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'.

“We were homestead people. We were gardeners,” said James Moren, a supervisor over the long earth lodges, a historical preservation area that studies and reconstructs traditional homes of the Hidatsa nation. “And we are still here.”

The Mandan and Hidatsa are some of the few Native nations who can say their reservation land is actually a part of the same land they’ve always known. Moren said his people have a long and storied history of farming and settling villages. They didn’t spend their time as nomads chasing buffalo across the plains, an assumption Moren would like outsiders to stop making.

According to Bernadine Young Bird, a faculty member at the Native American Studies and Cultural Center and amateur historian, their main source of food came from the “Three Sisters,” crops of beans, squash and corn. Young Bird also said they were fond of sunflowers.

“All three tribes were agricultural people,” Young Bird said. “We survived on what we had and didn’t need a store.”

Of course, the land and the people in it have changed tremendously over the years. In many ways, Fort Berthold would be unrecognizable to anyone from the olden days. People like Moren and Young Bird are making a conscious effort to preserve what is left of their history and culture and restore what they can, to the best of their abilities.

Young Bird teaches classes on how to cultivate gardens the traditional way. She hopes to preserve the Hidatsa words for their tools and techniques through her teachings. She said few fluent speakers are alive today. And their memories are getting hazy due to decades of discouragement from speaking their mother tongue by the United States government.

The memory of Bernadine Young Bird’s first-grade teacher is seared into her brain. Young Bird remembers her life as a little girl, speaking Hidatsa as a first language at home. She didn’t know a word of English before setting foot in her government-run classroom. She learned to speak English regularly by the end of the year. She doesn’t credit her first-grade teacher for this. She said it was done purely out of survival.

“It wasn’t a choice for us, like, say, for German immigrants,” Young Bird said. “We were persecuted.”

The people here have known many hardships. All three nations began their history separate from one another. Now, they’re blended mostly into a single identity. The Mandan and Hidatsa are native to the Bakken. But the Arikara, once a rival, came to them in an hour of need.

On the run from persecution and literally starving to death, they resorted to boiling their moccasins for nourishment. The Hidatsa took in the Arikara and gave them their own space to recover and thrive. Over time, the three nations naturally consolidated their resources in order to better survive. A series of dire smallpox plagues made this transition into the MHA even more of a requirement than ever before.

Before European colonization began in the Americas, Native American people had little to no immunities from foreign diseases. When the first settlers arrived from across the vast ocean, they brought with them several devastating plagues that would rock the entire native population to its very foundation. Historians estimate up to 112 million Indigenous peoples lived across the American continents before Columbus landed. Most lost their lives when exposed to the flu, measles and smallpox. For the MHA, their hardships especially began with a smallpox epidemic.

While essentially extinct these days thanks to vaccinations, smallpox used to be one of the most deadly diseases known to humanity. Victims would find themselves covered in painful blisters and sores. They would suffer from a fever and vomiting. The disease spreads easily and few survive. Those that do are left with permanent scarring from the sores. At one point, all three tribes found their population depleted down to around 100 people. One of their leaders, Chief Four Bears, became infected with the disease. He knew he was going to die. In order to save his people and avoid spreading the plague, Four Bears took his horse and rode off into the wilderness, never to be seen again. He is immortalized for his heroics with a statue of his likeness overlooking the Missouri River. From a mere 100 or so people, the nations grew their numbers over the years and are back to over 16,000 strong.

“It’s a huge comeback as far as numbers go, but we lost a lot of the culture,” said Charlie Moren, James’ father and a Hidatsa language high school teacher.

Charlie worries his people are in many ways being absorbed by the surrounding American culture. Every year, he finds it harder and harder to get young people engaged in learning the old ways of his people. He also said he knows the more time goes by, the fewer elders there will be to help pass down their stories and traditions.

Once the epidemic came under control, the people began to rebuild. Each nation built their villages closer together and they began to function as a single people in many ways. Historically, the MHA built in lowland areas by the banks of rivers. This protected them from the harsh winds above and it was also where they found the best soil for farming.

This existence abruptly came to an end in the 1950s, when the Army Corps of engineers decided to construct a hydroelectric dam to power the state. The resulting floods drowned villages and forced the MHA people onto the peaks of the rolling Bakken hills.

“My generation was the first to grow up on top,” Charlie said, meaning they were the first to live in a world knowing nothing of the lowland life that had existed through his family for lifetimes upon lifetimes.

That’s how the city of New Town got its name. It’s literally the new town, built after floodwaters from the dam sunk their old homes.

The post Chapter Two: ‘We Were Gardeners’ appeared first on 'We Are Still Here'.

The United States Geological Survey estimates there’s somewhere between 4.4 and 11.2 billion barrels of still-undiscovered oil waiting to be drilled within the Bakken, a 200,000 square mile ancient rock formation between Montana and North Dakota. Companies extracted around 450 million barrels just between 2008 and 2013.

