North Dakota. High noon. Plains browned by a long winter lie under the backdrop of a blue sky dotted with picturesque clouds.

Suddenly, oil wells and fracking stations scar the tranquil scenery as one crosses the boundary onto the Fort Berthold Reservation.

Semis routinely thunder by, their wheels spraying swirls of dust, blanketing the landscape in a russet haze, as if to remind its residents, things will never be as they were before the oil boom.

At midnight, flares will light the sky like campfires for the stars. The horizon is surrounded by a flickering orange glow in all directions: an endless sunset.

On a normal night, you can no longer see the stars, as flares hiss and belch natural gas fireballs into the sky.

A kitschy, wooden cowboy stands with his arms posed in an awkward embrace near a stoplight. The Bureau of Indian Affairs building stands imposingly across a small plaza with a bead shop, jewelry store and plastic oil well.

Farther down the street sits a billboard advertising apartments for $1,500 monthly rent, as an errant tumbleweed somersaults across the road – signs of how much things have changed.

“It’s a shock for me every time I go off; to me, it doesn’t even look like home anymore,” Bernadine Young Bird said, her face wistful and sad. Young Bird is a faculty member at Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College and member of the Maxoadi Hidatsa clan, where her people used to roam the lowlands before the government flooded them to create Lake Sakakawea.

Now, that once pristine Indian country is home to hundreds of mechanical arms violently pulling oil to the surface to be sent down the “Black Snake” of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which starts here.

It is also home to one of the most high-profile once missing indigenous people in a country with too many of them: Olivia Lone Bear, Young Bird’s niece.

The oil powers towns across America, funds schools and health centers on the reservation, provides checks for once-impoverished people and employs thousands of oil workers, self-described rock n’ rollers and drifters who pour into the community from all over, bunking in makeshift “man camps” and overrunning hotels.

But not everyone in the Bakken Region’s shale haven is “oil-rich.” In fact, the reservation is stratified by those who leased their land to the oil companies, those who refused to do so and everyone in between.

Prices rose to levels only those profiting from the oil could afford and crime and pollution rose to levels many of the Native residents had never seen before.

Nearby business chains were forced to import workers from Africa, as minimum-wage jobs sat empty in the oil economy. Frac sand was carted to the Bakken from Wisconsin.

In 2018, North Dakota produced 11.5% of the nation’s crude oil, second only to Texas.

Before the oil, government extermination and termination policies, poverty, drugs and disaffection ravished reservations, leading to domestic violence, higher rates of suicide and, yes, murdered and missing indigenous people.

After the oil, these existing ills worsened.

“I feel like we’re going extinct,” Francia White Body, a tribal Head Start worker, said as she walked out of the Better B Cafe, the local watering hole in New Town, the main outpost on this western North Dakota reservation that is home to Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people (former rivals now called the MHA Nation or Three Affiliated Tribes).

But for Young Bird, the oil and missing and murdered people are but the latest of many acts of violence visited upon the Native people, which is how many here describe themselves.

“When you think about our history, it’s a story of survival,” she said. “My people are very resilient.”

Twenty-eight-year-old James Phelan, a Hidatsa cultural leader, has kept that fighting spirit alive with his passion for tradition.

Students encountered Phelan loading wood for a traditional sweat lodge ceremony into his truck outside a one-stop-shop in Mandaree, a reservation town so small that it lacks a library and grocery store.

From the outside looking in, it may seem as though the residents do not have much.

However, as Phelan later explained before the purity of a sacred fire, the strength of North Dakota’s Native people lies in their fealty to profound intangibles:

Culture. Heritage. Community. Spirituality. And a traditional reverence for protecting the Earth.

Phelan, who belongs to a tribe once whittled down to 100 people from smallpox, said the elders are the tribe’s heartbeat.

“It’s a beautiful thing to be Native American,” he said.

But to be Native American is also to be imperiled.

According to a 2008 National Criminal Justice Reference Service report submitted to the Department of Justice, “Some counties have rates of murder against American Indian and Alaska Native women that are over ten times the national average.”

And in a 2018 report by the National Congress of American Indians, researchers found that more than half of Native women have experienced sexual violence and/or intimate partner violence.

“That’s why they call it the Wild West,” said Josephine Espino, the business administrator of Mandaree Public School.

Olivia Lone Bear made that wild country her home, caring for her father and four children and befriending those working in the oil fields.

Beautiful and spirited, she had pride in her heritage and wore it in the form of a tattoo on her arm which read, “Lone Bear.”

Last seen leaving Sportsmen Bar in an oil worker’s truck, she vanished, leaving behind questions, frantic relatives and another name to add to the growing list of missing and murdered indigenous women.

To better understand the topic of missing and murdered indigenous people nationwide, seven diverse journalism students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee spent three months exploring the issue. They contacted every tribe in Wisconsin for statistics and spoke to families in four states.

The students also traveled to New Town and Mandaree, North Dakota, small communities on the Fort Berthold Reservation, where they found a people struggling to survive the aftermath of an oil boom.

