nation, the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point, and the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township were excluded from the 2013 version of VAWA.
“We’re seeing months to years they have to wait in district court, and these cases are very sensitive because it gets tricky enforcing abuse orders with all the different jurisdictions,” Maulian Dana, who serves as Ambassador for the Penobscot Nation, told The Portland Press Herald. “Some walk away from the process. If we were able to handle these cases in a more efficient manner in the tribal court, we could make a really big difference.”
In addition to giving tribal courts expanded jurisdiction, the new bill will also give tribes more money—tribes would get reimbursement from the U.S. Justice Department $5 billion to $25 billion per year.
“What has happened with Native women is the result of systemically ignoring, disrespecting, and disregarding a group of people and their own authority to protect themselves,” Elizabeth Reese, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School and an expert on American Indian tribal law told The New Republic. “Doing that so deeply and for so long isn’t going to be fixed simply or quickly.”