“This doesn’t even look like home anymore,” said Bernadine Young Bird, a New Town local and faculty member at the Native American Studies and Cultural Center.

The oil has always been there. And those interested in the black gold always knew it. The problem was that the rock formation used to be too difficult and too costly for any self-respecting capitalist to justify drilling. So what changed in 2008? In one word: fracking.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a process in which a pressurized fluid, composed of a cocktail of water, sand and multiple chemicals, is pumped deep into the earth to crack the ancient stone and release oil trapped within. Once released, the oil can then be gathered up and shipped down the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) to Illinois for processing.

Although fracking has existed since the ’40s, it only became affordable and mainstream within the 21st century. Essentially overnight, hundreds of thousands of oil workers descended upon Fort Berthold and began drilling. From 2009 to 2014 alone, an extra 100,000 people descended into the area. “North Dakota led the nation in population growth over the past five years, at 12%, and men have accounted for two-thirds of it,” Pew Research wrote in 2014. Men formed a larger proportion of the North Dakota population than any other state but Alaska.

Landowners leased their property to the oil companies for tens of thousands of dollars a month. For the first time in a long time, real money flowed through the fingers of many Fort Berthold residents. But the newfound wealth didn’t spread evenly.

Those tribal members fortunate enough to find oil underneath their land saw more cash than was at one point ever dreamed possible. They bought nice cars and expensive clothes. You might even see a pristine Hummer pull up to the post office in a town too poor to have a grocery store.

Some people left and bought homes in places warmer and sunnier than North Dakota. For the rest, not much changed. If anything, their situation might’ve gotten worse.

In the beginning, the police force of Fort Berthold had only a handful of squad cars. They were a small town department used to dealing with small town problems. The oil workers, mostly men brought from all over the country and from all walks of life, found themselves making a starting salary of $100,000 a year with nowhere to go and nothing to spend it on. Some used the money to support families back home. Others used it to party like there’s no tomorrow.

Oil workers smoke cigarettes 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.

Violent crime rates skyrocketed within the Bakken. Aggravated assaults rose by 70 percent between 2006 and 2012. Residents of these sleepy towns had to think twice now about locking their doors.

From 2006 to 2012, a Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics-funded study found, “the rate of violent victimization known to law enforcement in the Bakken oil-producing region of Montana and North Dakota increased for males and females.”

“The violent victimization rate for males increased by 31%, from 90.2 per 10,000 males in 2006 to 118.0 per 10,000 males in 2012, whereas the comparable rate for females increased by 18%, from 118.1 per 10,000 females in 2006 to 139.8 per 10,000 females in 2012.”

The researchers noted that there were not similar crime spikes in non-Bakken counties in the same region: “Violent victimizations include the offenses of murder, rape and sexual assault, other unlawful sexual contact, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, kidnapping, and intimidation. During this same period, the rate of violent victimization in the non-Bakken counties of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, decreased for males (−10%) and females (−8%). “

In 2015, authorities responded by creating the “Bakken Organized Crime Strike Force.” In a press release, the Department of Justice noted, “The Bakken is a vast swatch of oil-rich land spanning approximately 200,000 square miles from North Dakota to eastern Montana and north to Canada.  It has resulted in dramatic influxes in the population as well as serious crimes, including the importation of pure methamphetamine from Mexico and multi-million dollar fraud and environmental crimes.”

Jeanine Spotted Horse, a mom from Mandaree and worker at the local high school, remembers hearing more and more stories of strange men trying to lure young girls to their car.

“We couldn’t even have our kids play outside,” Spotted Horse said.

The villages of Fort Berthold weren’t prepared for the population explosion that came with the oil boom. A lonely motel and a handful of apartments couldn’t hold back the tidal wave of a housing crisis that hit Fort Berthold during the boom.

Charlie Moren, a Hidatsa language high school teacher, said he saw office space, bowling alleys and movie theaters all get converted to housing units. He wore wide glasses and a cowboy hat and took drags of his cigarette real slow. He bragged how a local food truck named a signature cheeseburger after him.

He said he saw tenants evicted from their apartments, only to see the place put back on the market for triple the rent. Moren said he saw some two-bedroom places listed for $3,000 a month.

“We had rent prices higher than in New York City,” Moren said. He said he receives some oil money from the fracking companies but didn’t say how much. Other tribal members insist they know people getting oil royalty checks exceeding several hundred thousand dollars a month.

Many companies placed their workers in temporary constructed work camps. These “man camps” were everywhere during the boom. Some functioned like a military base, with mess halls and libraries and community centers. Others operated like the setting of an old spaghetti western film, dangerous and full of anarchy.

These days, the man camps have mostly disappeared. But there are still some campers and mobile homes parked near oil sites. One such site sits nestled between a drill site and a dirt parking lot for semi trucks. A nearby sign at an empty and overgrown jungle gym reads “children at play,” the pumps and burning flares of the worksite just a short stroll away.  A red pickup has a “Trump 2016” bumpersticker.