Although DAPL sparked protests that drew national media and celebrity attention, not far from where the pipeline starts, oil quietly permeates the landscape. Media coverage of the DAPL narrative focused on water, while the realities of what it carried — oil — were largely left out.

Drugs, prostitution, accidents, disappearances and occasionally, murders, have turned the quiet reservation into a place Young Bird drives through hunkered down, hoping to make it home without being crushed by a semi.

“It used to be a beautiful drive,” she said. “Today, you’re just white-knuckled, driving and watching for the trucks.”

Seventeen hundred wells blotted federal and Indian reservation lands in 2017, according to the Bureau of Land Management, pushed there after President Obama cracked down on fracking in 2015  — rules the Trump Administration rescinded in 2017.  

“We’re like rock ‘n’ rollers. We work all day, drink beer all night, and then move on to the next place,” said an oil worker from Arkansas as he smoked a cigarette outside New Town’s Teddy’s Residential Suites, a hotel crawling with men from all over the country. Every morning like clockwork, uniformed workers climb onto a company shuttle. He, like others, refused to give his name out of fear his company would not approve.

During 2017, there were 10,642 entries for missing Native Americans according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Last year, 9,914 such entries of missing Native Americans were made.

But the data is less clear on reservation land, where tribal data, if collected, is often not shared with the public.

Two women determined to see Native people counted uncovered over 500 cases of missing and murdered women and girls in various cities across the country as part of their report.

Annita Lucchesi, a doctoral student, and Urban Indian Health Institute Director Abigail Echo-Hawk compiled a 24-page report in 2018, where they analyzed data collection efforts, police efficacy, media coverage and victimization trends.

They also found 506 instances of missing and murdered native women and girls in those urban areas, 95% of whom never received national media coverage.

They found that most Native people (70%) live off-reservation, making it more difficult to track crimes due to race misidentification.

To be sure, although Fort Berthold locals say oil has driven up crime (drugs, sex trafficking), the issue of missing and murdered indigenous people is a causal braid both here and elsewhere, not always linked to oil. There’s Native on Native violence, white on Native violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, a meth epidemic and those who simply vanished into thin air. The common thread: More than two centuries of oppression.

A report funded by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, from 2006 to 2012, the rate of “violent victimization known to law enforcement in the Bakken oil-producing region of Montana and North Dakota increased, particularly the rate of aggravated assault, which increased 70%.”

“There was no similar increase in rates of violent crime in the counties surrounding the Bakken oil region,” the study concluded. “Rates of male and female violent victimization in the Bakken region increased during this period, with the increase being higher for males (up 31%) than females (up 18%).”

Rick Ruddell, author of “Oil, Gas, and Crime: The Dark Side of the Boomtown,” also studied crime spikes near oil fields.

“Everybody living in a boomtown suffers from a reduced quality of life due to antisocial behavior and crime, the disruption of long-standing routines and relationships, and the environmental impacts of development,” he wrote.

He also found that women were afraid to go out at night, wait for public transportation and even walk by themselves during the day.

Lucchesi said that fear is borne from centuries of being stereotyped as the “sexy savage.”

“On colonial occupations, we had generations of Pocahontas and all you see ia women who are sexy and exotic,” Lucchesi said. “This was the only image of native women.”

An analysis of the Marcellus shale region in the east coast states of New York and Pennsylvania found that violent crime increased 35% in counties with high amounts of fracking between 2004-2012.

And in North Dakota, Ruddell noted how the number of registered sex offenders increased in the Bakken region between 2000-2014 compared to counties with less oil activity.

Ruddell’s research also found that men are more likely to be victims of violent crime, despite receiving less media attention.

This disparity has prompted some community leaders to create a more inclusive #MMIR — missing and murdered indigenous relatives.

Relatives like Gene Cloud, Timothy Thompson and Daniel Skenandore from Wisconsin who have not been seen in years since their disappearances.

The disparities in enforcement and coverage are rooted in termination policies and crime legislation that stripped tribal law enforcement of their ability to prosecute non-Natives who commit crimes on reservation land.

Consequently, jurisdiction, despite efforts to cross-deputize and share information, has become a nightmare.

McLean County Sheriff Jerry Kerzmann said agencies must work together to improve how they handle sudden rises in crime.

“By not having a relationship, we are empowering drug dealers, addicts, and the people being affected,” he said. “It’s a time now when we need everyone with a badge and gun working together to resolve these problems.”

Most jurisdiction rules are based not only on where a crime occurs, but the tribal status of the victim and more importantly, the tribal status of the suspected perpetrator.

In missing persons cases, responding officers must determine whether an adult’s disappearance is suspicious enough to warrant police intervention at all, before attempting to bring in other agencies to work the case.

As a result, women like Olivia Lone Bear are lost in the confusion.

Lone Bear’s brother had to file two police reports after the first was never recorded and Young Bird said there was no BOLO issued for her truck until days after her disappearance.

Lone Bear’s family organized, searched and publicized Olivia’s case in a campaign few families of missing indigenous people have the resources to mount.

They conducted multiple land searches and begged city officials to check the waterways.

