Justice in Indian Country

Sari Horwitz
The Washington Post

Copyright

Diversion Books
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Copyright © 2015 by The Washington Post
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Cover image: Lisa Brunner in Mahnomen County, Minn., home of the White Earth Indian Reservation. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

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First Diversion Books edition April 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62681-794-4

Table of Contents

Introduction

New law offers protection to abused Native American women

The hard lives — and high suicide rate — of Native American children on reservations

Arizona tribe set to prosecute first non-Indian under a new law

In rural villages, little protection for Alaska Natives

Dark side of the boom

From broken homes to a broken system

A man of healing, a saga of suffering

About the Author

More from The Washington Post...

Introduction

At the beginning of 2014, while covering the Justice Department for the Washington Post, I set out to write a single story on the struggle to pass and implement a new federal law designed to protect Native American women from violence. I sat at the kitchen table of a Native American woman on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota on a freezing February day as Lisa Brunner of the Objibwe tribe described how she and her mother had been beaten and sexually assaulted by white men who were never prosecuted because of loopholes in the law. It was a familiar story in Indian country.

That first conversation set me on the path to a year-long examination of criminal justice on Indian lands – one that took me on reporting trips to Arizona, Minnesota, Alaska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

The result was a seven-part investigative series that attempted to both document and explain issues that have been largely overlooked on the national stage: the near absence of law enforcement officers on remote reservations; the broken system of juvenile incarceration; the barriers against the prosecution of domestic violence; the dark side of the oil boom in North Dakota; and the failure of law enforcement to address epidemics of teen suicide and child sexual abuse among Native Americans.

These stories were difficult to report. It was hard in some cases to obtain permission to go as a reporter to reservations, which are sovereign nations, and some of the villages I visited were extremely remote. In all cases, I also met an initial reluctance from the Native Americans who lived there to trust an outsider with their stories. In some cases, it took weeks and months to win their trust.

The reaction to the stories has been anguish at the plight of Native Americans, particularly the children, but also gratitude for the Post’s dedication to the issues. Among the many expressions of appreciation from Indian country was one from a reader named Robin Ladue: “Thank you from a Native American woman,” she wrote. “I am sitting here with tears streaming down my face and a lump in my throat so large. Ms. Horwitz, you spoke up for us. You spoke up for us. YOU spoke up for us.”

Since I began the series, there have been several important developments in justice issues on Indian lands. In December 2014, President Obama signed into law, a measure that closed a legal loophole that excluded Alaska Native women from protections against domestic violence.

The Obama administration also stepped up its efforts to address the crippling problems on reservations. President Obama, for the first time since he took office, visited an Indian reservation in 2014; he also started a Native Youth Listening initiative requiring members of his Cabinet to hear directly from Native youth.

The stories that made up the Post’s year-long effort are all gathered in one place for the first time in this e-Book. Together, they tell an often heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring tale of an ancient people trying to bring a new kind of justice to their troubled lands

Sari Horwitz

March, 2015

New law offers protection to abused Native American women

February 8, 2014

Lisa Brunner in Mahnomen County, Minn., home of the White Earth Indian Reservation. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Lisa Brunner remembers the first time she saw her stepfather beat her mother. She was 4 years old, cowering under the table here on the Ojibwe reservation, when her stepfather grabbed his shotgun from the rack. She heard her mother scream, “No, David! No!”

“He starts beating my mother over the head and I could hear the sickening thud of the butt of the shotgun over her head,” Brunner said. “Then he put the gun back on the rack and called her a bitch. He slammed the bedroom door and sat down on the squeaky bed. And then I heard the thud-thud of his cowboy boots as he laid down, squeaking again, and he went to sleep.”

There were many more beatings over the years, Brunner said. Twenty years later, she said, she was brutally assaulted by her own husband on this same Indian reservation, an enormous swath of Minnesota prairie that has seen its share of sorrow for generations.

An estimated one in three Native American women are assaulted or raped in their lifetimes, and three out of five experience domestic violence. But in the cases of Brunner and her mother, the assailants were white, not Native American, and that would turn out to make all the difference.

For decades, when a Native American woman has been assaulted or raped by a man who is non-Indian, she has had little or no recourse. Under long-standing law in Indian country, reservations are sovereign nations with their own police departments and courts in charge of prosecuting crimes on tribal land. But Indian police have lacked the legal authority to arrest non-Indian men who commit acts of domestic violence against native women on reservations, and tribal courts have lacked the authority to prosecute the men.

Last year, Congress approved a law — promoted by the Obama administration — that for the first time will allow Indian tribes to prosecute certain crimes of domestic violence committed by non-Indians in Indian country. The Justice Department on Thursday announced it had chosen three tribes for a pilot project to assert the new authority.

While the law has been praised by tribal leaders, native women and the administration as a significant first step, it still falls short of protecting all Indian women from the epidemic of violence they face on tribal lands.

The new authority, which will not go into effect for most of the country’s 566 federally recognized Indian tribes until March 2015, covers domestic violence committed by non-Indian husbands and boyfriends, but it does not cover sexual assault or rape committed by non-Indians who are “strangers” to their victims. It also does not extend to native women in Alaska.

Proponents of the law acknowledge that it was drawn narrowly to win support in Congress, particularly from Republican lawmakers who argued that non-native suspects would not receive a fair trial in the tribal justice system.

For their part, native women say they have long been ill-served by state and federal law. U.S. attorneys, who already have large caseloads, are often hundreds of miles away from rural reservations. It can take hours or days for them to respond to allegations, if they respond at all, tribal leaders say. Native women also have to navigate a complex maze of legal jurisdictions.

“There are tribal communities where state police have no jurisdiction and federal law enforcement has jurisdiction but is distant and often unable to respond,” said Thomas J. Perrelli, a former associate attorney general who was one of the administration’s chief proponents of the amendment. “There are tribal communities where the federal government has no jurisdiction but state law enforcement, which has jurisdiction, does not intervene. And there are still other tribal lands where there is a dispute about who, if anyone, has jurisdiction. All of this has led to an inadequate response to the plight of many Native American women.”

More than 75 percent of residents on Indian reservations in the United States are non-Indians. In at least 86 percent of the reported cases of rape or sexual assault of American Indian and Alaska native women, both on and off reservations, the victims say their attackers were non-native men, according to the Justice Department.

LEFT: Main Street in Mahnomen, Minn. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post). RIGHT: Heavy snow slides off grain and seed storage units on the White Earth Nation reservation. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

‘Not enrolled’

The loophole in the American Indian justice system that effectively provides immunity to non-Indians is the story of a patchwork of laws, treaties and Supreme Court decisions over generations.

At the root of the confusion about Indian jurisdiction is the historical tension over Indian land. As American settlers pushed Native Americans off their tribal lands and then renegotiated treaties to guarantee tribes a homeland, large areas of the reservations were opened for white families to homestead.

That migration led to the modern-day reservation, where Indians and non-
Indians often live side by side, one farm or ranch home belonging to a white family, the next one belonging to an Indian family. It is a recipe for conflict over who is in charge and who has legal jurisdiction over certain crimes.

“The public safety issues in Indian country are so complicated,” said Deputy Associate Attorney General Sam Hirsch, one of the Justice Department officials who focus on tribal justice issues. “No one would have ever designed a system from scratch to look like the system that has come down to us through the generations.”

Over the past 200 years, there have been dramatic swings in Indian-country jurisdiction and the extent of tribal powers.

In 1978, in a case widely known in Indian country as “Oliphant,” the Supreme Court held that Indian tribes had no legal jurisdiction to prosecute non-Indians who committed crimes on reservations. Even a violent crime committed by a non-Indian husband against his Indian wife in their home on the reservation — as Brunner said happened to her on the White Earth Nation reservation — could not be prosecuted by the tribe.

The court said it was up to Congress to decide who had that authority.

“We are not unaware of the prevalence of non-Indian crime on today’s reservations, which the tribes forcefully argue requires the ability to try non-Indians,” the court said. “But these are considerations for Congress to weigh in deciding whether Indian tribes should finally be authorized to try non-Indians.”

Congress took no action for 35 years.

As a result, native women who were assaulted were often told there was nothing tribal police could do for them. If the perpetrator was white and — in the lingo of the tribes — “not enrolled” in the tribal nation, there would be no recourse.

“Over the years, what happened is that white men, non-native men, would go onto a Native American reservation and go hunting — rape, abuse and even murder a native woman, and there’s absolutely nothing anyone could do to them,” said Kimberly Norris Guerrero, an actress, tribal advocate and native Oklahoman who is Cherokee and Colville Indian. “They got off scot-free.”

In 2009, shortly after taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was briefed by two FBI agents on the issue of violence on Indian reservations.

They told him about the soaring rates of assault and rape and the fact that on some reservations, the murder rate for native women is 10 times the national average.

“The way they phrased it was, if you are a young girl born on an Indian reservation, there’s a 1-in-3 chance or higher that you’re going to be abused during the course of your life,” Holder said in an interview. “I actually did not think the statistics were accurate. I remember asking, ‘check on those numbers.’ ”

Officials came back to Holder and told him the statistics were right: Native women experience the highest rates of assault of any group in the United States.

“The numbers are just staggering,” Holder said. “It’s deplorable. And it was at that point I said, this is an issue that we have to deal with. I am simply not going to accept the fact it is acceptable for women to be abused at the rates they are being abused on native lands.”

Measuring tape

Diane Millich grew up on the Southern Ute Indian reservation, nestled in the mountain meadows of southwestern Colorado. When she was 26, she fell in love and married a non-Indian man who lived in a town just beyond the reservation.

Not long after they were married, Millich’s husband moved in with her and began to push and slap her, she said. The violence escalated, and the abuse, she said, became routine. She called the tribal police and La Plata County authorities many times but was told they had no jurisdiction in the case.

One time after her husband beat her, Millich said, he picked up the phone and called the sheriff to report the incident himself to show that he couldn’t be arrested, she said. He knew, she said, there was nothing the sheriff could do.

“After a year of abuse and more than 100 incidents of being slapped, kicked, punched and living in terror, I left for good,” Millich said.

The brutality, she said, increased after she filed for a divorce.

“Typically, when you look backwards at crimes of domestic violence, if less serious violence is not dealt with by the law enforcement system, it leads to more serious violence, which eventually can lead to homicide,” said Hirsch, the deputy associate attorney general.

One day when Millich was at work, she saw her ex-husband pull up in a red truck. He was carrying a 9mm gun.

“My ex-husband walked inside our office and told me, ‘You promised until death do us part, so death it shall be,’ ” Millich recalled. A co-worker saved Millich’s life by pushing her out of the way and taking a bullet in his shoulder.

It took hours to decide who had jurisdiction over the shooting.

Investigators at the scene had to use a measuring tape to determine where the gun was fired and where Millich’s colleague had been struck, and a map to figure out whether the state, federal government or tribe had jurisdiction.

The case ended up going to the closest district attorney. Because Millich’s husband had never been arrested or charged for domestic abuse on tribal land, he was treated as a first-time offender, Millich said, and after trying to flee across state lines was offered a plea of aggravated driving under revocation.

“It was like his attempt to shoot me and the shooting of my co-worker did not happen,” Millich said. “The tribe wanted to help me, but couldn’t because of the law. In the end, he was right. The law couldn’t touch him.”

Section 904

Last year, Millich and other American Indian women came to Washington to tell their stories to congressional leaders. They joined tribal leaders in lobbying for the passage of the 288-page reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which included language proposed by the Justice Department that for the first time would allow tribal courts to prosecute non-
Indians who assaulted native women on tribal lands. It would also allow the courts to issue and enforce protective orders, whether the perpetrator is Indian or non-Indian.

Opponents of the provision, known as Section 904, argued that non-native defendants would not be afforded a fair trial by American Indian tribes. In the case of Alaska, the Senate excluded Native Alaskan women because of especially complicated issues involving jurisdiction.

At a town hall meeting, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said that “under the laws of our land, you’ve got to have a jury that is a reflection of society as a whole.”

“On an Indian reservation, it’s going to be made up of Indians, right?” Grassley said. “So the non-Indian doesn’t get a fair trial.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), another opponent, said the Violence Against Women Act was “being held hostage by a single provision that would take away fundamental constitutional rights for certain American citizens.”