The bulk of the workforce now stays in newly-constructed hotels. Teddy’s stays near full capacity on a regular basis. The building is multiple stories high with a bar and restaurant in the lobby. The place still smells like timber and fresh paint.

Oil workers come and go through the lobby in their bright green reflector jumpsuits with the Calfrac Well Services company logo labeled on the front. They mostly keep to themselves these days.

Most refused to give their names or speak about their jobs. One such worker said his supervisor explicitly warned them not to talk to the reporters staying at Teddy’s under any circumstances. Three oil workers did agree to talk but only without their names.

“You don’t have to go to college, you don’t have to have a high school diploma, and you can make over $100,000 a year,” commented a 19-year-old from Washington State.

“I wouldn’t even take a job under 100k,” joked the eldest as they all laughed together. He claimed the companies don’t all thoroughly check backgrounds of workers, calling some of them “ruffians.”

And that isn’t even to say what happened to the landscape. Before the oil can be pumped to the surface for transport down DAPL, first comes the natural gas. There are two ways to deal with natural gas; you can capture it and process it for energy use, or you can simply burn it off into the air and make room for the oil. The companies at Fort Berthold chose the former. The tribal government helped open the door to them.

The protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national attention and celebrities, but a few miles away, oil dominates the reservation landscape with far less hue and cry or media scrutiny. From the top of a hill outside New Town, you can see metal spires jutting from the earth and spewing fireballs of differing sizes into the atmosphere. At night these flares light up the sky. On many nights you don’t see the stars due to light pollution.

Any night map of the reservation is illuminated with thousands of specs of light. The place looks more like a bustling mid-level American city than a sparsely-populated section of North Dakota littered with oil rigs.

Many locals now fear what the oil is doing to the land around them. Some are scared to eat fish from the rivers or hunt local game. They say the wildlife is gone. What does the after burn of the flares leave floating around in the air for everyone to breath?

“The oil has corrupted the water, the air and the people,” said Lesa Fox, a gas station clerk in Newtown who recently moved back to the reservation after living elsewhere for the last 22 years. She said she plans on leaving again soon.

But what the people consistently said they hated the most from the boom was the semi trucks. Fleets of semis carrying oil, water or supplies came barreling through towns and highways on a regular basis. People died in head-on collisions with trucks taking a sharp turn and going too fast. The road from New Town to Mandaree features multiple crosses near its edge. Each one marking the site where someone met their end.

As far back as 2001, the MHA Nation declared in a resolution that “one of the leading causes of death and injury on the Fort Berthold Reservation each year is traffic accidents.” Some of the traffic was attributed to the casino and economic development.

A 2017 state report says that motor-vehicle crashes are “the leading cause of injury-related death in North Dakota,” and almost half were alcohol-related. However, in 2014, the number of statewide crashes began to recede. From 2008-2014, the state was above the national fatality rate in all but one year.

A state chart shows that fatalities are greater in number in the western area of the state dominated by the Bakken shale. As recently as March 2019, The Bismark Tribune reported that a head-on semi crash led to a fatality on Highway 23 bypass in New Town. Two Arizona people in a pickup, David Wilcox and Taylor Denny, were killed. The semi driver, who was from Montana, was accused of negligent homicide.

The Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute found that “the majority of truck-involved injury crashes occur in the oil region” in North Dakota, according to the Tribune.

“I always used to like driving to Mandaree,” Young Bird said, fumbling her hands over one another. “Now, it’s terrifying.”

The natural beauty of the land is now lost on many a traveler. One must drive white-knuckled down every stretch of road, constantly vigilant for some truck turning a corner and swerving too far or driving too fast.

The roads weren’t even paved in those days. The constant barrage of trucks on the highways kicked up a storm of dust that settled over everything in the area. It was as if the days of the dust bowl had returned.

Spotted Horse, the Mandaree school worker, said she believed the dust made her and her horses sick. Her kids would  come home covered from head-to-toe in a layer of dust. The swimming pool her family put up just before the boom got reduced to an unswimmable brown sludge.

James Phelan, the cultural advisor for his segment of the reservation, hated the semis. He wore a New York Yankees ballcap and drove a large black Chevy pickup truck. While normally quick to make a joke, talk of the semis brought a scowl to his face.

He said he made his own speed bumps and placed them on the roads in town to force trucks to drive slower. And it worked. The companies eventually gave in to the people’s frustrations and agreed to pave the roads. The Mandaree government even set up new laws dictating semi traffic to drive around the town, instead of through it.

The MHA people remain conflicted over what the legacy of the oil should mean to them. On the one hand, the boom brought drugs, crime and pollution to friendly communities where, at one time, everybody knew everybody else. It caused internal conflicts with traditional philosophies about protecting the earth. On the other hand, the oil paved their roads and built new schools and community areas. It lifted people out of poverty with large royalty checks.

Mandaree’s high school doesn’t have its own football field. Every game has to be an away game. Thanks to the oil, it’s scheduled for a multi-million dollar renovation. Families with generations trapped in poverty suddenly found themselves flooded with cash.