Then one month turned into nine, and the family was left searching for answers until two fishermen caught a strange ping beneath the blue majesty of Lake Sakakawea and found Lone Bear in the truck submerged below the surface.

The discovery of her watery grave has left the family with more questions than answers as they desperately chase a feeling that goes beyond the simplistic word, “closure.”

Editor’s note: Each chapter included some reporting from other members of the student journalism team.

The post Chapter One: The Heart of the Bakken appeared first on 'We Are Still Here'.

Troika Yaskovic, an 18-year-old working at the Four Bears Casino gift shop, said, “You can’t see the sky because the smoke is so thick.”

So it’s only fitting that Annita Lucchesi, called “Evening Star Woman” (Hetoevėhotohke’e) in her language of Cheyenne, would come to shine a light on the abuses faced by her people.

Lucchesi became invested in researching violence because of her own experiences.

“I’m a survivor of sexual violence and human trafficking,” she said “It’s a violence that almost ended my life.”

So while studying for her master’s degree at Washington State University, she partnered with Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, to send open record requests to 71 police departments across the nation.

From the responses, they compiled their 2018 report Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls.

 The results were shocking:

• There were 5,712 cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls reported in 2016, but only 116 were logged into the DOJ database
• The majority of Native Americans (71%) live off the reservation
• They identified 506 cases of Native women and girls, which were likely undercounted due to their presence in an urban area. Of those, 128 were missing persons cases, 280 were murder cases and 98 were cases with an “unknown status”
• Half of the perpetrators identified were non-Native
• The Northern Plains, which included the states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Colorado, had the second-highest number of cases involving missing and murdered indigenous women and girls
• Only 40 agencies of the 71 asked provided data
• More than 95% of the cases in the study were not covered by national media

Unlike many of those cases, however, Lucchesi and Echo-Hawk’s work brought national attention to the issues with data collection and ripple effects those issues have had on police and media efficacy.

“It reached everywhere,” she said. “I knew the stories was powerful, and it’s been really encouraging about how it has sparked.”

After writing the report, Lucchesi began Sovereign Body Institute, a non-profit organization advocating for survivors of sexual violence.

It is, as she says, her life’s work.

And that work, Lucchesi said, has helped her, and the families of the victims, heal: “A database is a process of prayer,” she said. “I don’t add to the database every day. When someone goes through extreme trauma, those pieces of your spirit bend. The process of the database is a deep sense of urgency (to bring) all these spirits home.”

Raylene Wolf did that for one Wisconsin tribe.

Currently the administrative assistant for Wisconsin’s Great Lakes Intertribal Council’s Aging & Disability Program, Wolf once worked for the La Courte Oreilles police department, where she helped set up the tribal police department with NIBERS, the National Incident Based Reporting System.

Started in 1988, NIBERS began as an offshoot of the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and was developed to collect national data more efficiently.

“I got us set up and I believe we were the third tribe in Wisconsin to start reporting,” she said.

Although it took six months of training and three months of supervision, Wolf was able to connect the tribal data from the police department to a larger network, helping better track crime trends and direct resources throughout the region.

For example, once they were set up with NIBERS, the department collaborated with Sawyer County.

The move was a milestone because even though some tribes report health and police data to the Department of Justice to apply for grants, Wolf said many tribes keep their information in-house and don’t share it with the public or other police departments.

“Tribes are a lot more private with their information,” she said. “I suppose it’s more of a sovereignty issue with the tribes that most don’t report the information.”

The Wisconsin DOJ UCR database contains tribal crime data we compiled from every tribe in Wisconsin.

Media Milwaukee journalists requested reservation crime data from every tribe from Wisconsin.

Some Wisconsin tribes with police departments, such as the Lac Du Flambeau, require permission from their tribal council before they can release such information.

Other tribes in Wisconsin, such as the Sokaogon Chippewa, Bad River and Red Cliff tribes told Media Milwaukee journalists that they do not collect such data.

Consequently, we examined crime in all of the counties which include reservation land:

But North Dakota’s “Crime Stats” database only included three homicides for all violent crime on tribal lands in 2017 and Fort Berthold MHA Nation representatives denied Media Milwaukee journalists access to their records.

Only crime data from North Dakotan counties with reservation lands were available.

Media Milwaukee reached out to former Fort Berthold Police Captain Grace Her Many Horses for an explanation, but despite several attempts, she did not return any of our calls.

North Segment Councilwoman Monica Mayer, who oversees New Town, North Dakota, said the lack of tribal and county data collection presents challenges for her as a policymaker because it’s difficult to create a solution for a problem you can’t see.

She also pointed out how collecting tribal data is just one of the concerns for the indigenous people of Fort Berthold, where the influx of drugs and alcohol from the oil boom have escalated rates of domestic violence, human trafficking and other violent crime.

Nationally, the trend toward higher death rates from drug and alcohol addiction, as well as homicide and suicide, is even clearer.

Tim Purdon was the United States Attorney for the District of North Dakota from 2010-2015.

During his work with tribal, county and federal law enforcement to increase public safety in Indian Country, Purdon said he saw first-hand how poverty contributes to addiction and violence.