The bill passed the Senate last February but was held up by House Republicans over Section 904. They argued that tribal courts were not equipped to take on the new responsibilities and non-Indian constituents would be deprived of their constitutional rights without being able to appeal to federal courts.

“When we talk about the constitutional rights, don’t women on tribal lands deserve their constitutional right of equal protection and not to be raped and battered and beaten and dragged back onto native lands because they know they can be raped with impunity?” Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) argued on the floor.

Underlying the opposition, some congressmen said, was a fear of retribution by the tribes for the long history of mistreatment by white Americans.

With the support of Rep. Tom Cole (R- Okla.), a member of the Chickasaw Nation, the House accepted the bill containing Section 904 on a vote of 229 to 196. On March 7, President Obama signed the bill with Millich, Holder and Native American advocates at his side.

The Justice Department chose three Indian tribes — the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona, the Tulalip Tribes of Washington state and the Umatilla tribes of Oregon — to be the first in the nation to exercise their new criminal jurisdiction over certain crimes of domestic and dating violence.

“What we have done, I think, has been game-changing,” Holder said. “But there are still attitudes that have to be changed. There are still resources that have to be directed at the problem. There’s training that still needs to go on. We’re really only at the beginning stages of reversing what is a horrible situation.”

Lisa Brunner and her daughter, Faith Roy, fold clothes at home on the White Earth Indian reservation in Minnesota. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

‘Sliver of a Full Moon’

In the summer of 2013, several Native American survivors of domestic violence from around the country put on a play, “Sliver of a Full Moon,” in Albuquerque. The play documented the story of the abuse and rape of Native American women by non-Indians and the prolonged campaign to bring them justice.

Using the technique of traditional Indian storytelling, Mary Kathryn Nagle, a lawyer and member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, wove together their emotional tales of abuse with the story of their fight to get Washington to pay attention.

Millich and Brunner played themselves, and actors played the roles of members of Congress, federal employees and tribal police officers who kept answering desperate phone calls from abused native women by saying over and over again, “We can’t do nothin’, ” “We don’t have jurisdiction,” and “He’s white and he ain’t enrolled.”

LEFT: Lisa Brunner, seated, with her daughters Samantha, left, and Faith Roy. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post). RIGHT: Brunner portrayed herself in a play that told the story of the abuse and rape of Native American women by non-Indians and the campaign to bring them justice. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

By that time, Brunner’s intergenerational story of violence and abuse had taken a painful turn. Her youngest daughter, 17, had been abducted by four white men who drove onto the reservation one summer night. One of them raped her, Brunner said.

It was the real-life version of author Louise Erdrich’s acclaimed fictional account of the rape of an Ojibwe woman by a non-Indian in her 2012 book, “The Round House.” In both the real and the unrelated fictional case, the new congressional authority would not give the tribe jurisdiction to arrest and prosecute the suspects, because they were not previously known to the victim.

Last week, inside her home on the frigid White Earth Nation, which was dotted by vast snowy cornfields and hundreds of frozen lakes, Brunner brought out a colorful watercolor she had painted of three native women standing in the woods under a glowing full moon. The painting was the inspiration for the title of Nagle’s play, she said, but it’s also a metaphor for the new law.

“We have always known that non-Indians can come onto our lands and they can beat, rape and murder us and there is nothing we can do about it,” Brunner said. “Now, our tribal officers have jurisdiction for the first time to do something about certain crimes.”

“But,” she added, “it is just the first sliver of the full moon that we need to protect us.”

Lisa Brunner watches as her daughter Faith Roy plays with her baby, Ethan Blue. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Additional Content

PostTV: ‘They come here to hunt’: Surviving sexual violence on the reservation

The hard lives — and high suicide rate — of Native American children on reservations

March 9, 2014

A grave site of Native Americans on the Gila Indian reservation in Sacaton, Ariz. The Justice Department created a national task force to study violence and its impact on American Indian and Alaska Native children, part of an effort to prevent children’s exposure to violence and reduce the numbers of Native American youth in the criminal justice system. The suicide rate has startled some officials on the task force who view the epidemic as another outcome of what they see as pervasive despair. Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

SACATON, ARIZ. The tamarisk tree down the dirt road from Tyler Owens’s house is the one where the teenage girl who lived across the road hanged herself. Don’t climb it, don’t touch it, admonished Owens’s grandmother when Tyler, now 18, was younger.

There are other taboo markers around the Gila River Indian reservation — eight young people committed suicide here over the course of a single year.

“We’re not really open to conversation about suicide,” Owens said. “It’s kind of like a private matter, a sensitive topic. If a suicide happens, you’re there for the family. Then after that, it’s kind of just, like, left alone.”

But the silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer number of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times on some reservations.

A toxic collection of pathologies — poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcoholism and drug addiction — has seeped into the lives of young people among the nation’s 566 tribes. Reversing their crushing hopelessness, Indian experts say, is one of the biggest challenges for these communities.

“The circumstances are absolutely dire for Indian children,” said Theresa M. Pouley, the chief judge of the Tulalip Tribal Court in Washington state and a member of the Indian Law and Order Commission.

Pouley fluently recites statistics in a weary refrain: “One-quarter of Indian children live in poverty, versus 13 percent in the United States. They graduate high school at a rate 17 percent lower than the national average. Their substance-abuse rates are higher. They’re twice as likely as any other race to die before the age of 24. They have a 2.3 percent higher rate of exposure to trauma. They have two times the rate of abuse and neglect. Their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder rivals the rates of returning veterans from Afghanistan.”

In one of the broadest studies of its kind, the Justice Department created a national task force to examine the violence and its impact on American Indian and Alaska Native children, part of an effort to reduce the number of Native American youth in the criminal justice system. The level of suicide has startled some task force officials, who consider the epidemic another outcome of what they see as pervasive despair.

Last month, the task force held a hearing on the reservation of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Scottsdale. During their visit, Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-highest-ranking Justice Department official, and task force members drove to Sacaton, about 30 miles south of Phoenix, and met with Owens and 14 other teenagers.

“How many of you know a young person who has taken their life?” the task force’s co-chairman asked. All 15 raised their hands.

“That floored me,” West said.

A ‘trail of broken promises’

There is an image that Byron Dorgan, co-chairman of the task force and a former senator from North Dakota, can’t get out of his head. On the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota years ago, a 14-year-old girl named Avis Little Wind hanged herself after lying in bed in a fetal position for 90 days. Her death followed the suicides of her father and sister.

“She lay in bed for all that time, and nobody, not even her school, missed her,” said Dorgan, a Democrat who chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. “Eventually she got out of bed and killed herself. Avis Little Wind died of suicide because mental-health treatment wasn’t available on that reservation.”

Indian youth suicide cannot be looked at in a historical vacuum, Dorgan said. The agony on reservations is directly tied to a “trail of broken promises to American Indians,” he said, noting treaties dating back to the 19th century that guaranteed but largely didn’t deliver health care, education and housing.

When he retired after 30 years in Congress, Dorgan founded the Center for Native American Youth at the Aspen Institute to focus on problems facing young Indians, especially the high suicide rates.

“The children bear the brunt of the misery,” Dorgan said, adding that tribal leaders are working hard to overcome the challenges. “But there is no sense of urgency by our country to do anything about it.”

At the first hearing of the Justice Department task force, in Bismarck, N.D., in December, Sarah Kastelic, deputy director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, used a phrase that comes up repeatedly in deliberations among experts: “historical trauma.”

Youth suicide was once virtually unheard of in Indian tribes. A system of child protection, sustained by tribal child-rearing practices and beliefs, flourished among Native Americans, and everyone in a community was responsible for the safeguarding of young people, Kastelic said.

“Child maltreatment was rarely a problem,” said Kastelic, a member of the native village of Ouzinkie in Alaska, “because of these traditional beliefs and a natural safety net.”

But these child-rearing practices were often lost as the federal government sought to assimilate native people and placed children — often against their parents’ wishes — in “boarding schools” that were designed to immerse Indian children in Euro-American culture.

In many cases, the schools, mostly located off reservations, were centers of widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse. The transplantation of native children continued into the 1970s; there were 60,000 children in such schools in 1973 as the system was being wound down. They are the parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers.

Michelle Rivard-Parks, a University of North Dakota law professor who has spent 10 years working in Indian country as a prosecutor and tribal lawyer, said that the “aftermath of attempts to assimilate American and Alaska Natives remains ever present . . . and is visible in higher-than-average rates of suicide.”

The Justice Department task force is gathering data and will not offer its final recommendations to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on ways to mitigate violence and suicide until this fall. For now, West, Dorgan and other members are listening to tribal leaders and experts at hearings on reservations around the country.

“We know that the road to involvement in the juvenile justice system is often paved by experiences of victimization and trauma,” West said. “We have a lot of work to do. There are too many young people in Indian country who don’t see a future for themselves, who have lost all hope.”

The testimony West is hearing is sometimes bitter, and witnesses often come forward with great reluctance.

“It’s tough coming forward when you’re a victim,” said Deborah Parker, 43, the vice chair of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington state. “You have to relive what happened. . . . A reservation is like a small town, and you can face a backlash.”

Parker didn’t talk about her sexual abuse as a child until two years ago, when she publicly told of being repeatedly raped when she “was the size of a couch cushion.”

Indian child-welfare experts say that the staggering number of rapes and sexual assaults of Native American women have had devastating effects on mothers and their children.

“A majority of our girls have struggled with sexual and domestic violence — not once but repeatedly,” said Parker, who has started a program to help young female survivors and try to prevent suicide. “One of my girls, Sophia, was murdered on my reservation by her partner. Another one of our young girls took her life.”

Stories of violence and abuse

Owens recalls how she used to climb the tamarisk tree with her cousin to look for the nests of mourning doves and pigeons — until the suicide of the 16-year-old girl. The next year, the girl’s distraught father hanged himself in the same tree.

“He was devastated and he was drinking, and he hung himself too,” Owens said.

She and a good friend, Richard Stone, recently talked about their broken families and their own histories with violence. When Owens was younger, her uncle physically abused her until her mother got a restraining order. Stone, 17, was beaten by his alcoholic mother.

“My mother hit me with anything she could find,” Stone said. “A TV antenna, a belt, the wooden end of a shovel.”

Social workers finally removed him and his brothers and sister from their home, and he was placed in a group home and then a foster home.

Both Owens and Stone dream about leaving “the rez.” Owens hopes to get an internship in Washington and have a career as a politician; Stone wants to someday be a counselor or a psychiatrist.

Owens sometimes rides her bike out into the alfalfa and cotton fields near Sacaton, the tiny town named after the coarse grasses that once grew on the Sonoran Desert land belonging to the Akimel O’Odham and Pee Posh tribes. She and her friends sing a peaceful, healing song she learned from the elders about a bluebird who flies west at night, blessing the sun and bringing on the moon and stars.

One recent evening, as the sun dipped below the Sierra Estrella mountains, the two made their way to Owens’s backyard. They climbed onto her trampoline and began jumping in the moonlight, giggling like teenagers anywhere in America.

But later this month on the reservation, they will take on an adult task. Owens, Stone and a group of other teenagers here will begin a two-day course on suicide prevention. A hospital intervention trainer will engage them in role-playing and teach them how to spot the danger signs.

“In Indian country, youths need to have somebody there for them,” Owens said. “I wish I had been that somebody for the girl in the tamarisk tree.”