Spotted Horse said she doesn’t think the tradeoff was worth it. She has a son who works in the oil industry. Others aren’t so sure.

“People own their own businesses now and can take care of their families,” said James Moren, Charlie’s son and the Long Earth Lodge supervisor.

The post Chapter Three: Silica Valley 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'.

Kateri Mishow

Kateri Mishow would call her father every day. The 22-year-old brunette from Minneapolis enjoyed going out with her friends and traveling. She had a Tweety Bird tattoo on her shoulder and was extremely close to her brother and sister-in-law. The three even lived together for a time. Then one day in late January, 2007, Kateri vanished.

“She was probably 98 pounds soaking wet, but she thought she was invincible,” Said Kathy Mishow, Kateri’s mother.

Kathy said these last 12 years have been mostly a blur. Some days, the pain of a mother missing her daughter is nearly unbearable. She’s retired from her career as a nurse for the University of Minnesota. She spends much of her time at the community center in Little Earth, a Native American neighborhood in Minneapolis.

She said it didn’t really sink in for her that Kateri was missing until her friends began to come over asking for her. Kathy and Ira filed a missing persons report with the Minneapolis Police Department on Jan. 23, 2007. They notified local TV news stations which aired Kateri’s story and urged anyone with information to step up.

Not long after, Kathy got a call from a friend of Kateri’s in jail. He said he overheard two other inmates saying Kateri wasn’t missing, she was in the river. They passed this information along to police, who promised to investigate. After hearing what Kateri’s friend had to say, Ira spent the next two years walking up and down the Mississippi river every day, looking for any signs of a body. He never found anything. And after years of the same daily result, he finally stopped.

Sgt. Hatchner has been the lead investigator on Kateri’s case since the beginning. He declined to comment on the case, citing it as an ongoing investigation. Kateri has been missing for 12 years. There are currently no suspects. Her information is listed on all missing persons pages in a tri-state area.

Kateri’s family has attended a march for the Missing and Murdered Native American Women for the last few years. Kathy said she wants to whatever she can to get Kateri’s name out there. There is a mural on the front wall of the Little Earth Community Center with the names of every Missing and Murdered Native American in Minneapolis. Every person asked in the neighborhood said they knew somebody who’s name is on that wall.

Anyone with information is asked to call MPD at 612-348-2345.

Olivia Lone Bear

Olivia Lone Bear loved her family. She cooked meals for her kids and her dad regularly. Bernadine Young Bird, Olivia’s aunt, remembers she would deliver homemade soup to Bernadine’s mom on the regular.

“What happened to her could happen to anyone,” Young Bird said.

Olivia was last seen on Oct. 25, 2017. She left a bar in New Town driving her oil worker friend’s truck and just disappeared.

Her family assumed something was wrong immediately. Her dad became suspicious when she didn’t come home. They filed a report with the police, asked around and conducted searches on their own. Olivia’s Brother, Matthew, led the operation.

After she’d been missing for four days, her family discovered the police misfiled the report and they had to come down to the station to file a new report.

“We were abandoned right from the beginning,” Young Bird said. She said she doesn’t believe the police took Olivia’s case seriously from the start. Olivia remained missing for nine months.

Folks gathered from around the whole area to look for Olivia. Even some came from out-of-state to help find her. Her family created a facebook page and conducted regular searches.

Olivia’s story gained national attention. Other news organizations flocked to New Town to tell her story.

On July 31, 2018 a private search group came across a truck over 200 feet out in the bottom of a lake. It was the truck Olivia was last seen in. The FBI announced the body recovered in the truck was Olivia’s.

Investigators still haven’t released a cause of death. The FBI declined to comment on what they called an ongoing investigation. “We were shocked, upset and angry,” Young Bird said, the expression on her face never changing.

Susan Poupart

Susan “Suzy” Poupart was a victim of murder and elusive justice.

Her killers have never been charged, prosecuted or convicted of a crime.

Poupart’s remains were found nine months after she went missing from a party on the Lac Du Flambeau reservation in Vilas County, Wisconsin.

The 29-year-old was the mother of two children, who suffered tremendously from her death:

Jared Poupart, who grew up with a grandmother crushed by sadness and Alexandra Poupart, his younger sister who grew up with her aunt and battled – for years before settling down.

Vilas Sheriff Joseph Fath, who picked up Poupart’s case in 2013, said he needs people in the community to come forward if the persons of interest in the case are to ever be charged.’

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

Alex said she remembered people telling her about how her mother attended American Indian University in New Mexico, was left-handed and an artist.

But those memories have been overshadowed by how long her mother’s murder has gone unsolved.

“I mean it’s, it’s, it’s basically forgotten,” she said. “… but all that pain, it’s still here.”

Both she and Jared look forward to the day when their mother’s memory will be honored.

“She touched so many people in ways that I cannot explain,” he said. “People tell me, she was a good person.”

“The laws don’t protect us,” he said. “The value of an Indian is nothing — and it shows.”