“Reservations in my part of the world, the Great Plains, they suffer from tremendous challenges,” he said. “These are economically challenged areas … higher levels of addiction lead to higher levels of violence.”

Unemployment and poverty levels also lead to addiction and violence.

Purdon also said tight budgets make it incredibly difficult for North Dakota’s tribal police departments to collect tribal data.

“Tribal governments are not well-funded and the federal government has not lived up to its treaty obligations,” he explained.

As a result, he said, “data collection on reservations is not great.”

Janet Franson said the lack of accurate data collection by non-Native government agencies, such as state and local police departments, has a different cause: inefficacy.

“There are no numbers because nobody has given a damn enough until recently,” she said.

Franson, a retired former homicide detective, created Lost and Missing in Indian Country to track the number of missing Native women and girls, an uneasy feat given the fact that many are ruled accidents or suicides.

For example, Franson believes the death of three-year-old Keara Lee Coshow, who died in a fire that was ruled accidental, was actually due to child abuse.

According to the girl’s sister, Coshow had been shaken into unconsciousness before the fire occurred and months earlier, was blinded after Drano cleaner from a childproof canister made its way into her eyes.

However, no one has ever been charged in connection with the Lac Courte Oreilles girl’s death.

Franson described this carelessness as a reflection of how often Native people are ignored by non-Natives.

Her website, along with Justice for Native Women, the Native Alliance Against Violence and countless Facebook pages, is dedicated to Native people believed to be missing, murdered or gone.

It’s one way individuals are attempting to make those cases more visible and solvable. And although the sites are not perfect, government data entries are not either.

For example, law enforcement voluntarily adds missing people from their jurisdiction to NamUS, resulting in gaps and the DOJ-run Wisconsin Clearinghouse is missing Timothy Thompson.

But even without all the numbers, existing data from NCIC illustrates a more disturbing picture:

The chart above divided the U.S. Census Bureau population for particular races in specific years and dividing that figure by the number of missing people for particular races reported by the FBI’s NCIC for the corresponding year. The result of that calculation was then multiplied by 100,000, producing the rates of missing persons per 100,000 people in that racial category.

American Indians and Alaska Natives, represented by the purple line on the chart, have consistently illustrated the second-highest rate of missing people in the country, according to FBI statistics.

Moreover, predators, poverty, addiction and a lack of resources mean American Indian/Alaska Natives do not live as long as average Americans.

But for many Native Americans, numbers only show half the picture.

The other half can be heard in the dead of night, from the voices of Native Americans singing prayers to their ancestors.

It smells like burnt sage offered as thanks and goodwill to the spirits; tastes like the Three Sisters of corn, beans and squash Bernadine Young Bird keeps alive in the Hidatsa tradition of gardening; and is envisioned in the traditional garments of men like Eric Bears Paw, who adorn their carefully sewn and beaded ensembles with otter pelts.

And on the other half of each number is a loss that can be felt — a life, a voice, a face gone.

The post Chapter Four: Snapshot of Crime appeared first on 'We Are Still Here'.

Poor tribal-government relations along with government mistrust and high declination rates have only exacerbated the lack of justice administered for Native Americans and their families.

So when did this all begin?

As with most current issues, this one’s origins are rooted in the past.

How criminal jurisdiction changed in Indian Country:

• The Major Crimes Act was passed in 1885, as part of the Indian Appropriations Act. It placed violent crimes perpetrated by Native Americans in Native territory under federal jurisdiction.
• Public Law 280 was passed in 1953, as part of House Concurrent Resolution 108. It established tribal termination as the official federal policy. Public Law 280 removed jurisdiction from tribal law enforcement and transferred it to the states in California, Minnesota (except Red Lake), Nebraska, Oregon (except Warm Springs), Wisconsin and Alaska (except Metlakatla).
• The Supreme Court ruled in the 1978 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe case that Native tribal courts did not have jurisdiction over non-Natives.

In Wisconsin, only the Menominee tribe — terminated in 1961 and reinstated in 1973 — has sovereign status, which means the FBI investigates all cases above a misdemeanor.

Tribal police function as local police departments on reservtions with  Public Law 280 and prosecute through the District Attorney’s office, hence the double jurisdiction.

If a Native person is the victim or perpetrator of a crime off-reservation (in Milwaukee, for example), local police investigate; the FBI only gets involved if the person is of “tender age” and goes missing under suspicious circumstances (or committed a federal offense).

As both charts illustrate, tribal departments have very little jurisdiction over serious crimes.

And because of the Oliphant decision, tribes cannot prosecute non-Native criminals who committed offenses on their land.

Sarah Deer, tribal legal scholar and professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, said the federal government’s policies — between Public Law 280 and the precedent set by Oliphant — severely undercut tribal law enforcement’s ability to do their jobs.

“Because tribes lack jurisdiction in many cases, they’re not able to protect their own people,” she said.

Underfunding and understaffing are other reasons tribes are less able to protect their people.

According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “tribal governments often operate with anywhere from 55 percent to 75 percent less monetary resources than non-tribal governments.”

In addition, the report pointed out how reservation law enforcement needed $337 million to make its law enforcement staffing equal to that of county government.