Additional Content

Richard Stone, left, and Tyler Owens stand near the tree where a Native American girl and her father both committed suicide in Sacaton, Ariz. Owens, who lives across the street from this tree, said: “In Indian Country, youths need to have somebody there for them. I wish I had been that somebody for the girl in the tamarisk tree.” (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Graffiti dot the landscape on the Gila River Indian reservation in Sacaton, Ariz. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Law professors and a tribal judge give their recommendations on the tribal, state and federal juvenile justice systems at a Department of Justice public hearing in Scottsdale, Ariz. The attorney general’s task force listened to recommendations from social workers, judges and Native American youths who had been the victims of violence on the reservation. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Associate Attorney General Tony West, center, talks to youth council members Tyler Owens, left, and Richard Stone at the Gila River Indian reservation in Sacaton, Ariz. The Justice Department's task force hosted a roundtable asking select Native American young people what they needed to succeed. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Chief Judge Theresa Pouley, Tulalip Tribal Court, talks with former senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), not pictured, after testifying at a Department of Justice public hearing in Scottsdale, Ariz. The attorney general’s task force listened to recommendations from social workers, judges and Native American young people who had been the victims of violence on the reservation. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Members of the youth council on the Gila River Indian reservation in Sacaton, Ariz. When the students were asked by a show of hands how many had family members who attended college, three raised their hand. When asked whether they knew anyone who had committed suicide, all 15 raised their hands. The Justice Department hosted a roundtable with the youth council asking select young people what they needed to succeed. Many of them responded that they needed someone to talk to; others said they needed college scholarships. Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Temetria Young talks about her troubled home life growing up on the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation at a Department of Justice public hearing on Native American youths in Scottsdale, Ariz. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Youth council member Richard Stone, center, talks with Associate Attorney General Tony West, right, at the Gila River Indian reservation in Sacaton, Ariz. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Different modes of transportation and cultures intersect on the Gila River Indian reservation in Sacaton, Ariz. The reservation is 40 minutes from Phoenix, and a major highway runs through a portion of it. Unlike some other reservations, Gila River borders a burgeoning metropolis. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Native American schoolchildren walk to class on the Gila River Indian reservation. Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Richard Stone, left, and Tyler Owens, right, jump on a trampoline in the moonlight with Owens’s relative Raymond Norris, center, in Sacaton, Ariz. Owens and Stone both have stories to tell of violence on the reservation. Linda Davidson)

Arizona tribe set to prosecute first non-Indian under a new law

April 18, 2014

Tribal police chief Michael Valenzuela drove through darkened desert streets, turned into a Circle K convenience store and pointed to the spot beyond the reservation line where his officers used to take the non-Indian men who battered Indian women.

“We would literally drive them to the end of the reservation and tell them to beat it,” Valenzuela said. “And hope they didn’t come back that night. They almost always did.”

About three weeks ago, at 2:45 a.m., the tribal police were called to the reservation home of an Indian woman who was allegedly being assaulted in front of her two children. They said her 36-year-old non-
Indian husband, Eloy Figueroa Lopez, had pushed her down on the couch and was violently choking her with both hands.

This time, the Yaqui police were armed with a new law that allows Indian tribes, which have their own justice system, to prosecute non-Indians. Instead of driving Lopez to the Circle K and telling him to leave the reservation, they arrested him.

Inside a sand-colored tribal courthouse set here amid the saguaro-dotted land of the Pascua Yaqui people, the law backed by the Obama administration and passed by Congress last year is facing its first critical test.

Michael Valenzuela, the Pascua Yaqui chief of police (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

The Pascua Yaqui, along with two other tribes chosen by the Justice Department for a pilot project allowing the prosecution of non-tribal men, received the go-ahead to begin enforcing the law a year ahead of the country’s other 563 tribes because tribal officials made the case they were able to protect the rights of the accused.

Some members of Congress had fought hard to derail the legislation, arguing that non-Indian men would be unfairly convicted without due process by sovereign nations whose unsophisticated tribal courts were not equal to the American criminal justice system.

“They thought that tribal courts wouldn’t give the non-Indians a fair shake,” said Pascua Yaqui Attorney General Amanda Lomayesva. “Congressmen all were asking, how are non-Indians going to be tried by a group of Indian jurors?”

Against that opposition last year, the Obama administration was able to push through only the narrowest version of a law to prosecute non-Indians. While it covers domestic and dating-violence cases involving Native Americans on the reservation, the law does not give tribes jurisdiction to prosecute child abuse or crimes, including sexual assault, that are committed by non-Indians who are “strangers” to their victims. In addition, the law does not extend to Native American women in Alaska.

“It was a compromise the tribes had to make,” Lomayesva said. “It only partially fixes the problem.”

Still, what will play out over the next months on the Pascua Yaqui reservation is being watched closely by the Justice Department and by all of Indian country. The tribe’s officials are facing intense scrutiny and thorny legal challenges as they prepare for their first prosecution of a non-Indian man.

“Everyone’s feeling pressure about these cases,” said Pascua Yaqui Chief Prosecutor Alfred Urbina. “They’re the first cases. No one wants to screw anything up.”

LEFT: Alfred Urbina, the chief prosecutor of the Pascua Yaqui tribe (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post). RIGHT: A courtroom at the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Courthouse (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

The prosecutor

A year ago, Urbina traveled to Washington with tribal Chairman Peter Yucupicio and others from the tribe to meet with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). He carried a binder with a Native American design on its wool cover that was filled with photographs of the tribe’s
$21 million state-of-the-art courthouse and police complex.

Most Americans have never been exposed to Indian tribal courts, and Urbina knew that there were no federally recognized tribes or Indian reservations in Virginia. Urbina wanted to show Cantor that, as one tribal official put it, “Indians were not still living in teepees” and could dispense justice as fairly as any other court in America.

Beginning with the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, Indians were encouraged to set up their own tribal courts. There are now 324 tribal courts on sovereign Indian land across the country. Most of the courts operate like other U.S. courts and have similar laws and court procedures.

But many of them also use traditional Indian culture to help resolve disputes, including elders councils and sentencing circles. The Navajo Nation has a traditional “peacemaking” program. The Tulalip Tribes send first-time and nonviolent juvenile and young adult offenders to be counseled by a tribal court elders panel, which may recommend community service and treatment instead of jail.

The prospect of exposing non-Native Americans to this system upset many Republicans in Congress. Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said the legislation made “56 million acres of U.S. soil that happen to be called Indian Country . . . Constitution-free zones where due process and equal protection rights as interpreted and enforced in U.S. courts — do not exist.”

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said it “would trample on the Bill of Rights of every American who is not a Native American.”

Inside Cantor’s conference room, Urbina pulled out photographs of the new, high-tech courthouse where proceedings are video- and audio-recorded and each juror has a small television screen to view forensic evidence, which is also displayed on a giant video screen in front.

Urbina, the son of Yaqui and Hispanic pecan and cotton pickers, told Cantor about his tribe, a deeply religious people who have blended Catholicism with ancient cultural traditions.

The reservation is struggling with alcoholism, substance abuse, drug gangs, teen pregnancy and domestic violence. More than 42 percent of the children are living with single mothers in poverty.

Urbina also told Cantor about all the non-Indians on his reservation, which is about two square miles in area and located about an hour’s travel north of the Mexican border and a few miles southwest of Tucson. Along with about 5,000 members of the tribe, many non-Native Americans live or work on the reservation, often dating and marrying Indian women.

While some Pascua Yaqui speak their native language, almost all speak English and Spanish. Given the diversity, it was critical to be able to prosecute any men who abuse Indian women, Urbina said.

The grounds of the Casino del Sol resort (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

At the western edge of the reservation, the gleaming Casino del Sol resort brings in money for the tribe. But the casino, along with an older gambling hall down the road, is also a key to protecting criminal defendants, Urbina explained.

All employees at the casinos, including whites, African Americans, Hispanics and Asians, could be tapped for jury duty so that the pool would not be composed exclusively of Native Americans, Urbina said.

The 500 non-Indians living on the reservation could also be called for jury duty, along with non-Indians who work for the tribal government.

“Cantor came into the meeting a little perturbed,” said Urbina, recalling that day. “But once we started talking and said this is what we do in Indian country, this is our court system and look, our courtroom looks like any other courtroom in America, the meeting went really well.

“He was mesmerized,” said Raymond Buelna, a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Council who was there. “He saw how extensive our justice system was and it just wasn’t a group of people under a porch judging someone. It was an actual, living, breathing justice system.”

A Cantor spokesman confirmed the tenor of the meeting. Although the majority leader was personally opposed to the prosecution of non-Indians in Indian courts, two weeks later he allowed the legislation to get to the floor of the House for a vote, and it eventually became law.

LEFT: Judge Melvin Stoof (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post). RIGHT: Photos of Stoof’s grandfather, Joseph Running Bear (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

The judge

Tribes that prosecute non-Indians must have a judge with a law degree, and in his office behind the Pascua Yaqui tribal courtroom, Judge Melvin R. Stoof has the requisite degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law on the wall, along with a photo of himself beside Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. On his desk, he also has a photo of his grandfather, Joseph Running Bear, wearing his powwow ceremonial feather headdress.

A member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, Stoof remembers reading in law school about the 1978 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe case in which the Supreme Court held that Indian tribes had no legal authority to prosecute non-Indians who committed crimes on reservations.

“I never understood the logic of it,” said Stoof, 57, who wears his long gray hair tied in a ponytail. “The Supreme Court found that tribal courts couldn’t have jurisdiction over non-Indians because they were aliens and strangers. They didn’t participate in the political process, didn’t vote in elections and weren’t residents. And I said, wait a minute, that’s the same that would apply to a New Yorker who commits a crime in Los Angeles.”

For the next nearly four decades, as Stoof served as a lawyer and then a tribal judge on 10 different reservations, he watched in frustration as non-Native American men committed crimes against Indian women and were never punished. The tribes couldn’t prosecute, and the federal government, which did have jurisdiction, wasn’t taking the cases, he said.

“For a long time, the federal government was not prosecuting these crimes and they didn’t have to give any reason for declinations,” Stoof said.

He said this was partly because some reservations are rural outposts and hundreds of miles from a federal courthouse. In other cases, federal officials and the FBI might not trust that the tribal police did a good enough job investigating and preparing the case, he said.

In Stoof’s home state of South Dakota, he said, the federal government declined about 80 percent of assault and battery cases against non-Indians. But Stoof said that the number of cases declined by U.S. attorneys has dropped in recent years because the Justice Department has made an effort to prosecute more cases in Indian country.

Last year, in its first report to Congress on prosecutions, the Justice Department said U.S. attorneys declined 31 percent of all Indian-country cases submitted for prosecution.

Now, Stoof is set to be the first tribal judge in the country to hear a tribal criminal case against a non-Indian in 36 years. Since Feb. 20, when the Justice Department said the Yaquis, the Tulalip Tribes of Washington state and the Umatilla tribes of Oregon could begin prosecuting non-Indians, there have been six arrests, all by the Pascua Yaqui police.

“It’s uncharted territory, and people will be paying attention to what happens here,” Stoof said, smiling. “There’s a lot of unresolved issues, and I’m sure there will be some challenges.”

Melissa Acosta is the chief public defender on the reservation. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

The public defender

The challenges will come from Melissa Acosta, a Mexican-American woman from Tucson who commutes to the reservation every day and serves as the tribe’s chief public defender.

Working down the road from the new courthouse inside a pale-beige stucco modular building, Acosta is gearing up to defend the non-Indian men accused of assaulting women living on the reservation.

Many tribal courts cannot afford their own public defender and have only “advocates” without law degrees to defend the accused. The Yaquis wouldn’t have been given the green light from the Justice Department to launch the pilot project without Acosta, a longtime public defender — and she knows it.

Acosta said she would like a little more respect from the federal government. “We should be over there,” she says, pointing to the high-tech courthouse in the distance. “It would be great if the federal government threw some resources our way as well.”

Acosta’s office recently filed motions with the tribal court to dismiss the first three tribal arrests of non-Indian men, arguing that the tribe did not properly implement the new law, including notifying the public of its new jurisdiction over domestic violence cases.

Chief prosecutor Urbina has opposed the motions, saying that the tribe fully complied with the Justice Department requirements. Judge Stoof has set a hearing for Friday.

In the meantime, a court date has been set for Lopez, who allegedly tried to strangle his wife. A resident alien from Mexico, he has been charged by the tribe with domestic violence aggravated assault, battery and endangerment. If convicted, he could face deportation.

A 37-year-old Asian man, Myxay Yongbanthom, has also been charged with domestic violence under the new law after allegedly breaking down the door of his Indian girlfriend’s bathroom, where she had locked herself and her daughter to get away from him. He has pleaded not guilty.

Another non-Indian, Tony R. Slaton, has been charged with aggravated assault and battery. Tribal police said he attacked his girlfriend in the middle of an intersection in broad daylight in front of several witnesses. He allegedly choked his girlfriend as she held onto her baby, threatened to kill witnesses who came to the woman’s aid, and then fled the scene, the police said.

