![]() ![]() ![]() “There is an awful lot of shame about being assaulted for Indian women. Amnesty International hailed the bill as a groundbreaking piece of legislation that tackles the complex jurisdictional maze that allows violent crime against American Indians to continue unabated.įar more insidious than the failure of federal, state, and tribal authorities to protect Indian women and prosecute perpetrators is the shocking climate of resignation, even acceptance, among many Indian people toward sexual assault. In July, Congress finally passed a bill to give greater local control to Native American tribal authorities to deal with crimes on reservations, including sexual violence against women. This represents a 250 percent increase over the past two years for such programming. The Obama Administration has taken action in response to this news with landmark financial support, increasing funding for programs that work with tribal courts and law enforcement by nearly $180 million in fiscal year 2011. In some of the cases, officials cited jurisdictional problems. attorneys had declined to prosecute 47 percent of all cases in Indian Country referred to them in 2009. The Justice Department recently released statistics for the first time indicating that U.S. After hearing details of Indian women’s experience with the “system,” however, she and John Beyer, deputy chief of Duluth police, have promised to make substantive changes in how their departments treat American Indian sexual assault victims. Louis county attorney, who admitted to an initial reaction of defensiveness and guilt. The audit was a wake-up call for Duluth authorities such as Leslie Beiers, assistant St. Surprised by their findings, the authors continued their research back to 2004 and were unable to find any prosecutions of sexual assault for American Indian victims. According to an extensive three-year study of the Duluth Police Department conducted by Mending the Sacred Hoop and the Program for Aid to Victims of Sexual Assault, none of the forty-plus cases of sexual assault reported by American Indian women went to prosecution. Indian women understand that reporting rape doesn’t often result in prosecution so they choose simply not to subject themselves to additional trauma, notes Pauline Musgrove, executive director of the Spirits of Hope Coalition, in the Amnesty report. “Indian women don’t trust the system,” Matthews says. They may be concerned about past arrest warrants, they may fear they could lose their children, or they may worry no one will believe them. Indian women often don’t report sexual assaults, according to Matthews and other advocates. “We’d like to know who those two other women are who haven’t been assaulted because we haven’t yet met them,” says Nicole Matthews of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition. The actual rate of sexual assault for American Indian women is likely far greater than the data presented by the Justice Department or the “Maze of Injustice,” according to sexual assault advocates. Raping Indian women has essentially been a right of conquest, notes Deer, a Muscogee Creek who served as a consultant on the “Maze of Injustice” report. Indian women have been viewed as legitimate and deserving targets for sexual violence since the earliest days of colonialization, according to researchers such as Sarah Deer, professor at the William Mitchell College of Law. It has been open season on American Indian women in this country for more than 200 years. For example, in 2004, 65.1 percent of perpetrators of sexual violence against white women were white and 89.8 percent of perpetrators against African American women were African American.įor American Indian women, however, these facts are old news-really old news. Data gathered from Justice Department reports also shows that 86 percent of rapes reported by Indian women involve a perpetrator outside of their race. According to the 2006 “Maze of Injustice” report by Amnesty International, one in three American Indian women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Indian women experience higher rates of sexual assault than any other ethnic or racial group in the United States. The sweetness of this month, however, is belied by the reason for my visit: to learn more about the ways that American Indian women here are addressing the plague of sexual assault in their communities. These first warm spring days mean that the sugar bush camps can begin, a treasured time for Ojibwe families to work together tapping maple trees and spending long hours boiling the sap down to its exquisite syrup. ![]()
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