The report also noted that the law-enforcement-to-resident ratio is below average (3.5 per 1,000 residents) in Indian Country, which was at 1.9 per 1,000 residents during the 2010 year — in the heart of the oil boom.

That was only one way in which, as Bernadine Young Bird remarked, the tribe was not prepared for the side effects of an oil boom.

At the height of the boom, existing police issues were exacerbated by the influx of drugs onto the Bakken oil patch, where Tim Purdon, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of North Dakota, saw heroin being sold for the first time in the state.

“There was a very large spike in organized, out of state drug traffickers because of the amount of huge population growth, people with a lot of money in their pocket,” he said.

McLean County Sheriff Jerry Kerzmann, who polices an area just 90 miles east of New Town, agreed.

“We’re way busier now than we were before the oil boom,” he acknowledged.

Law enforcement agencies have begun sharing jurisdiction in their effort to address drug crimes, Kerzmann noted, despite initial hesitancy from tribal leaders.

“Tribal council leaders were hesitant because they didn’t want to give up sovereignty. (There’s) a lot of bad blood from 50-60 years ago,” he said. “Now we work together.”

Operation Winter’s End, which deployed FBI and BIA resources on the Fort Berthold Reservation to catch drug traffickers, was one particular instance of such interagency cooperation.

The effort, partially led by Purdon, resulted in 22 key arrests.

However, such successes are rare — in the year following that operation (2014), there were 5,223 drug/narcotic violations across the state.

According to North Dakota Rep. Ruth Buffalo, Native residents have little hope that cases involving missing and murdered indigenous people will reach successful conclusions.

“I think many people feel there is a lack of justice or that nothing will be done in these cases,” she explained.

Young Bird certainly felt that way when Olivia Lone Bear went missing and the family assumed a BOLO had been issued for her car — only to find it hadn’t been issued four days later.

“When the report was made, we assumed they would get a BOLO out and things would start rolling,” she explained. “So one of her brothers checked the police department in Watford to see if anything had resulted from the BOLO and they asked the officer (who) said ‘What BOLO?’”

“On the fourth day, we found out that the report hadn’t gotten in, so my brother had to go down and do the report again,” she said.

Young Bird is helping develop a protocol which will incorporate the families of a missing person into missing persons investigations.

Janet Franson was a detective in Lakeland, Florida for 21 years before she retired and spent her next 10 years working as a Doe Network volunteer, NAMUS administrator, cold case investigator and the creator of Lost and Missing in Indian Country, a website aimed at finding missing Native Americans.

According to Franson, police officers’ blasé attitude stems from a dislike of missing persons cases and a disregard for imperfect victims — sex workers, addicts and women who seem to make their own bed.

“People don’t like missing persons cases because a lot of them don’t think they’re real police-work,” she said. “I think there’s an awful lot of lazy police officers all over the place that are not investigating to their ability.”

For example, in several cases, Franson said authorities don’t look for people.

“They just (come) up with every excuse in the book. Even if she was a runaway, that doesn’t mean something bad couldn’t happen to her; that’s just not doing your job, I don’t care who you are.”

Deer said many police departments simply do not value Native lives: “The government doesn’t listen to native voices,” she said. “We’re not as significant a population. We’re not valued.”

However, Missoula Police Detective Guy Baker from Montana said his investigations have nothing to do with race.

Baker, a 29-year veteran of the force, has been looking for Jermain Charlo since the 23-year-old from the Flathead Indian Reservation went missing at a bar in January of 2019.

Baker said the aspiring artist was likely a victimized by sex traffickers.

Still, he said he has spent 2,500 man-hours, looked at half a dozen suspects, interviewed 50 people and executed several search warrants to find her.

“I have done everything for Jermain,” He said. “They trust me. They know I have good intentions. I’m doing everything.”

However, Baker appears to be an anomaly.

Families typically experience much less in the way of justice.

For example, there has yet to be a charge in the 28-year-old unsolved murder of Susan Poupart, a Lac Du Flambeau woman who was last seen getting into a car with multiple men.

The mother of two who loved to laugh and paint was found six months later as bones scattered around the Chequamegon National Forest.

Although all three men were questioned extensively and invited to testify at an open hearing, where one man invoked his Fifth Amendment, the other asked for an attorney and the third didn’t show up; at a second set of hearings when all three men were supposed to appear, the first witness asked for an attorney, prompting the officials to adjourn the hearing until December.

It is unclear whether that hearing was ever reconvened, yet charges have never been brought against the men.

Of course, even if the police referred the three men for charges, there is no evidence that the Vilas County prosecutor — or a federal one — would follow through.

Declination rates, which represent how often federal prosecutors decline to prosecute cases referred to them by police, are significantly higher in Indian Country than elsewhere.

In the fiscal year of 2013, the United States Attorney’s Office found that, over one-third (34% or 853 cases out of 2,542) of Indian country referrals for federal prosecution were declined in comparison to a national declination rate of 15% (25,629 out of 174,024 declined).

In 2017, declinations had risen to 37% (891) of the 2,390 cases referred to prosecutors in Indian Country.