Three other cases, including one in which an Indian woman was allegedly punched in the face and suffered a concussion, were dismissed by the tribe after evidentiary issues arose and there were questions about whether one of the victims would testify against her boyfriend.

Pascua Yaqui Victim Services Manager Canada Valenzuela said that women in the middle of domestic violence cases often want their husbands or boyfriends to come back home and not be sent to jail.

Dismissing some of the first cases was “very disappointing, but you have issues in almost all domestic violence cases, especially where those relationship dynamics are still going on,” Urbina said. “It’s probably more difficult on reservations where it’s a small community, folks all know each other and many are related.”

Whatever happens, Urbina said that in the end, the significance of the new law is bigger than the first, second or third arrests.

“When you do not have an adequate system of justice or laws, it creates a perception of lawlessness,” Urbina said. “In the past, I have had to face whole families and explain that we could not provide the full measure of justice their loved ones deserved. When you have decades of this legal sickness festering in tribal communities, it has a tremendous impact on the health and wellness of tribes.”

The Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation in Arizona is being watched closely by the Justice Department and by all of Indian country as they prepare for their first-ever prosecution of a non-Indian man. The tribe’s officials are expecting intense scrutiny and thorny legal challenges. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Additional Content

PostTV: Justice is slow to arrive for Native women

Children play in the street on the Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation. Michael Valenzuela, the reservation’s chief of police, said, “This is our goal. Kids running in the street, bicycling, going to the ice cream truck.” (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

LEFT: Police Sgt. Jose Montano drives by the Circle K corner store near the reservation where police officers used to have to drop off non-tribal lawbreakers. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post). RIGHT: From left, Sgt. Jose Montano, Sgt. Jesse Hernandez and Lt. Tom Snyder are tribal police officers on the Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Alfred Urbina, the chief prosecutor of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, describes the complexities of tribal law and its interaction with Arizona state law and federal law. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

The Pascua Yaqui flag flies alongside the U.S. and the Arizona state flags. The tribe, along with two others, received the go-ahead to begin enforcing the law to allow prosecutions of non-Indians a year ahead of the country’s other 563 tribes because they made the case they were able to protect the rights of the accused. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

LEFT: Families and a junior-league football team gather on the Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post). RIGHT: From left, Loretta Nuñez, daughter Cecelia Nuñez and husband Henry Nuñez, all of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, make flour tortillas. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Josephine Athena Valenzuela of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe was in an abusive relationship and marriage from the age of 14 to 21. If laws were different at the time of her abuse, she said, she would have been more comfortable reporting her then-husband to reservation law enforcement. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

LEFT: A guard electronically watches over cells at the Pascua Yaqui tribal jail. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post). RIGHT: The new Pascua Yaqui police complex has a state-of-the-art underground shooting range. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Barbershop owner Greg Salinas, who is Mexican American, cuts the hair of Pascua Yaqui tribesman Jose Montana, 34. Because Salinas owns the barbershop on the reservation, he is eligible to be called for jury duty by the tribal court, as are all employees at the casinos and the non-Indians living on the reservation or working for the tribal government. That means a jury pool would not be composed exclusively of Native Americans. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Jesus Salinas is seen with his mother, Yvonne Diaz, of the Pascua Yaqui tribe. Diaz believes the new law helps but more needs to be done. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

Juan Jaimez tends to the cemetery on the Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation. Jaimez also said the new law is a step in the right direction but that more needs to be done. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

In rural villages, little protection for Alaska Natives

In the tiny Tlingit community of Kake, a brutal murder highlights how help often comes slowly and public safety is in short supply

August 2, 2014

Marla Howard looks at the church across the street from her house in Kake, Alaska, where her daughter, 13-year-old Mackenzie, was found dead February 2013. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

KAKE, Alaska — Her body lay in the back entryway of the church for 11 hours after villagers called the Alaska State Troopers for help. She was a 13-year-old nicknamed “Mack” who wore big red glasses and loved to dance. The native Tlingit girl had been beaten to death.

No one knew who killed Mackenzie Howard that cold February night last year — and people were terrified that the killer was still in their midst. But in the remote community of Kake, only accessible by air or boat, there was no law enforcement officer. That meant no police to protect the community, cordon off the crime scene, preserve the evidence and launch an investigation. The villagers had to wait for state troopers in Juneau, 114 miles away, to get there.

“They have the capability of flying at night now . . . but still nobody came,” said Joel Jackson, a local wood carver who helped gather villagers to guard Mackenzie’s body and the crime scene that night. “And that upset me greatly. When there’s any fishing violation or hunting violation, they’re here in full force — over a dead animal. To have one of our own laying there for [so long] was traumatic for everybody.”

With no police and few courts of their own, most Alaska Native villages instead are forced to rely on Alaska State Troopers. But there is only about one trooper per every million acres. Getting to rural communities can take days and is often delayed by the great distances to cover, the vagaries of the weather and — in the minds of many Alaska Natives — the low priority placed on protecting local tribes.

Rural Alaska has the worst crime statistics in the nation’s Native American communities — and the country. Alaska Native communities experience the highest rates of family violence, suicide and alcohol abuse in the United States: a domestic violence rate 10 times the national average; physical assault of women 12 times the national average; and a suicide rate almost four times the national average. Rape in Alaska occurs at the highest rate in the nation — three times the national average.

These trends, according to Bruce Botelho, a former Alaska attorney general and a member of the Alaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission, are “exacerbated, in part, because of the enormous geographical size of Alaska, the remoteness of these communities, the skyrocketing costs of transportation, the lack of any economic opportunity and the enormous gaps in the delivery of any form of government service, particularly from the state of Alaska.”

There are at least 75 remote Alaska Native villages with no law enforcement, according to a report last fall by the bipartisan Indian Law and Order Commission, created by Congress to study ways to make tribal communities safer. Of the nation’s 566 federally recognized tribes, 229 of them are in Alaska, most in tiny villages with no access by roads.

“Unfortunately, there are places in rural Alaska that if a woman is raped or a child is beaten, that victim might not get any help whatsoever,” said Associate Attorney General Tony West, who recently visited Alaska. “It can take a day and a half before responders show up to the scene of a crime or to a call for help. Imagine if you were a victim of violence and you can’t get help because weather conditions don’t allow you to get out of your village. Where are you supposed to go? You have nowhere to go.”

A spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers said that delayed response time “has no relationship to the priority given to respond to remote Alaskan villages.”

“The overriding factor considered . . . when establishing case priority for a response, whether on the road system or off, is the nature of the crime,” spokeswoman Megan A. Peters said. “Crimes in rural areas . . . can take additional time to respond to depending on logistical issues such as distance, terrain and weather.”

In some remote villages in the Alaska bush, townspeople say they have to place a suspect in a locked closet until troopers come. In one, villagers handcuffed a suspect to an anvil in a hut while they waited for help.

A villager passes the empty office of Kake’s village public safety officer, who was away for training for a week. These officers, paid for with state funds, haven't been allowed to carry guns. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

‘People don’t really fear the law here’

Nestled in the Tongass National Forest, Kake overlooks the serene waters of Frederick Sound and the distant snow-capped mountains of Baranof Island. It is home to one of the world’s largest totem poles.

Bald eagles fly above, humpback whales are seen offshore and black bears wander into town, especially when the salmon starts running in Gunnuk Creek. A close-knit and mostly peaceful community, the 559 villagers live off the land, hunting moose and deer and fishing for salmon and halibut. As an alternative to the traditional justice system, magistrate Mike Jackson, the brother of the local carver, created a “circle peacemaking” program to resolve minor disputes and misdemeanors.

But Kake is also struggling with 80 percent unemployment and, like other communities around America, the attendant alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence. The village’s once-booming logging industry is dead. The commercial fishing business has long been in decline. The salmon hatchery closed last month. And Kake does not have enough funds for a police officer.

“It can be terrifying,” said Teresa Gaudette, who chairs Kake’s public-safety committee. “When something happens, like someone breaking and entering, we have to call 911 to get a state trooper to come in. Then, it can take a few hours to a day or two, depending on their availability and the weather. By the time they get here, sometimes nothing can be done because there’s no evidence. People can just get away with it.”

Or, as Kake City Council member Marla Howard, the mother of the slain girl, put it: “People don’t really fear the law here.”

A close-knit and mostly peaceful community, Kake villagers live off the land and use a “circle peacemaking” program to resolve minor disputes and misdemeanors. Grave Island, across from Kake, is where the village’s elders are buried and where Mackenzie was laid to rest. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

The Justice Department’s relationship with Alaska Native villages is different than it is with tribes in the lower 48 because the state — rather than tribes or the federal government — generally has jurisdiction over criminal matters involving tribes.

In the lower 48, there is a long history of treaties to provide services to Native American communities that the government moved onto reservations. But in Alaska, which became a state in 1959 long after the American Indian treaties, there are no reservations. And a series of court rulings has determined that there is almost no “Indian country” in Alaska, as defined by federal law, which has led to a tense and complicated relationship between the tribes and the state government.

“The strongly centralized law enforcement and justice systems of the state of Alaska . . . do not serve local and Native communities adequately, if at all,” concluded the Indian Law and Order Commission. “Devolving authority to Alaska Native communities is essential for addressing local crime.”

‘The world just changed for me’

On Feb. 5, 2013, villagers in Kake gathered for a memorial ceremony for a widely respected elder. Scores of relatives and friends from other towns descended on the tiny village in Southeastern Alaska for the Tlingit tradition of “potlatch,” an event with large offerings of food and other gifts.

Mackenzie and her parents, Marla and Clifton “Kip” Howard, spent the day preparing for the funeral. The Howards have eight children from previous marriages. Mackenzie was the one child they had together.

A villager snapped a photograph as Mackenzie set out with a boatload of flowers to Grave Island, right across the water from Kake. Wearing her signature red-framed glasses, the junior high basketball player flashed a big smile. It is one of the last images of her alive.

Later, as the village-wide memorial dinner wound down in Kake, Mackenzie told her father, who is the village fire chief, that she would meet him at home. When Kip Howard arrived shortly afterward, she wasn’t there and he sensed that something was wrong. Grabbing a hand-held spotlight, he started looking for her and called other villagers to help.

About 11 p.m., the pastor’s wife called him. She had found Mackenzie’s unclothed body in the back of the Memorial Presbyterian Church, directly across the street from Mackenzie’s house.

“I opened up the church’s back door and there she was,” said Kip Howard, fighting back tears. The assailant “bashed her head in with a rock bigger than a basketball. And I just . . . that’s when the world just changed for me.”

"I opened up the church’s back door and there she was," said Mackenzie's father, Clifton "Kip" Howard. An assailant "bashed her head in with a rock bigger than a basketball … And I just … that’s when the world just changed for me." (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Joel Jackson, the local carver whose studio is next to the church, called the state troopers in Juneau. He gathered other villagers to help him cordon off the lawn outside the church, guard the girl’s body and protect the village while they waited for investigators. Thirty-five years ago, Jackson was the village’s police chief. The village eventually shut down the one-person department because of a lack of funds.

“There were probably 12 to 15 men,” said Liz Medicine Crow, president of the nonprofit First Alaskans Institute who had come in from Anchorage for her uncle’s potlatch. “And [Jackson] told them, ‘If you’re going to help, go home and get your warm clothes on because you’re going to be out here all night. If you can’t handle this, don’t come back.’ They all came back.”

As daylight broke — and the troopers were still not there — people who had come in for the potlatch began leaving the village.

“There was a group of us all leaving in the morning on the early ferry,” said Medicine Crow. “And there was kind of a ‘What do we do?’ moment. ‘Can we leave? Are we allowed to leave?’ There was no trooper there to tell us what to do. So, we left.”

“The fastest way to get law enforcement here is to shoot a moose,” she added, reflecting a widespread sentiment in the village.

But Peters, the spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers, said crimes against people always get first priority.

In the wake of the murder, villagers were angry. “People were scared,” Jackson said. “They still hadn’t figured out who did the crime. People were on edge, people had guns out, which I don’t blame them. It was pretty intense.” The murder of a child was unheard of in Kake.