The post Chapter Five: Where are You? 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'.

“We were very self-reliant,” said Bernadine Young Bird, a faculty member at the Native American Studies and Cultural Center and instructor on traditional gardening. “We relied on the skills and knowledge that our people had.”

Young Bird maintains the contemporary gardening methods of her people. She sees this as both a way to reignite her people’s “love and need for gardening” and as a way to bring some food sovereignty to a town filled these days with pizzas and canned goods. Young Bird said the reservation has high rates of diabetes thanks to the “American diet.”

Her people traditionally grew beans, squash and corn. Young Bird called these “the three sisters.” She also likes to grow sunflowers. She maintains her garden in the traditional Hidatsa way with traditional hidatsa tools. Her 85-year-old mother, a fluent speaker in Hidatsa, is helping her record the names and techniques of their people for future generations to appreciate. And she isn’t nearly the only one working to preserve and celebrate the MHA ways.

James Phelan is the cultural advisor for his segment of the reservation. He hosts a sweat lodge several nights a week, or whenever somebody asks him to.

Sweat lodges are Native American ceremonies meant to bring some form of peace to anyone struggling. At least 40 rocks are placed under a roaring fire for hours and hours until they turn red hot. Then, everyone enters the lodge and gathers in a circle around a pit dug in the center. The red-hot stones are brought in one by one until exactly 14 sit glowing in the middle. Someone is chosen to say a prayer for those in the lodge and spread chips of cedar over the rocks. The cedar cracks and sparkles on the rocks and releases a pleasing aroma throughout the tent. Several in the tent then sing traditional Hidatsa songs and splash water over the stones until the tent is thick with steam.

James says the ceremonies take a lot out of him. But he can’t control when someone needs help, and he always wants to be there when needed. He says it also reinforces his spirit. The rocks can’t be used again because they contain celebrants’ toxins. Here, the fire is pure.

He also likes to sing outside the lodge with his friends and in competitions. Phelan and his friends sing Hidatsa songs together for community events and powwows. He said he even sang for the Netflix series “Longmire” in an effort to bring traditional Native American music to mainstream television.

“The beautiful part is our culture,” Phelan said.

James said a big part of their culture is honoring veterans. You can see this when driving through town. Right next to the statue of Chief Four Bears, the MHA’s most honored leader, is a memorial to all MHA tribal members who gave their lives fighting in American wars.

The demographics of Fort Berthold are changing. With the oil came many non-native people from all over the United States. James Moren, a supervisor for the traditional Long Earth Lodges, said he doesn’t mind the influx of new faces “as long as we can get together and have a good time.”

“If you’re going to stay and work, then you’re going to make this place home,” Moren said.

Powwows and ceremonies are held on the regular in Fort Berthold. People from different nations all over the North American continent flock to these powwows, adorned in the ceremonial garb of their nations. Some come to dance. Some come to sing. Many come to socialize and enjoy the show.

“The more you come to the powwow, the more people you know,” said Mary Topsky, a dancer during a memorial powwow for the late singer Kenny Merrick Jr. “I feel really comfortable when I come here.”

Topsky has attended powwows since she was a little girl. She said she considers powwows to be a sort of family gathering.

Not only are there those hard at work to protect and express their Native American culture, but there are also some out there fighting to protect the people. Anita Lucchesi is one such person.

She is the creator and executive director of of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, an organization dedicated to ending sexual violence against Native Americans by empowering communities through data collection.

“When I first started, I knew that it’s going to be my life’s work,” Lucchesi said.

She said she considers it an honor to help bring women “a home” with the community her organization provides after they’ve gone through a traumatic incident.

There are efforts all throughout Fort Berthold to preserve and celebrate where they’ve come from and what they are. They work hard to keep the community strong and will go out of their way to care for another in need.

“Hopefully, you’ll see more of us than just the oil,” Phelan said.

The post Chapter Eight: Nation-Building appeared first on 'We Are Still Here'.

There is a sign when entering Mandaree that says it’s the heart of the MHA Nation. MHA stands for Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara a trio of tribes brought together by small pox outbreaks in 1792, 1836 and 1837.

The gas station located in the small town has but two gas pumps. The inside has shelves that aren’t fully stocked and there’s a small pizza place inside. Since it’s the only gas station within a good 30-minute radius in a town without a grocery store, there are constantly members, and even non-members of the reservation, going in and out buying various items such as energy drinks and bags of chips.

However, it was a moment outside of the gas station when University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student journalist Royce Podeszwa was told to approach a black Chevy pickup truck packed with stacks of wood in the back. That was the moment he was introduced to James Phelan.

Phelan is a proud Hidatsa who is committed to keeping his culture alive and well. Not only for his generation, but for future generations as well. James has high respect for the elders of the tribe. The culture and spirit they hold within them are very important to the people.

“The elders are our heartbeat of our people. If we lose the elders, we lose our language and our culture and our stories,” said Phelan.