It is the last link in a rusted and broken chain.

In cases where something happens to an tribal member, the case must be assigned to the proper authority, which can be difficult to ascertain without an investigation — after all, missing person cases rarely have an obvious “perpetrator.”

Then, officers must work the case diligently enough to find a body and/or a perpetrator, if there is one.

And finally, prosecutors must be willing to take police referrals.

But for Native people from Mandaree, North Dakota to Menominee, Wisconsin, justice is as fleeting as the wind.

The greatest danger with this lack of accountability, Deer said, is that it leads to Native people — and especially women — being seen as easy targets for predators.

“The system isn’t set up to protect them so that’s the reason that sex predators target native women,” She said. “The cases need to be investigated so that sends a message to predators: these women are not fair game, they are not ignored.”

The post Chapter Six: Jurisdiction and Justice in Indian Country appeared first on 'We Are Still Here'.

This person is valuable, someone misses them.

But rarely, according to Zach Sommers’ 2016 report, is that message sent for Native Americans.

After studying five news sources (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution without AP contributions, Atlanta Journal-Constitution with AP contributions, the Chicago Tribune, CNN and the Minneapolis Star Tribune), he found that “Missing White Woman Syndrome” is not just a catchy phrase, but a media reality.

Four of the five sources he analyzed overrepresented women and white missing people compared to missing men and people of color, respectively.

And Sommers found even greater disparities when he looked at the intensity of coverage, where half of the coverage covered missing white women as their subjects.

“… Whites, women, and likely white women in particular benefit from a higher intensity of coverage than other missing persons,” he concluded.

In contrast, missing Native American men seem the least likely to benefit from this type of coverage.

Daniel Skenandore, who has been missing for over 20 years, is an example of one such man.

He was last seen in Black River Falls, Wisconsin by friends who said Skenandore wanted to travel to Wyoming, according to a detective interviewed by local media.

However, he was never heard from after he called his girlfriend at 8 p.m. on Apr. 26, 1996 to tell her he would be working late.

There has been scant coverage by media in Green Bay; outside of Green Bay, there has been almost none.

The intersectionality is clear, and for many Native people, so is the motivation.

“In general, women of color who go missing are not profiled in the media… [because] their cases are not important enough to warrant media coverage,” said Sarah Deer, a Native American lawyer, advocate and professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law.

And this isn’t a new phenomenon.

A 1992 study by Robert Entman found racial bias which consistently criminalized non-white groups, while Herbert J. Gans’ 1979 book “Deciding What’s News” explored how the news’ ethnocentric and middle-class skew makes stories about non-white, working-class and similar groups less important.

Deer said unequal coverage is not only unfair, but reduces the chances other missing people can be found:

“If the media is not covering it, then people won’t know to look for these women.”

So they don’t.

U.S. Rep. Ruth Buffalo, who represents the 27^th District of North Dakota, said Native people still fight for recognition as humans, let alone victims worthy of news coverage.

“Many people believe there is still so much work to have indigenous people recognized as humans,” she said.

In fact, in 2007, the U.N. made a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which recognized, “… the urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights of indigenous peoples.”

Buffalo, who was born in Mandaree, said Native people have struggled to gain respect since “first contact” — a euphemism for the colonists who came to claim their land.

And the media has become more of a problem than a solution.

“I think, in general, it’s an issue for indigenous people to have proper coverage in the media, accurate coverage,” she said. “There are a lot of stereotypes against Native Americans, like oh, they just take off.”

And sometimes they do; but not at a rate less than their white counterparts who are highlighted in the media.

Of the 612,846 missing person entries for 2018, over 90% (553,065) were cancelled, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.

Doctoral candidate Annita Lucchesi and Urban Indian Health Institute Director Abigail Echo-Hawk, who identified 506 cases of missing and murdered native women after sending open records requests to 71 police departments, also identified several media shortcomings in their report.

They analyzed 934 articles on the cases they found and discovered that 95% of the 506 cases were not covered by national media at all, indicating that most coverage is localized.

Moreover, of the 934 articles they analyzed, violent, disparaging and/or dehumanizing language was used:

• Over one-third (38%) referenced drugs or alcohol
• One-third (33%) misgendered trans-women
• Nearly one-third (31%) referenced the victim’s criminal history
• One in ten (11%) referenced sex work

Buffalo said the media should focus on solutions instead of victim shaming, blaming or ignoring.

“We just have to look at what facts are present and the lack of media coverage or response does make one wonder … Does implicit bias play a role and how do we work towards addressing that ?” She asked.

Some of the journalists who covered the area, however, argue they are often hamstrung by an uncooperative tribal police force and suspicious Native American community.

Stu Merry, a reporter for the BHG news service, lives in Garrison, North Dakota, 20 miles from the Fort Berthold White Shield reservation line.

When he was a reporter, he said tribal police never shared information.

“Anything that happens out there, it goes into a black hole,” he said. “You will not get anything from tribal officials.”

“They’re very nice people out there, they’re just protective,” he added.

Jenny Michael, who worked at the Bismarck Tribune, said she doesn’t remember tribal police ever returning a phone call in eight years.