A trooper arrived later that morning, followed several hours later by investigators who came from Anchorage, more than 1,000 miles from Kake. The school was shut down for two days and in lockdown in the days afterward. “I told the lead trooper, ‘You need to solve this and solve it quick,’ because you could feel the anger in the town,” Jackson said.

Ten days later, the villagers prepared to bury Mackenzie on Grave Island. “They sent her to Anchorage to try and fix her up,” her mother said. “But they couldn’t fix her up for us to be able to see her again.”

The family was only able to touch her hand to say goodbye.

“That’s about it,” Marla Howard said.

At 11 a.m. the morning of the funeral, state troopers made an arrest after collecting several key pieces of evidence and executing search warrants, according to state trooper Lt. Rex Leath, who oversaw the investigation.

The suspect was one of Kake’s own, the 14-year-old son of villagers who were friends with the Howards. The boy, who has not been publicly named because he is a juvenile, was flown to a juvenile facility on an island more than 100 miles away where he is still detained. A court hearing is set for the fall of 2014 to determine whether he will be tried as a juvenile or an adult.

Juneau’s assistant district attorney, Nick Polasky, declined to comment on the case. John Bernitz, the attorney representing the boy, said he would not confirm or deny there even is a juvenile case. Mayor Henrich Kadake said he did not want to discuss the murder because he is related to the families of both the victim and the accused.

The village’s safety problems

It has been about a year and a half since Mackenzie was killed. From their living room window, the Howards look out at the church where their daughter’s body was found. A piece of yellow crime scene tape left by the troopers still blows in the wind. “It’s a nightmare,” Marla Howard said. “And I’m awake.”

After the murder, Kake was sent a village public safety officer known in Alaska as a VPSO. Throughout rural Alaska, about 100 VPSOs are used as substitutes for police. These officers, who have limited training and authority, are paid by nonprofit regional corporations with state funds. But they are not directly accountable to the community where they work, instead reporting to Alaska State Troopers.

Even though Alaska is one of the highest gun-owning states per capita, public safety officers have not been allowed to carry firearms. A VPSO was shot and killed in a Southwest Alaska village in March 2013. In July 2014, the Alaska governor signed a bill that would allow VPSOs to carry firearms. But the gun training won’t begin until January 2015, and VPSOs aren’t expected to be armed until the end of 2015.

In most cases now, only one unarmed officer is responsible for the safety of the village around the clock. When a VPSO leaves for training or to patrol another village, the community is left with no backup.

A Washington Post reporter visiting Kake in mid-June found a handwritten note taped to a window of the small building where the VPSO works, indicating he was gone. “If you have any reports to make, please call Ketchikan Dispatch. Thank you,” the note said. Ketchikan is 143 miles away from Kake. A dispatcher said the officer would be gone for the week. He was attending a training program.

“It’s nerve-wracking when the village public safety officer leaves the island,” said Kake City Administrator Rudy Bean. “Everyone pretty much hopes that nothing serious happens.”

Marla Howard hugs carver Joel Jackson, a lifelong Kake resident who helped guard the crime scene next to his studio after her daughter was murdered. Kake does not have enough funds for a police officer, and state troopers didn’t arrive until the next day. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Back to Grave Island

Many mornings, Kip Howard gets up at 3 a.m. to go fishing before heading to his jobs as fire chief and operator of the village water treatment plant.

“I cannot get through the day without thinking of Mackenzie half the day,” he said. “It’s very, very hard when you have to bury your baby. It should have been the other way around.”

He and his wife have thought about moving away from Kake. “But Kake is home,” Howard said. “My wife grew up here and lived here all her life. I’ve got all my work here. My pleasure comes in going down to my boat in the morning and being able to put my line in the water and probably catch a fish within five minutes.”

On the way back, Howard does not come straight home. He steers his boat out toward lush, green Grave Island where the village elders are buried, as is his daughter.

“I want to let Mackenzie know I’m passing by,” Howard said. “I want her to know I’m thinking about her.”

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Marla Howard, mother of Mackenzie, wears her daughter’s green sneakers while looking at a headstone that her family will put on her daughter's grave. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Marla Howard talks about her daughter’s murder and the days that followed from her home in Kake. “It’s a nightmare,” she said. “And I'm awake.” (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

A boat passes Grave Island, where Kake villagers bury their elders and where Mackenzie Howard is now buried. The girl’s body was discovered in the back of a church across the street from her house in February 2013. The small village did not have any law enforcement, so villagers were left to guard the crime scene themselves until a state trooper arrived the next day. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

LEFT: One of the last photographs of Mackenzie Howard, taken on the day she was murdered. She was setting off with a boatload of flowers to Grave Island as part of the “potlatch” and burial of a beloved village elder. (Courtesy of Marla Howard). RIGHT: Mackenzie Howard wore big red glasses, loved to dance and was on her school’s basketball team. A teenage boy from Kake was arrested in the murder, but the case has not yet gone to trial. (Courtesy of Howard family)

A small shrine of candles, photos and basketball jerseys honoring Mackenzie Howard is inside her home in Kake. “Mackenzie was just born smiling,” said her mother, Marla. “She was just the happiest girl.” (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

A visual homage to the memory of Mackenzie Howard is in the window of her family’s home. Her body was found in the arctic entryway of a church, seen in the reflection, located across the street from her house. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

At home, Marla Howard goes through cards and other memorabilia dedicated to her daughter. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Liz Medicine Crow, who is originally from Kake and is now the president and chief executive of the nonprofit First Alaskans Institute, recalls the murder of Mackenzie Howard and how her village had to wait until the next day for law enforcement to arrive. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Josiah Thomas, his father David Thomas and sister Debbie Thomas with grandfather Gary Jackson in Kake after dinner one recent evening. The Jackson family live in the Tlingit community of 559 people in a remote village located in the Alexander Archipelago. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

LEFT: Andrew Kashevarof, Chevy Kadake and brother Rio Kadake prepare nets for opening day of salmon fishing aboard their family fishing vessel Jade Ann in Kake. Other than local government, employment opportunities are limited for residents in the small village.There are few privately owned fishing businesses. Years ago when logging was active along with a salmon cannery, the community was larger, had more jobs and also more of a law enforcement presence. But logging dried up along with the economy and Kake was without any law enforcement last year when Mackenzie Howard was murdered. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post). RIGHT: Chevy Kadake prepares nets for opening day of salmon fishing aboard their family fishing vessel Jade Ann in Kake. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

LEFT: Lifelong Kake resident Mike Jackson picks goosetongue at low tide on the shore of the small village of Kake. The villagers fend for themselves by fishing, hunting deer and moose, and gathering local plants and berries. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post). RIGHT: At low tide one evening in Kake, local magistrate Mike Jackson picks goosetongue, a coastal plant that can be eaten raw or cooked. Jackson runs a Circle Peacemaking program centered on healing victims and the community. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

John Willis and his longtime girlfriend Shirley Skeek kiss outside her home in Kake.They said that their community is peaceful but needs full-time law enforcement. The village has one VPSO paid for with state funds, but he is not allowed to be armed. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

From left, Liz Medicine Crow and Kake residents Julie Jackson and David Thomas talk while barbecuing dinner in Kake. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

“Our way of life is about knowing the geography and the biology of everything that’s out here and being able to take care of it and harvest it in a responsible way so that you’re always ensuring that more come back, that you are only taking what you need, and that you’re understanding the history of the clan and the people who are from here. When you’re out on the land and out on the water, those are the things that you learn,” said Liz Medicine Crow, describing her Tlingit village of Kake, which is only accessible by boat or plane. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Dark side of the boom

North Dakota’s oil rush brings cash and promise to reservation, along with drug-fueled crime

September 28, 2014

RIGHT: Tractor-trailers tied to oil production back up traffic and are seen everywhere in and around New Town. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

FORT BERTHOLD INDIAN RESERVATION, N.D. — Tribal police Sgt. Dawn White is racing down a dusty two-lane road — siren blaring, police radio crackling — as she attempts to get to the latest 911 call on a reservation that is a blur of oil rigs and bright-orange gas flares.

“Move! C’mon, get out of the fricking way!” White yells as she hits 102 mph and weaves in and out of a line of slow-moving tractor-trailers that stretches for miles.

In just five years, the Bakken formation in North Dakota has gone from producing about 200,000 barrels to 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, making North Dakota the No. 2 oil-producing state, behind Texas, and luring thousands of workers from around the country.

But there is a dark side to the multibillion-dollar boom in the oil fields, which stretch across western North Dakota into Montana and part of Canada. The arrival of highly paid oil workers living in sprawling “man camps” with limited spending opportunities has led to a crime wave -- including murders, aggravated assaults, rapes, human trafficking and robberies -- fueled by a huge market for illegal drugs, primarily heroin and methamphetamine.

Especially hard-hit are the Indian lands at the heart of the Bakken. Created in 1870 on rolling grasslands along the Missouri River, Fort Berthold (pronounced Birth-Old), was named after a U.S. Army fort and is home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation -- known as the MHA Nation, or the Three Affiliated Tribes.

“It’s like a tidal wave, it’s unbelievable,” said Diane Johnson, chief judge at the MHA Nation. She said crime has tripled in the past two years and that 90 percent is drug-related. “The drug problem that the oil boom has brought is destroying our reservation.”

Once farmers and traders, the Mandan was the tribe that gave Lewis and Clark safe harbor on their expedition to the Northwest but was decimated in the mid-1830s by smallpox. Over many years, the 12 million acres awarded to the three tribes by treaty in 1851 has been reduced to 1 million by the United States.

The U.S. government in 1947 built the Garrison Dam and created Lake Sakakawea, a 479-square-mile body of water that flooded the land of the Three Affiliated Tribes, wiped out much of their farming and ranching economy, and forced most of them to relocate to higher ground on the prairie.

“When the white man said, ‘This will be your reservation,’ little did they know those Badlands would now have oil and gas,” MHA Nation Chairman Tex “Red Tipped Arrow” Hall said in an energy company video last year. “Those Badlands were coined because they’re nothing but gully, gumbo and clay. Grass won’t grow, and horses can’t eat and cattle or buffalo can’t hardly eat . . . but there’s huge oil and gas reserves under those Badlands now.”

Native Americans from regional tribes dance at the grand entrance of the Little Shell Pow Wow, hosted by the Three Affiliated Tribes in New Town, N.D. The reservation, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations, is at the epicenter of the fracking and oil boom, but crime and drug trafficking have increased dramatically. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

The oil boom could potentially bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the tribes, creating the opportunity to build new roads, schools, and badly needed housing and health facilities. But the money is coming with a steep social cost, according to White, her fellow tribal officers and federal officials who are struggling to keep up with the onslaught of drugs and crime.

“We are dealing with stuff we’ve never seen before,” White said after leaving the scene of the latest disturbance fueled by drugs and alcohol. “No one was prepared for this.”

The 20-member tribal police force is short-staffed and losing officers to higher-paying jobs on the oil fields. Sometimes, there are only two tribal officers on duty to cover the whole reservation, including part of the North Dakota Badlands. There is only one substance-abuse treatment center, with room for only nine patients at a time, to help the soaring number of heroin and meth addicts.

In the summer of 2014, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy singled out drug trafficking in the Bakken oil patch as a “burgeoning threat.” Violent crime in North Dakota’s Williston Basin region, which includes the reservation, increased 121 percent from 2005 to 2011. The Bakken is also experiencing a large influx of motorcycle gangs, trying to claim “ownership” of the territory and facilitating prostitution and the drug trade, according to a federal report.

“Up until a few years ago, Fort Berthold was a typical reservation struggling with the typical economic problems that you find in Indian Country,” said Timothy Q. Purdon, the U.S. attorney for North Dakota, whose office prosecutes violent crime on the reservation.

“But now, boom — barrels of oil mean barrels of money,” Purdon said. “More money and more people equals more crime. And whether the outsiders came here to work on a rig and decided it would be easier to sell drugs or they came here to sell drugs, it doesn’t make any difference. They’re selling drugs. An unprecedented amount.”

Three Affiliated Tribes officer Jacob Gadewoltz takes tribal member Troy Yazzie into custody on a federal warrant. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Operation Winter’s End

Hall, the longtime chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, called it the “worst tragedy” on the Fort Berthold reservation in his memory.