Veterans are also very important to the tribe and especially to Phelan. He used very touching words to describe veterans.

“We really honor our veterans. They get forgotten a lot of times. If it wasn’t for their sacrifice, then we wouldn’t be here,” said Phelan.

After talking with Podeszwa for a short amount of time, Phelan felt compelled to invite the student journalists to join him in a sweat lodge.

“Something just told me to invite these guys. I’ve never invited non-native people to a sweat,” said Phelan.

A sweat lodge is a tradition that transcends recorded history. A sweat, as it’s commonly called, is practiced by many different cultures in many different forms across the globe. It’s a cleansing that promotes healing and purification.

The process begins with the heating of rocks in a fire. The rocks are heated for hours until they are glowing red. They are eventually placed inside of the sweat lodge a few at a time. After everyone has entered and the ceremony has begun, water is poured periodically on the rocks to create the steam.

The sweat Phelan was performing that night was a healing one, but the details to what occurred during the sweat will not be discussed. This is a sacred tradition that requires the upmost respect.

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

Phelan believes there’s a negative feeling towards the tribe because of the oil as well as typical stereotypes that persists in the media.

“I want people to see us different than how the movies and books portray us,” said Phelan.

The area, where the sweat was held, was hilly in terrain. There were horses roaming free as well as cattle. Phelan, his family and friends have a huge fire set up heating up dozens of stones. They continually feed the fire with a cut-up tree that was in the back of their pickup truck.

There are oil wells seemingly surrounding the immediate area. One of the wells can be seen right over the hill. When the day became night, the light from the flares could be seen in several different directions.

The flares are fire stacks intended to burn off the natural gas. In order to get to the oil buried deep within the ground, the process of natural gas escaping must be done. Instead of containing the natural gas and using it, the gas is instead burned. The burning process is intended to save money, as it is less expensive to simply burn the gas off. Fort Berthold has these flares everywhere and they all came with the oil boom.

The oil boom began in 2008 and brought big changes to the area. Phelan believes it was by design that this blessing of change was brought to people.

“We lived in poverty for a long time. Maybe the creator saw that we needed help and maybe that was a blessing for us, but it came too fast,” said Phelan.

Phelan is referring to the rapid development of the area after the billions of barrels in shale oil were found underneath the reservation. Phelan believes there are many misconceptions about oil and how it’s affected the tribe.

“We’re an oil tribe, but we’re not all rich. We’re rich in history and our culture,” said Phelan.

After the sweat was over there was a long discussion about culture. About being the protectors of the Earth. Phelan’s brother had powerful words during this time.

“We’re the last line. We’re it. If something doesn’t change, we will all die in our lifetime. It will be the end,” said Phelan.

It was an incredible moment to be in. Taking in the culture and the spirituality. There are few feelings that can describe the moments that occurred during the sweat and after. It’s an experience the small group from UWM will never forget. And it’s very likely the experience made an impact on their lives.

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Some tribes believed in a Deer Woman who transformed into a deer after being raped or who was brought back to life by the original Deer Woman spirit after being murdered.

For Annita Lucchesi, one of most profound moments is when she heard, a few days before a trial court hearing, about a sighting of a white deer in the city where a Native woman was a victim of murder trial.

This to her was an affirmation of the work she does, which is deeply connected to honoring those victims without a voice.

With the disparate number of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women murdered each year, the MMIW movement has become a wave of voices for the voiceless. It brings awareness about the violence against the women and girls within the indigenous population.

Lucchesi is the woman behind the research of an influential Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) report done in 2017 entitled Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG).

The report shows the starkly disparate numbers of violence against indigenous woman including trans and people from urban areas.

The reported collected data from 71 cities and 29 states throughout the United States.

Out of 506 cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women girls, 128 or 25% were missing cases, 280 or 56% were murder, while 98 or 19% were classified as unknown.

The victims ages ranged from a baby less than one to an elder who was 83-years-old.

Lucchesi started the research project because she was a survivor of sexual violence herself. “I’m a survivor of sexual violence and human trafficking… it’s a violence that almost ended my life,” she said.

The report started from a grassroots approach, says Lucchesi. Since then, the report has been used a lot and policy makers support its efforts.

Lucchesi said that some of the root causes for the start of MMIW movement are “Colonization… we had generation of Pocahontas and that’s all you see women exotic sexy this was the only image of native women.”

The report says that some of the problems of accessing data about missing and murdered indigenous women involved lack of records and racial misclassification.

The report surveyed 71 cities’ police departments and one state agency; 40 agencies provided some level of data, 14 agencies did not provide data, 18 agencies still have pending requests under (FOIA) Freedom of Information Act laws.

The report analyzed the media coverage of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. The authors examined 934 articles, which only covered 129 cases out of 506 represented in the study.

The results were that one-fifth of the total local cases were covered more than once, which is equivalent to 14%. In less than 1/10, the cases were covered more than three times, or 7%.

Another analysis from the media analysis dealt with violent language.