“Culturally, it’s just different,” she said. “They’re not super open to talking about a lot of this stuff. And I don’t know if that’s just cultural or just years of being beaten down by the poor system they have to deal with. “

But these jurisdictional quagmires don’t prevent broadcasters from putting up a missing indigenous person’s photo, describing the circumstances of their disappearance or publicizing a tip line every day someone is missing.

The difference, Deer said, is indifference.

“I don’t think (these cases) are straight forward, but I do think that what we have is official indifference in many cases,” she explained. “We’re not valued.”

“When Elizabeth Smart goes missing, everybody looks at her and she’s on CNN and, and you know, prime time news. But when a woman of color goes missing, especially a woman of color that might be a sex worker or might have an addiction problem or has been homeless … they don’t prioritize that disappearance.”

Robin Lynn Fox, a Native American mother from Fort Berthold went missing in 2014, yet was never searched for in Google. Searches for Jessica Heeringa, a white mother who disappeared from a gas station in 2013, reached peak popularity weeks after her disappearance and continued to to be searched for after.

Heeringa’s case appeared on Unsolved Mystery, an Investigation Discovery series called Disappeared, The Vanished podcast and Crime Watch Daily.

Fox’s case has yet to receive similar coverage on a television show.

Gene Cloud, a Native American man who went missing from Jackson, Wisconsin in 2012, also went missing with very little of the public consciousness being raised.

In fact, only five articles about his disappearance are available on the web.

In comparison, Gavin Smith, a 57-year-old white film executive who disappeared in California during the same year, reached peak popularity in Google searches during the month of his disappearance even in Wisconsin, where Gene Cloud was from.

Gavin’s body was found in 2014 and someone was been convicted of his murder in 2017.

Cloud has never been found.

Gene Jacob Cloud Jr., who went missing from Black River Falls, Wisconsin on January 25, 2012, would be 27 now.

He went missing on a stretch of Highway O, where a sheriff noticed his truck in a ditch, and says Cloud ran off into the woods before he could approach.

According to one of the five articles about his disappearance, he had recently started classes to earn his high school diploma and when he went missing, he left behind a pregnant girlfriend and a grieving mother.

Cloud, like other Native Americans who go missing, was valuable.

His family, like so many other Native American families, have missed him since he disappeared.

And for all intents and purposes, so has the media.

The post Chapter Seven: Missing in Media appeared first on 'We Are Still Here'.

Alexandra (“Alex”) and Jared Poupart, now older with children of their own, struggled in the immediate aftermath of their mother’s disappearance and long after, left to carry just fragments, photographs and snatches of time as told by others.

Small, but no slouch in a fight, Jared said people told him she was strong-willed.

“She didn’t take s— from nobody and she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.”

And she wasn’t afraid to go out and have a good time.

But “Suzy,” as those who knew her called her, would never have abandoned her children.

So when the 29-year-old left for a party on May 20, 1990 and didn’t resurface for days, her sister and mother reported her missing.

Lac Du Flambeau is a Public Law 280 reservation, which means Vilas County has jurisdiction for serious investigations.

As the hope Poupart might be found alive swiftly slipped away, search parties organized by her family and the Vilas County sheriff’s office went through the summer into the fall in search of Poupart.

Poupart’s scattered bones were found by hunters on Thanksgiving Day in the Chequamegon National Forest of Price County.

Vilas County Sheriff Joseph Fath, who has taken up the case since becoming sheriff in 2013, said, “We knew from the crime scene that she was murdered.”

They found remnants of plastic and tape, in what Fath said was part of an effort to hide her remains.

Moreover, DNA was in its infancy, so material at the scene that might have been successfully tested then has since degraded.

All police did have was a story:

She went to a party for someone going away into the military.

Witnesses last saw her getting into a car with two men between 4 and 4:30 a.m.

Fath said two men, Joe Cobb and Robert Elm, told investigators they began arguing and dropped her off at the Lac du Flambeau Elementary School.

“That was suspicious,” Fath said, adding that their focus remains on the two men she left the party with, Cobb and Elm, as well as Fritz Schuman, another man who became a person of interest later in the investigation.

In other news reports, those three individuals were Robert Elm, Fritz Schuman and Joe Cobb.

Despite messages sent through social media, attempted phone calls and certified letters, none of the men responded to Media Milwaukee inquiries for their sid eof the story.

However, despite multiple interrogations and an open hearing held on her case, none of the persons of interest have ever been charged with a crime related to her disappearance or death.

All that pain, it’s still here.

Alex Poupart

Alex said she understands why Fath and the District Attorney’s office haven’t been able to build a strong enough case on behalf of her mother.

“It was a different time in 1999 or 1990 where you could get away with something like that if it was planned property,” Alex said. “They can’t prove what happened to my mom ’cause they don’t know.”

Jared said he is frustrated and pessimistic about a justice system he believes has treated his mother’s case differently because she is Native American. “The value of a Native American’s life to the government is nothing,” he said. “Look at the white women who got murdered in the surrounding communities; their murders were solved within a matter of months.”