On a November afternoon two years ago, an intruder burst into a home in New Town, the largest town on the reservation, and shot and killed a grandmother and three of her grandchildren with a hunting rifle. A fourth grandchild, a 12-year-old boy, survived by hiding under his slain brother’s body and pretending he was dead.

North Dakota U.S. Attorney Tim Purdon has indicted more than 60 people for dealing heroin and methamphetamine on and around Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in an investigation dubbed Operation Winter’s End. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

The young man responsible for the killings slit his own throat hours later in a nearby town. He was high on meth, according to federal officials.

On the same day, in an unrelated incident, Sgt. White stopped a motorist who was wanted on an outstanding warrant. As she grabbed the handle of his car door, the driver, who had drugs in the vehicle, took off, dragging her on the ground for half a block and sending her to the hospital with a concussion.

It seemed as though big-city drug violence had arrived like a sudden storm.

“We wanted to find out, immediate top priority, what happened here,” Purdon said. “Who was this shooter? Where did he get the meth? Who was he involved with? And what can we do about it?”

Purdon and the FBI teamed up with White and other tribal officers, focusing on a large-scale drug-trafficking ring led by two brothers from Wasco, Calif. — Oscar and Happy Lopez. In the summer of 2013, in an investigation dubbed Operation Winter’s End, Purdon indicted 22 people, including the Lopez brothers as well as members of the tribes, for dealing heroin and meth on or around Fort Berthold. The drugs came from Mexico through Southern California, officials said.

One suspect, Michael Smith, was wanted on a warrant for drug trafficking in Colorado. He holed himself up in a reservation house with a gun for more than 12 hours before the police knocked down the walls with a front-end loader.

“The ‘wow effect’ was pretty strong,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Volk, who oversaw the case. “That’s not something that happens every day in a small town like New Town.”

Since then, Purdon has indicted more than 40 other people who have all pleaded guilty to felony drug charges in the ongoing Winter’s End case, with a large amount of the meth and heroin also coming from gangs in Chicago or dealers in Minneapolis.

Investigating crime on Fort Berthold is more difficult than most places because the reservation sits in six different counties each with its own sheriff — some of whom do not have a good relationship with the tribe, according to tribal members. If the victim and suspect are both Native American, the tribal police or the FBI handles the arrest. But if the suspect is not Native American, in most cases the tribal police can detain the suspect but then have to call the sheriff in the county where the crime occurred. Sometimes they have to wait several hours before a deputy arrives to make the arrest. In a murder case, the state or the FBI might be involved, depending on the race of the victim and the suspect.

“There are volumes of treatises on Indian law that are written about this stuff,” Purdon said. “It’s very complicated. And we’re asking guys with guns and badges in uniforms at 3:30 in the morning with people yelling at each other to make these decisions — to understand the law and be able to apply it.”

In the quadruple murder, for example, all four victims were white. But police didn't immediately know if the perpetrator was white or Native American, so there was initial confusion among law enforcement officials about who was in charge of the investigation.

“Can you imagine the idea that we didn’t know the race of the shooter, so we didn’t know at first who had jurisdiction over the homicide?” Purdon asked. “That’s not something your typical county sheriff has to deal with.”

The killer was later identified as a 21-year-old Native American.

Native American Rachelle Baker, 29, a former user of meth and heroin, has the names of her two young children tattooed on her arms to cover up needle scars and to serve as a reminder to stay sober. Baker, who faces up to 56 months in jail on drug charges, hopes to regain custody of her children. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

‘I helped bring that heroin here’

In the front seat of her cruiser, White, an Army veteran who grew up in Fort Berthold, carries an eagle feather and a photograph of the rodeo-champion grandfather who raised her.

Volk calls her “the eyes and ears of the reservation,” a cop who is able to find anyone. Her fervor to save her people from the ravages of heroin and meth gives White the fortitude to arrest even tribal members she knows well.

“I put the uniform on,” White said, “I have no family. I have no friends.”

Sgt. Dawn White removes an open bottle of whiskey from a vehicle while searching for drugs during a traffic stop in New Town. The driver, not a Native American, was detained on charges of driving under the influence and a suspended driver’s license while White waited for a deputy sheriff to make the arrest. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Before she sets out on patrol, she lights the end of braided sweet grass, a tradition of the Plains Indians to drive away bad spirits. White, a mother of three, places it on her dashboard for protection.

White also carries a set of pink handcuffs, a personal signature that she says represents “girl power.” One night last year, White slapped the cuffs on one of her relatives, Rachelle Baker, a 29-year-old former Fort Berthold teacher who became addicted to heroin shortly after it arrived on the Bakken.

“I was in the back of her cruiser, cussing her out, telling her to get away from me, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing,’ ” Baker said in a recent interview. “I was bawling my eyes out. I was sweating, my hair was sticking to my face. She took my hair and pushed it back and she said, ‘Rachelle, I don’t want to see you like this anymore. I don’t want to see you live like this. You need to get better for your kids, Rachelle.’ And she closed the door.”

Three years ago, Baker’s boyfriend at the time got heroin from an oil rig worker who had brought it with him from Boston. “That was the first time in my life I ever saw it,” Baker said.

Soon, she was hooked on heroin, buying from a dealer who came from Minneapolis and shooting up, along with her friends, on a reservation where she said “there’s no other recreation.”

“There’s not a movie theater here,” Baker said. “There’s not a swimming pool. There’s nothing. There’s nothing to do here.”

She became pregnant and was using when she had her baby boy.

“I just couldn’t stop,” Baker said. She shot up so many times that she couldn’t find an easy vein and inserted needles into her neck, legs, ankles and toes. One time, she shot up in her forehead.

By last fall, Baker was also using meth. In January of this year, social workers took away both of her children, now ages 3 and 1.

“That was the lowest point in my life,” Baker said. She said she tried to kill herself by swallowing 200 Tylenol pills. Baker was transferred from the hospital to a mental-health facility and then jail, where lying in the bunk she said she felt a sense of peace for the first time in years.

“Because it felt like the nightmare I had been living was finally over,” she said.

When she was released, Baker enrolled in a treatment program; she’s now been drug-free for nearly eight months. She’s in counseling and finished parenting classes. She is tested for drugs every week and is one step away from regaining custody of her children. She’s helping to start two Narcotics Anonymous groups at Fort Berthold, where there was none.

But in a few months, Baker goes to federal court, where she said she faces 56 months in prison. She pleaded guilty to distribution of heroin after being caught in Purdon’s drug sweep.

“It is so sad because I am finally getting my life back together,” Baker said. “But I helped bring that heroin here. I sold it to people here on the reservation. I gave it to family members. And if I have to pay that price, then I will.”

Miles of pipeline for natural gas wait to be welded along a rural stretch where cows were shooed off the road by a Three Affiliated Tribes officer near Mandaree, N.D. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

An unsafe community

Responding to another call, White pulls up to the reservation’s 4 Bears Casino and Lodge to check on a small child who was left inside a car while her mother went inside to gamble.

Lined up outside the casino’s hotel are four other police cars. They are not the cruisers of officers who have come to investigate the child. They belong to several new recruits who have no place to live. The housing shortage has forced officers to move with their families into casino hotel rooms until homes are built for them.

Three Affiliated Tribes Police Chief Chad Johnson said he needs at least 50 more officers.

“I get a lot of applicants from all over,” Johnson said. “The first thing they ask is if we have housing available. We’ve been putting them up in the casino, but some of them have families and they don’t want their families living in a casino.”

Johnson, the judge, has the same problem recruiting prosecutors. “We can’t get them to come to the MHA Nation because of the lack of housing and the community is becoming so unsafe,” she said. “It is extremely dangerous to live here now.”

While Fort Berthold needs more police officers, housing for recruits, more tribal prosecutors and judges, and additional drug treatment facilities, some residents say their leaders have made questionable purchases, including a yacht. Just behind the casino on the lake sits a gleaming white 96-foot yacht that the tribe purchased last year to be used for a riverboat gambling operation.

While some federal officials have questioned the tribe's financial priorities, tribe members have called for an investigation into their leader's business dealings.

Earlier this year, the seven-member tribal business council led by Hall voted to hire a former U.S. attorney to examine Hall’s private oil and gas business dealings on Fort Berthold -- including his relationship with James Henrikson, a man who was arrested on felony weapons charges and was indicted two weeks ago on 11 counts, including murder-for-hire of an associate.

Hall, who served as chairman for 12 years, lost his reelection bid the same week. In a statement, he has denied "affiliation with any gangs" and said he is cooperating with federal investigators in the Henrikson case.

Another member of the tribal council, Barry Benson, was arrested this year on drug charges.

Federal officials have sent more agents and resources to the Bakken, tripling the number of prosecutions in what Purdon calls a “robust response” to the crime wave.

But, he added, “it’s not for me to talk about what the appropriate response is by the state of North Dakota, or these counties and the tribe.”

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) created a task force this month of North Dakotans to focus on the increase in drug-related crime and human trafficking in the Bakken, including Fort Berthold.

The state “could absolutely do more,” Heitkamp said in an interview, pointing to the need for more mental-health services, drug treatment facilities and drug courts.

“We are blessed with a growing economy and the country’s lowest unemployment rate, but there was a 20 percent increase in drug crimes in North Dakota last year,” Heitkamp said. “A better-coordinated response from the state would be helpful. The lack of roads, housing and law enforcement has stretched this small rural reservation to the max.”

Tractor-trailers employed in oil production are a constant sight on the roads throughout the reservation. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

‘The last of the last’

Earlier this year at a tribal conference in Bismark, N.D., which Purdon and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. attended, White was presented with an award for her work trying to eradicate drug trafficking at Fort Berthold.

She choked back tears as she walked to the podium, where she dedicated her award to her Native American grandparents who raised her. She spoke about the time she has spent away from her three children because of her job.

“I sacrifice because this is the only place I’m going to be a cop, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation,” White said, her voice cracking.

“This is the last of what my people have,” White said. “Our people have survived so many things in history. The methamphetamine use, the heroin use, is just another epidemic like smallpox and boarding schools. And the last of the last are going to have to survive. And I want to be in the front lines because that was my vow — to protect my people.”

Additional Content

‘Dakota Boys,’ U.S. attorneys with focus on Indian country, stepping down

From broken homes to a broken system

Surrounded by alcohol and abuse, Indian youths in need of support feel the isolation of incarceration

November 28, 2014

Slippers sit on the court at the Kiyuksa O'Tipi Reintegration Center, a juvenile detention facility in South Dakota. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. — She sits alone in a cinder-block cell, an Oglala Lakota teenager with a long braid and tattoos. For five months she has been locked up on this remote prairie reservation for drinking and disorderly conduct.

When she behaves, she can watch television. Mostly, though, she passes the time with two books — a Bible and “The Hunger Games” — and her journal, in which she records the monotony of her long days. The journal, with an eagle on the cover, also holds the names of nearly a dozen friends and relatives who have died — some from drugs, violence or suicide.

"It's so boring in here," the 17-year-old says before coming to a realization that would have startled her just a short while ago: "I miss school more than anything."

For the teenager, whose name is not used because she is a juvenile, and nine other Native Americans at a facility for minors here, there is no schooling, no vocational opportunity and no counseling. There is simply detention.

Their situation is emblematic of a juvenile justice system that is fundamentally broken when it comes to Native American youths. Around the country, juveniles on reservations are left to languish in cash-strapped facilities that cannot afford to provide the kind of rehabilitative services afforded to most young offenders in the United States. Because some reservations have no juvenile detention centers, offenders often are shipped to facilities far from their homes, compounding the isolation of incarceration.

A jurisdictional legal maze in Indian country further complicates matters. Indian reservations are sovereign nations. So when juveniles commit minor crimes, their cases are usually handled by the tribes. But when they commit a serious felony, their cases are generally handled by federal prosecutors, and they can be sent to either federal prison or a federal facility.

In the federal system, there is no juvenile division, and no court judges, rehabilitation facilities or probation system for juveniles. From 1999 through 2008, as many as 60 percent of juveniles in federal custody were American Indians, according to a commission that last year recommended that tribes be given full jurisdiction over Indian children and be released from "dysfunctional federal and state controls."

Advocates say Native American youths have essentially been forgotten.