UIHI defines violent language as language that engages in racism or misogyny or racial stereotyping, including references to alcohol, drugs, sex work, gang violence, victim criminal history, victim-blaming, making excuses for the perpetrator, Misgendering transgender victims, racial clarification, false information on cases not named in the victim, and publishing images / video of the victim’s death.

Lucchesi connects the complexities of violence against Native women through this analogy.

“Look at it like soup, but ultimately you want to have a good soup. We just want a good soup. If the root cause of these issues is colonization you can’t expect to add more colonization, and to have it move differently…Tribes should be notified when people go missing. This could be impactful.”

She suggests “rethinking and making the small changes that honor that type of coverage.”

The MMWIG report states that law enforcement lacks access to data regarding this issue, which can impede the ability for communities, tribal nations and policymakers to make the best decisions to address these issues. As a result, grassroots approaches by community members must be the sources used to address issues with Indigenous women.

The study also says that racial and gender disparities in police forces contribute to the treatment on how MMIWG cases are handled.

Lucchesi considers her work as a spiritual work. “A data-based is a process of prayer for me.”  That’s a process she feels her ancestors assist her with.

“I learned self-care through the data a process as prayers. I don’t add to the database every day…The process of the database is a deep sense of urgency,” said Lucchesi, who added the process helps “all these spirits,” meaning that as a result researching the data is “not all sad but brings some closure.”

She feels that her work honors those spirts of the women and girls to move on and go home.

Lucchesi currently works as the Executive director of the research institute Sovereign Bodies Institute (SBI).

The Institute gathers data and knowledge to put action in place to dismantle and create change on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous people.

SBI is affiliated with the seventh-generation fund, a non-profit for indigenous leadership for the past 40 years. 

Her plans for the future is to expand her data collecting to the Indigenous women populations in Latin America. 

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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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Standing outside of Teddy’s Residential Suites in New Town, North Dakota stood three gentlemen oil workers having a chat. After a long day’s work, these oil workers enjoy chatting it up, smoking a cigarette, and perhaps having a beer.

Each of them came from a different state: Arkansas, Washington, and New Mexico. It was each of their first time meeting one another and yet they had a lot of the same ideas and lifestyles when it came to working with oil companies.

“Whenever I’m home, I’m home,” stated the eldest. “My old lady likes it when I’m gone.”

His earlier marriage suffered from his job schedule, ultimately ending in divorce. He is currently in a new relationship and his significant other doesn’t seem to be bothered by the work schedule.

But their hectic schedule is one of the least of the workers worries. Many of the positions at oil companies come with multiple dangers and health hazards.

“Traveling is the most dangerous thing you can do in the oil field,” mentioned the youngest, who was 19-years-old, “and it’s not the actual work we do.”

The danger comes in when oil workers have to drive three hours to the oil field, have over 10 hour work days, then have to drive three more hours back home, fatigued. Sometimes putting in over 120 hours a week. But the dangers don’t end there. In the last 10 years, there have been more safety rules put in place in order to decrease the rising death toll of oil workers.

“They’ve got red zones we’re not allowed in,” said the eldest. “You’ve got to wear safety goggles. If you’re messing with anything you have to have proper protection.”

With an extensive amount of dangers must come a very reasonable pay.

“You don’t have to go to college, you don’t have to have a high school diploma, and you can make over $100,000 a year,” commented the 19 year-old.

“I wouldn’t even take a job under 100k,” joked the eldest as they all laughed together.

A job that is very hazardous to its employees must have some type of effect everywhere else. Fort Berthold is illuminated in the dark by flares coming up and out from the ground all day and into the night.

“Look at the other countries that don’t have EPA regulations,” spoke the eldest, “China and Africa are polluting 10 times worse than what we’re doing here.”

The reasoning behind many oil workers staying at working hazardous positions like this is the pay. A job where starting rate without a high school or college diploma is already 100k, it becomes difficult to turn down. Oil workers with families may find it more difficult to turn down an opportunity like that. Some who don’t have families find comfort in gambling.

“My old lady doesn’t have to work and my kids are well taken care of.” He spoke again in regards this time to why he kept working with the oil company.

Oil companies bring strangers into towns where everyone knew one another at some point. New Town had slowly become a place where strangers where now often seen at bars and restaurants. New Town residents no longer know everyone walking the streets. After the case of Olivia Lonebear in 2017 and 2018, many of the residents of the small town have began speculating and becoming afraid of strangers entering.

“If you look at the increase in child abductions and stuff like that, everything has increased,” he said, “but its not just people in the oil field that’s everywhere.”

After speaking with other New Town residents, it became apparent that they did not feel comfortable with the oil workers coming in to their town. They are all strangers to them.

“In the oil field, you make a lot of money. When you make a lot of money then drugs and addiction follow and it creates problems,” explained the youngest.

“A lot of the oil field workers by the time they come home they barely want to eat and go to bed because they got to back up in six hours,” stated the eldest.