But his mother’s case remains unsolved, because witnesses won’t speak and Susan and no longer can.

“It’s just the hardest part when you lose somebody,” Alex said, her voice breaking. “All that pain, it’s still here.”

Susan Poupart was beautiful, her son said.

He has long believed that beauty may have contributed to her death.

Jared Poupart is the father of a five-year-old namesake who is his world.

He works at a travel building in the tribal economics support office. And in his free time, he goes spearfishing and collects wild rice in the glimmering waterways of Lac Du Flambeau.

But no matter where he is, he said he is always thinking of his mother.

“Every day, I think about my mom,” he said. “I say hi to her and tell her I love her.”

Alexandra, Susan Poupart’s daughter, was much younger when her mother went missing.

Alex never knew her father and has fewer memories of her mother than Jared.

From others, she learned that her mother was an artist, that she was left-handed and that she spent time in New Mexico at American Indian University.

And she remembers how her mother’s death affected Jared: “He was real hurt as a boy.”

They’ve all had a life with their children … Me and my sister, we had that taken away.

Jared Poupart

Jared said he’s always wondered what his life would have been like if his mother had never been murdered.

Before her disappearance, Jared said his mother made sure he and his sister were always taken care of.

“Every morning, I’d wake up and my clothes would be on the edge of my bed,” he said. “She always dressed me up in nice clothes: buttoned up shirts, dress pants, shoes; that’s how she’d send me to school every day.”

“When I was small, she would give me an Eskimo kiss and she’d blow air into my mouth and my cheeks would puff up and we’d always laugh.”

On the night of May 20, Jared’s grandmother begged Susan to not to go out, telling her she had a bad feeling.

When she didn’t come home a few days later, her family grew worried and a nine-year-old Jared went with his aunts and uncles to look for her. But it would be nine months before his grandmother’s intuition was proven right.

There’s people out there that know what happened. I just need them to come forward.”

Sheriff Joseph Fath

“We were going out and looking everywhere in the woods. My uncle David, he pulled me aside … he said Jared, ‘Man, your mom is not coming home, she’s gone now.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘She’s dead. I’m sorry I’m the one who has to tell you this, but your mom is not coming home no more.’”

For years, Jared said he shut down: “I locked my feelings away for a long time,” he recalled.

Jared grew up with his grandmother while Alex was raised by one of her aunts.

Alex said growing up separately changed their sibling relationship.

“Me and my brother weren’t as close as we should have been growing up,” she explained.

Jared grew up with a grandmother wracked with guilt that she didn’t do more to keep Susan home that fateful night.

“That broke my grandmother’s heart and I had to live with that. I lived with my grandma and she cried all the time. She tried to kill herself a couple of times with her insulin; I had to stop her.”

Alex also changed, having grown up without either of her biological parents: “When I was younger, before I had kids, I used to drink a lot and I was restless,” she said.

She dreads the day she has to explain to her children, who are all under nine, why they can’t see their grandmother.

“My kids really are at the age where they don’t know about it yet… so they’ve asked about her and they talk about her, but the murder thing has not come up with them yet,” she said.

Jared also said he wishes his mother could have met her grandchildren. “They’re never going to know her — only through a picture,” he said, adding that it’s unfair that his mother’s killer(s) have not had to live with the consequences of their actions the way he and his sister have.

“They’ve all had a life with their children,” he said bitterly. “Me and my sister, we had that taken away.”

“They” are the three men Jared and Alex have heard, through rumors, are responsible for their mother’s death: Elm, Schuman and Cobb.

In fact, it is through rumors that Jared has cobbled together a horrific biography of his mother’s last moments:

That after she was whisked away from the party, she was the victim of an attempted sexual assault and beaten when she resisted; then gang-raped, shot and killed with the pump part of a tire jack.

But the same people who told Jared these tidbits have refused to go to the police.

“I’m not sure, but I believe there are people in that community in Lac Du Flambeau that know something about this case and they have chosen not to come forward,” he said. “There’s people out there that know what happened. I just need them to come forward.”

The case has been notoriously difficult to prove, but Alex has always believed the three men brought before the open hearings were the men who killed her mother.

“It was from people within our community. If the community could get more involved and help out, it would be solved,” she said, her voice strained with anger and sadness.

But that maddening wall of silence has in fact, reached open hearings when only one of the three men, Schuman, showed up — and pled the fifth.

In the Lac Du Flambeau community, Susan Poupart’s death has created a rift between those who knew the suspects and Jared and Alex.

“There’s been nothing but conflict between me and them,” she said.

But he said whoever killed her is carrying a sickness in their soul: “They did some evil s— and I know they feel it every day,” he said.

Jared said he doesn’t have a lot of hope that his mothers’ killers will ever be brought to justice in a court of law.

But he believes talking about it might help.

“Maybe my story will get out and be heard by somebody who is willing to help and do something about it because my family, we deserve some justice,” he said.

Anyone with information about Susan Poupart’s murder can contact the Vilas County Sheriff’s Office at (800) 472-7290 and ask for Lieutenant Carl Gauger or Sheriff Joe Fath. 

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