"There is no systemic program to educate kids or provide services for them in detention centers," said Troy Eid, the chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission and a former U.S. attorney from Colorado. "They don't have computer instruction. They don't have classrooms. They have nothing, and their services are lacking because Congress hasn't appropriated the funding. They just sit in a cell all day."

Pine Ridge's attorney general, Tatewin Means, the daughter of the late American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, works out of a run-down building with a broken toilet and no heat or air conditioning.

Means said there is no funding for behavioral health services for children who have been sexually or physically abused. And when, as teenagers, some get caught up in the juvenile justice system, the tribe has few resources to help them.

"For the last two years, we have applied for federal grants for public safety and child protection and were absolutely shut out," she said.

LEFT: An Oglala Lakota teenager sits alone in her cell at the Kiyuksa O’Tipi Reintegration Center, a juvenile detention center in Kyle, S.D. Like many Native American juveniles in detention, she is not offered significant academic programs or counseling while incarcerated. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post). RIGHT: Anthony Ghost-Red Feather, 18, a senior at Pine Ridge High School, says he grew up surrounded by alcoholism and violence. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post).

'No place to be'

The Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota is larger than the state of Delaware, covering more than 2.7 million acres of starkly beautiful, windswept Plains grasses and Badlands buttes. But the tribal communities here are racked by 87 percent unemployment and crippling poverty. Located within Pine Ridge, Shannon County has one of the highest numbers of people living below the poverty line in the nation. Families live in rotting and overcrowded public housing.

In an environment plagued by sexual assault, domestic violence and substance abuse, it is a struggle to protect children, law enforcement officials say. Many young people turn to drugs or otherwise run afoul of the law.

Heather Thompson, a former assistant U.S. attorney in South Dakota who prosecuted many cases from Pine Ridge, put it bluntly: "There is no place for our kids to get help."

The one Boys and Girls Club is often closed because of a lack of funding. The nearest population center, Rapid City, with a population of about 70,000, is more than 100 miles away.

Although Pine Ridge is technically a "dry" reservation, just over the line in Nebraska is the tiny town of White Clay, which is lined with stores that sell alcohol to Pine Ridge residents; day and night, they can be found leaning against buildings or lying on the ground intoxicated.

Tony Ghost-Red Feather, 18, said he grew up surrounded by alcoholism and violence. He said he was bullied at school and that some of his friends and relatives ended up in the juvenile detention center. He considered suicide on two occasions. The only things stopping him were his younger siblings, whom he was mostly responsible for raising.

"I had a knife in my hand," he said, recalling one episode. "I was sitting in the dark outside and crying. I was going to either slit my wrists or go at my throat or my stomach."

A 17-year-old on the reservation said she, like Ghost-Red Feather, grew up in the shadow of alcoholics and domestic violence. She started cutting herself when she was 15.

Sometimes she uses a cigarette lighter to burn her arms.

"I do it to feel the pain," she said. "Burning takes everything off my mind."

On four different occasions, she was sent to the juvenile detention center for offenses including disorderly conduct and running away, a criminal violation. It was, she said, "no place to be."

"You're mainly just looking at cement walls," she said. "There were no teachers or counselors. They woke us up to take showers and clean up. Then, we were just sitting there."

On Pine Ridge and Rosebud, two of South Dakota's largest Indian reservations, many Native American teenagers find themselves caught between broken homes and a broken justice system. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Barriers to improvement

Detention facilities explicitly for Native American youths are operated by an amalgam of entities.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs runs three of the 23 juvenile detention centers in Indian country. Fourteen of the facilities are run by tribes but are overseen and funded in part by the BIA. The remaining six are funded and run by tribes.

Several of the facilities operated by the BIA, an agency within the Interior Department, have been beset by problems. A facility in Lower Brule, S.D., has been closed for a year because of structural problems. On Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, a more than $7 million center constructed with Justice Department and tribal funds has been empty for more than four years because it was not built to code. The new building will continue to be run by the BIA when it opens.

Dozens of facilities that had been built are now vacant or seriously underutilized because operating funds haven't been provided, according to a panel of Indian-country experts that presented a report last week to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

Juveniles arrested on those reservations have to be sent to other reservations, sometimes hundreds of miles away.

Much of the criticism of the juvenile justice system for Native Americans is centered on the removal of young offenders from their communities, a practice that critics say makes it even more difficult to rehabilitate them. The BIA acknowledges the situation presents challenges for families but said there are not always alternatives.

Wind flutters around the peace offerings of tobacco ties that line the fence at the Wounded Knee memorial, in memory of the day in December 1890 when the U.S. Cavalry massacred an estimated 300 men, women and children of the Great Sioux Nation. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

"If we had the ability to have a fully staffed juvenile detention facility at every reservation, that would be absolutely the best way to do it," said Darren Cruzan, the deputy director of the BIA's Office of Justice Services. "But we know that is unrealistic based on the ability to build safe juvenile detention facilities and staff them appropriately."

A member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, Cruzan said the BIA is taking steps to try to improve services for juveniles in Indian country. But he stressed the difficulty of developing education programs, saying that "a lot of the juveniles that we're getting are kids who aren't in school or have dropped out of school."

Tribal members who testified before the Indian Law and Order Commission, a congressionally mandated panel, said that detention facilities on reservations lacked adequate education programs because there was no funding. The BIA, however, disputes that criticism.

"I hear the same concerns, that it's not in there and it's not happening," Cruzan said when asked about criticism that there are no education programs in some facilities. "But when I hear those things I get with our chief of corrections. The conversation is, 'Hey, just assure me that we have education in these facilities.' And the answer is always, 'Yes, we do.' "

The Kiyuksa O'Tipi Reintegration Center, Pine Ridge's juvenile detention center, is funded and overseen by the BIA but operated by the tribe. A BIA document indicates that there is an education program. Inside, there is a classroom with desks and computers.

However, there are no teachers, no counselors and no academic programs.

"Funding ran out two years ago," one official at the detention center said.

Outside the Kiyuksa O’Tipi Reintegration Center sits a traditional sweat lodge, a dome-shaped hut used to experience the ceremony of purification and prayer. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Rehabilitating youth

About an hour and a half drive across the northern Great Plains is a juvenile detention facility for Native Americans that looks and feels altogether different.

Unlike in Pine Ridge and other reservations, there is no barbed wire surrounding the center. Inside, students learn to carve in a woodshop, work out in a gymnasium and participate in “smudging,” a ceremony of burning sage and cedar to cleanse a person and keep away negative spirits and energy.

The Wanbli Wiconi Tipi Youth Wellness and Renewal Center, located on the Rosebud Reservation, houses about 250 teenagers each year and is run by Miskoo Petite, who grew up in the community.

“We are trying to integrate traditional Lakota cultural information, and rehabilitate our youth by bridging the gaps they might have with their identities and who they are,” he said.

Unlike other juvenile centers, where a majority of the building is used for detention, 70 percent of the space is used for programs.

“I have had juveniles tell me directly that they would rather be in the juvenile detention center in Rosebud than at home,” said former Rosebud attorney general Mato Standing High.

Like Pine Ridge, Rosebud — home to an estimated 25,000 people living on about 900,000 acres of tribal land — is overwhelmed by dire poverty. Over a two-year period, 47 teenagers committed suicide on the reservation, Petite said. At least two children a day are victims of a crime or exposed to abuse and neglect, school violence or domestic violence, according to Standing High.

For all its problems, however, the juvenile detention center is striving to rehabilitate young offenders. Outside sits a traditional sweat lodge, a dome-shaped hut, for them to experience the ceremony of purification and prayer.

The juveniles attend classes and are taken on field trips to places like the Wounded Knee memorial on Pine Ridge, where they learn more about their history and the day in December 1890 when the U.S. Cavalry massacred an estimated 300 men, women and children of the Great Sioux Nation. (Many on the reservation prefer to refer to themselves as Lakota rather than Sioux, a term meaning “little snake” that they say was given to them by their enemies.)

“It’s jail, but they give you a chance to do things here — go to the gym, play ball, learn Lakota [the language] and go to school every day,” said one teenager who said he had been housed in three other juvenile detention centers.

Law enforcement officials credit Petite with running a facility that is considered among the most progressive in Indian country. At the same time, U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson of South Dakota is working closely with the tribes to keep Rosebud juveniles out of the federal system whenever possible and allow them to be sentenced in tribal court.

“This is a really poor, very remote reservation,” said Eid, the chairman of the Indian Law and Order Commission. “But when the tribes have some control over their systems, they don’t warehouse kids. They make sure there’s education, including for the ones who misbehave.”

Petite, however, is still dependent on grants from the BIA and the Justice Department to operate his programs. And as with many health, education and law enforcement programs throughout Indian country, tribes have to compete against each other for funding. Every couple of years they have to reapply to keep programs running — or they end. Petite will soon lose his clinical psychologist because the federal grant funding her has ended.

The panel of Indian-country experts that met with Holder this week said that tribal juvenile justice programs are “grossly underfunded,” saying it is “unacceptable” for federal agencies to provide grant money limited to three years. The panel recommended that grant-based, competitive criminal justice funding for Indian country be replaced with a permanent budget.

In Petite’s view, one the best programs at Wanbli Wiconi Tipi centers on an organic garden planted by staff and kids, a beehive and a greenhouse. The program is designed to remind tribal youth of their history of living off the land and to instill in them an appreciation of nurturing life.

“We donate the vegetables — tomatoes, chili peppers, cucumbers — to our elders or use them in the kitchen,” Petite said.

During a recent tour of the facility, however, Petite seemed reluctant to open the door to the greenhouse. When he did, there was a stench of decay. The greenhouse had been overtaken by weeds.

“Our federal grant for the program recently ended,” he explained. “We just don’t have the additional staff to keep this garden going.”

Miskoo Petite, administrator of the Wanbli Wiconi Tipi juvenile detention center, stands outside the center’s greenhouse, which was used for a program to remind tribal youth of their history of living off the land and to instill in them an appreciation of nurturing life. The greenhouse was overtaken by weeds after a grant ended. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Additional Content

PostTV: On reservations, at-risk Native American youths find few places to turn

A man of healing, a saga of suffering

Allegations of child sex abuse are complicated by a legal maze in Indian country

December 28, 2014

LEFT: Charles Chipps Sr. is accused of sexually abusing girls for years on an Indian reservation. The allegations against Chipps have torn his family apart, with some relatives and friends supporting him and others shunning him. The medicine man pleaded not guilty. (Obtained by The Post). RIGHT: Lena Chipps, shown near the skeleton of a sweat lodge, is the sister-in-law of Charles Chipps Sr., above, who is accused of sexually abusing girls for years on an Indian reservation. The allegations against Chipps have torn his family apart, with some relatives and friends supporting him and others shunning him. Now 67, the medicine man has pleaded not guilty. (Obtained by The Post)

WANBLEE, S.D.—He was a world-famous medicine man, a traditional healer and spiritual leader. Followers would travel long distances to this tiny hamlet on the Great Plains to be in his presence and pray in the darkness with him in a sacred sweat lodge.

But Charles Chipps Sr., a medicine man on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, had a dark secret, federal prosecutors say.

For years, they allege, Chipps sexually abused and raped girls, including some of his own daughters and granddaughters; many of the alleged victims were younger than 12 and several were as young as 5. A girl from Colorado whose aunt brought her to meet Chipps for spiritual guidance committed suicide after revealing the abuse she allegedly suffered.

The sexual abuse of children has long been regarded as a rampant if largely unspoken problem on Native American reservations, in part a legacy of a boarding school system that was designed to assimilate students and subjected them to widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse, according to Native leaders and prosecutors. But Chipps’s case, as described in court testimony, is among the most shocking — entailing allegations that a respected elder sexually abused at least six girls.

It is also an illustration of the ways in which the federal, state and tribal legal maze that governs Indian country can complicate the pursuit of justice and, in Chipps’s case, allowed him to go free for three years after he was first jailed.

Child sexual abuse on the reservations is at the root of the many problems that follow for Indian children — depression, alcohol and drug abuse, juvenile detention and suicide, according to Indian country experts. The challenge of getting victims to speak out — common in child sexual assault cases anywhere — is exacerbated by the close-knit nature of the remote communities where they live.