At the beginning none of them wanted to acknowledge the fact that some oil workers could be reason for many Native American women who have gone missing in passed and recent years. They began joking. “Lets go on our crime spree tonight! No, I’m to tired I gotta turn it in man,” laughed the third gentleman who is a gatekeeper for one of the oil companies in New Town.

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The room is filled with red clothing items and mostly women attendees. People throughout the Native American community of Milwaukee unite to learn more about the violence against Native American women and girls.

May 5^this the national day of awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women(MMIW) 

Their flyer requested everyone to wear red to honor to remember, honor and bring awareness for Indigenous women and girls. 

The Redress is the national symbol for the MMIW movement. The project was created by visual artist Jamie Black 

The free event was provided by the Circles of strength program with the Indian Health Center. 

The Circles of Strength program is domestic violence and sexual assault program support circle at the Center. The program offers medical and behavior health and social services for women at risk of violence, or currently in violent situations. 

Some of the women in red are elders to the youth. Almost everyone wore items of red, from bright red shoes to sparking red earrings. The room showered with solidarity.

The event started with a prayer. They offered the practice of smudging with sage to everyone in the room. 

Deborah Black the Deputy director and licensed psychologist in the behavior health department at the Indian Health Center oversees the Circles of strength program. 

They planned this event to bring education and awareness to community of Milwaukee related to issues of sexual violence against Native women and the connecting to national issues of Human Trafficking epidemic. 

“The data. That it’s so hard to identify due to the variety of reasons why we don’t know why these women are missing, but I do know and believe that yes a lot of them are being sex traffic and they go missing from their family and never to be seen again,” said Black.

The key note speaker was Dr. Alexandra Piece. She received her Masters and doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota. 

She is also the President of Othayonih Research with 20 years of experience with research on domestic violence, sexual assault and sex trafficking.

A savior of sex and labor trafficking the author of Shattered Hearts.

She was the first researcher to be published in the United States on commercial sexual exploitation of Native American women and girls. 

Her presentation connected the past to the present using the image of the Native American Women and examining how the creation of the “sexual savage” stereotype.

The stereotype encourages trafficker’s violence against Native women and incites traffickers to target women/girl’s profitable exotics.  

A report done with the Urban Indian Health Institute on 5,712 cases of were of murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in the United States as of 2018 only 116 cases were in NamUs were Indigenous women. 

She connected Human trafficking victimizes as women part of an economic system. A system fuel by control to generate a profit for traffickers and that traffickers view as a business. 

“It’s all about money. It’s a criminal operation with profit as the goal.” said Pierce

The program also connected Human Trafficking to the MMIW and within the city of Milwaukee. 

Mariana Rodriguez, program Manager at the Latina Resource Center at United Migrant Opportunity Service also known as UMOS.

She addressed issues about Human Trafficking within Wisconsin from an intersectional framework. 

“It’s very easy to label a person a drug addict or in prostitute or to blame the victim.” Rodriguez said. 

She informed the large issues within a sex trafficking are higher demand for foreign women. 

As well as the issues of law enforcement not being distinguished the difference between sex work and sex trafficking. 

A report done with the Medical College of Wisconsin examined human trafficking from 2013 to 2016 confirmed that 81 per cent or 187 individuals who had been trafficked confirmed to have reported prior history to sexual assault victimization and a history of being reported missing under Milwaukee Police Department. 

97 per cent or 225 individuals being identified as female and 65 per cent or 149 individuals were Black/African American.

“The barriers we encounter in term of being racial misclassified, or the barriers of juridical issues to the barriers of intuitional racism, just the issues of native women not being as of much importance as it will be in other mainstream community. Due to Deep systematic barriers and vulnerabilities native people experience over time,” said Black

An Attendee at the program came to learn more was Celeste Clark a member of the Lambee tribe and senior advisor in American Indian Student Services at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

“It was kind of overwhelming and distributing and emotional to find out were the highest number being murder and missing, rape and domestic violence,” said Clark.

She known about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman since 2015. 

Clark felt that event was informative and that everyone should be aware on MMIW and human trafficking issues. 

The number of statics against Native people still conflicts Clark.

“That’s what bothers me why is it our population with the highest number?  Are we too trusting? I don’t get it because we have the highest of everything. Highest dropout rate highest disabilities then you see this. I don’t understand how can another human being do this to another human being,” she said.

The Indian Health Center provides medical, behavior and social services to the Native and Greater community of Milwaukee for the pass 30 years. Most recently they added Dental and Pharmacy services for the community. 

They offered a holistic approach to mental, substance abuse, medication, cultural, youth services and the circle of strength domestic violence program. 

The Indian Health Center care is culturally inclusive to Native people cultural practices when providing survives.  

In the future, Deborah Black hopes to see justice for Native women and for those who are survivors she hopes for healing. “You can heal from it, you can heal from violence…its possible to feel safe again.” she said. 

If you wish to use or get involved with the services of Indian Health Center you can contact Deborah Black (414) 316-5092 or their main line at (414) 383-9526.

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