The U.S. attorney for South Dakota, Brendan V. Johnson, said that sexual violence is one of the most common criminal offenses on the nine reservations where he shares criminal jurisdiction with the tribes, but it is extremely difficult to bring charges.

“Victims are placed under tremendous pressure by family members and friends to recant their stories,” said Johnson, who declined to discuss details of the Chipps case. “The complaint will come in, the victims will be forensically interviewed and will provide us with specific facts about what happened and then, months later, will recant their stories.”

The allegations against Chipps have torn his family apart, with some relatives and friends supporting him and others shunning him. Now 67, the medicine man has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer says he is too sick and mentally incompetent to stand trial.

In a brief interview, he declined to discuss his client’s case further.

The little blue house

The village of Wanblee, population approximately 725, is located on the northeastern edge of the Pine Ridge reservation, where 87 percent of the tribe is unemployed. It has a tiny post office, a small convenience market, a school and a health clinic, but little else.

In a place of desperation, Chipps was a source of healing. He inherited his spiritual position in the tribe and became a renowned medicine man on Pine Ridge and beyond, even releasing a CD of ceremonial songs. He made his home about eight miles out of town in a family compound in the shadow of the Eagle Nest Butte.

It was in a little blue house and a log cabin in that compound that Chipps abused girls and young women who came to him for spiritual guidance, according to the indictment against him and other court documents. He also allegedly sexually assaulted them on his nearby sacred ceremonial grounds, forcing them to disrobe and engage in sexual acts in the darkness of the sweat lodge.

From 2002 to 2007, according to court documents, the South Dakota Department of Social Services and the tribe’s social services agency received nearly a dozen reports in which minors told people close to them that they had been sexually assaulted by Chipps. In most cases, the young accusers failed to repeat the claims before investigators.

In June 2009, a rookie Oglala Sioux tribal police officer from Wanblee, Samuel Pretty Bear Sr., responded to a call at the compound from Chipps’s son. The son said he had long feared his father, Pretty Bear recalled, but had information he wanted to share.

“He explained to me what was going on out there, and it wasn’t right,” Pretty Bear said in an interview. “He has kids of his own, and he was afraid for their safety.”

Pretty Bear removed four of Chipps’s grandchildren from the compound. A few days later, three more children were removed. Some were placed into foster care, and others went to live with other family members.

“Don’t tell them nothing about us,” Chipps warned one girl, according to court testimony from a state counselor who talked to the girl.

About a month later, Chipps was arrested on tribal child sex abuse charges and placed in a Pine Ridge jail. Then, nothing happened.

“We did our report,” said Pretty Bear. “We did what was asked of us as police officers and never heard anything about it after that.”

Although tribes have their own governments and court systems, the responsibility for prosecuting felony crime, such as sexual assault and rape, generally falls to the Justice Department. In this case, the U.S. attorney’s office for South Dakota opened an investigation but did not have enough evidence to bring federal charges.

Tribal authorities tried to obtain the limited evidence that federal investigators had, but federal officials would not share it.

In 2010, after a year with no charges by the U.S. attorney’s office — and no access to any evidence the FBI had collected — tribal law required that Chipps be let go.

He was free for another three years.

LEFT: Heather Dawn Thompson, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, was the former assistant U.S. attorney in South Dakota who prosecuted the Chipps case in Rapid City. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post). RIGHT: Beth Carnes, a counselor at Crazy Horse School in Wanblee, reported some of the allegations of sexual abuse. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Samuel Pretty Bear Sr., a former Oglala Sioux tribal police officer, responded to a call from Chipps’s son in June 2009. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Crazy Horse School

Beth Carnes, a non-Native counselor at Crazy Horse School in Wanblee, had a gentle manner and a way of talking and listening respectfully to children.

One day, about a year after Chipps was released from jail, she began talking with a 13-year-old girl who had been acting out. Something was deeply wrong.

“I said, wouldn’t it feel better if you just told Ms. Beth everything that’s inside and you got it out?” Carnes later testified in court. “And she said yes. And we went in my office, and she told me the whole thing.”

The girl told Carnes that the medicine man had been sexually abusing her since she was 5. She also said Chipps had recently insisted on seeing her, which she said was a violation of an order from a tribal agency that he not have any contact with any of the alleged victims.

As a school counselor, Carnes was legally obligated to report what she had been told. She did.

At about the same time, Heather Dawn Thompson, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe of South Dakota, joined the U.S. attorney’s office in Rapid City. Thompson said she soon became an expert in sexual abuse cases because there were so many of them.

“There are a variety of historical reasons that people point to for this cycle in Indian country, one of which has to do with the federal policy of removing children from their homes and sending them to boarding schools during the late 1800s and much of the 1900s,” Thompson said.

Many studies tie sexual abuse to the intergenerational trauma that began in the secular and church-run boarding schools that Indian children were required to attend. Court documents and lawsuit settlements reveal how the boarding schools, especially in places like South Dakota, were centers of widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse.

Many of the children who attended the schools are the parents and grandparents of today’s Native American children. “There were individuals who were willing to move out in the middle of nowhere in order to work at boarding schools with these children and there were some who had a pre-disposition for child sex abuse and many of the children were sexually abused,” Thompson said. “Unfortunately, that has become a cycle that was passed down from generation to generation. You compound that with the poverty, socioeconomic and isolation issues in Indian country and unfortunately that cycle has not yet been broken.”

Armed with new information from Carnes, Thompson and a South Dakota FBI agent, Rick Lauck, moved aggressively on the Chipps case.

Soon, more young people claiming they had been victimized came forward.

On July 16, 2013, a federal grand jury indicted Chipps on 15 counts of rape, sexual abuse and intimidation of six minor victims. Besides the children in the indictment, older victims from South Dakota and other states came forward and alleged they were sexually abused by Chipps when they were younger, according to a filing by the U.S. attorney’s office.

Gifting

In a federal courtroom in Rapid City last year, Chipps was brought before a judge to determine whether he could be released pending trial.

An older relative testified on his behalf and said he could live with her if he was released. Glenyce Bean, a psychotherapist who had come to his Sundance ceremonial grounds and sweat lodge for years, also testified in his support, saying that she had taken care of him in recent years.

“I know him as a ceremonial leader,” Bean said. “People [look] up to him and he helps people. . . . He’s uncle or grandpa to almost everyone. I know him to be helpful. He has provided just lots of healing for many, many people, myself included, over many, many years.”

Tribal officer Pretty Bear testified, as did Carnes, the school counselor. Then, Hollie Strand, a forensic interviewer from the Child Advocacy Center of the Black Hills in Rapid City, took the stand.

She recalled being told by children who spent time with Chipps that he bought them food and gifts — a way, she said, that sexual predators often intimidate their victims and make them feel more reliant on them.

She then described in graphic detail the sexual acts that the children said Chipps forced them to do. He would make one kiss him and another perform oral sex at the same time. Then he would snap his fingers and force them to trade places. One time he made two girls watch while he had sex with another one. Sometimes, he hit them hard with a stick. He warned them that if they told anyone, “he would whip them,” Strand testified.

Thompson, in an interview, would not discuss the case. In a court filing, however, she alleged Chipps raped one girl while two of the other girls were in his bed during a trip. She also alleged that, in another instance, one girl opened a bedroom door and found Chipps leaning over a partially unclothed girl with another girl nearby crying.

Several of the alleged victims would later tell officials that his wife knew about the abuse before she died, according to a detention order, though some said she was too scared to come forward.

The judge ruled that Chipps be held pending trial. Chipps has since been moved to a federal prison in Missouri. If found guilty, he faces the possibility of life in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Clouds move over the Badlands near Scenic, S.D., on Dec. 7. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Sweat lodge

On a recent chilly December afternoon, Lena Chipps, 62, walked through the windswept grasses on the rural grounds outside of Wanblee where her brother-in-law, Charles, for more than 20 years ran one of the most sacred Oglala Lakota Sioux ceremonies.

She says she did not know about the allegations against Chipps until he was first arrested five years ago.

“When I first found out about Charles, I wanted to get a gun and go shoot him,” she said. “For what he did to all these kids.”

Lena Chipps talks about her brother-in-law, a medicine man who a federal grand jury has indicted on 15 counts of rape, sexual abuse and intimidation of minor victims. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Lena Chipps said she has been shamed by the allegations involving her family — allegations that she believes tarnish the reputation of the tiny Oglala Lakota community and Native American culture more broadly.

“We’re not like that,” she said with disgust.

Johnson took over the case from Thompson, who left the office, and in a rare move for a U.S. attorney decided to personally prosecute the Chipps case.

Chipps’s attorney, Terry L. Pechota, says that his client is in bad health — diabetes, high blood pressure and congestive heart failure — and is not mentally competent to stand trial.

“I have found defendant completely unable to recall things in the past,” Pechota, who has known Chipps for 30 years, wrote in a court filing. “He would not be able to take the stand because he has no recollection of events.”

The children in Wanblee remember everything, Lena Chipps said.

Among them is her granddaughter, who has struggled in life as a result of the trauma she suffered, Lena Chipps said. Another of her teenage relatives twice tried to kill herself. There are few mental health resources in Pine Ridge — or any reservation — to help children like them.

“Some of these kids don’t care now what happens to them,” she said.

Lena Chipps walked unsteadily with her cane past several of the dome-shaped lodges on the ceremonial grounds. In the winter sunlight, the site looked abandoned, but she said the sweat lodge ceremonies are still being performed.

Inside the lodges are stones that are heated in a fire and placed in a central pit. Water is poured on the stones. Prayers and traditional songs — which Charles Chipps used to sing — are offered in the Lakota language.

On the grounds that day were white antlers, which are used to move the hot stones into the lodge.

Lying on the ground, mostly covered by dirt, was a tiny turquoise and purple braided bracelet, tiny enough to fit around the wrist of a child.

Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

How to Help

There are many organizations throughout Indian country working to break the cycle of sexual and physical abuse. Below are a few organizations that are working specifically to strengthen families and protect children.

NATIONALLY

Center for Native American Youth
1 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20036
202-736-2905

ON PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION

Pine Ridge Emergency Youth Shelter
Pauletta Red Willow
OST Emergency Youth Shelter
P. O. Box 5055
Pine Ridge, SD 57770

The Bear Program
C/O Tiny Decory
Box 415
Pine Ridge, SD 57770
605-454-0518

Friends of Pine Ridge Reservation

Tasunke Wakan Okolakiciye

Oglala Lakota Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA)
C/O Arlana Bettelyoun
Oglala Lakota CASA
Box 5014
Pine Ridge, SD 57770
605-867-5643

OST Child Protection Services

Additional Content

PostTV: Medicine man's alleged sexual abuse haunts reservation

Medicine man Charles Chipps Sr. dies in prison before trial on rape charges

About the Author

Sari Horwitz covers the Justice Department for The Washington Post where she has been a reporter for 30 years. She won the American Society of News Editors Distinguished Writing on Diversity Award for her 2014 series on justice on Native American lands.

Sari has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times. In 2002, she shared the Pulitzer for investigative reporting for a series exposing the District of Columbia's role in the neglect and deaths of 229 children placed in protective care. The series prompted an overhaul of the child welfare system and a new wing of D.C. Superior Court for children and families. Sari also co-wrote an investigation of D.C. police shootings that revealed that D.C. police officers shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other large American city police force. The series won the 1999 Pulitzer for Public Service and the 1999 Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting. It led to a Justice Department investigation of all DC police shootings in the 1990s and new training of all officers. In 2008, she was part of a team awarded the Pulitzer for breaking news coverage of the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.

In 2003, she co-authored the book Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation. She also co-authored the 2009 book, Finding Chandra: A True Washington Murder Mystery. She wrote a chapter for the 2007 book, Being a Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril. Among Sari's other awards are the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize for reporting on the disadvantaged and the Investigative Reporters and Editors top award, the IRE Medal. In 2010, she was part of a team that won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Freedom of Information Award for a year-long series, "The Hidden Life of Guns," which was published as an e-book, Guns in America.

At The Washington Post, Sari has reported on crime, police, legal issues, education and social services for the local and national staffs and the Post's Investigative unit. She previously worked at Congressional Quarterly.

Sari is a native of Tucson, Ariz., graduated from Bryn Mawr College and holds a master's degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University. She has one daughter, Rachael Schultz, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, William Schultz.

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