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Violence is on the rise at a North Dakota reservation. And tribal officers are often
powerless to stop it.
An oil boom at the Fort Berthold reservation has attracted thousands of newcomers
—and a wave of hard-to-prosecute crime. (Sierra Crane-Murdoch)
On an early morning last June, on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in western
North Dakota, tribal officer Nathan Sanchez was nearing the end of his shift when
he noticed a frantic stirring in the cattails alongside the road. A girl emerged. Her
jeans were wet, her halter-top fallen to her waist. Sanchez approached in his car to
On Indian Land, Criminals Can Get Away With
Almost Anything
SIERRA CRANE-MURDOCH
FEB 22, 2013 |
U.S.
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On Indian Land, Criminals Can Get Away With Almost Anything - The Atlantic
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“Basically,” a mechanic
told me, “you can do
anything short of killing
somebody.”
ask what had happened. The girl, in hysterics, mumbled that she had been raped
and took off running.
Sanchez caught her on foot. He saw she was white—not a member of the tribe.
"Ma'am," he recalled saying, though she was only 16, "I know you're upset, but I
need to get you out of here." He wrapped her in a blanket and led her to the car.
Was the man who raped her Indian, he asked? She said he was.
Sanchez met Criminal Investigator Angela Cummings at the police station in New
Town, a low brick building that doubles as the Civic Center, and Cummings took
the girl into a private room. The victim had run away from Texas to find her father
who worked in the Bakken oilfields. He had refused to let her stay with him, and in
the weeks that followed, she'd lived with an acquaintance on the reservation.
The night before Sanchez found her, an oil worker at a bar in New Town had bought
her drinks and taken her to his camper. She remembered only that several men and
a woman were having sex. "Just do it," someone had said as a man climbed on top
of her. Were any of the men Indian, Cummings asked? No, the girl said this time.
Why did it matter? If the girl's rapist was, in fact, an enrolled member of a Native
American tribe, then Cummings had every right to continue the investigation. But
now the girl struggled through her shock and inebriation to recall the story: The
men, she believed, had been white and Latino. If true, then the right to investigate
and prosecute the case belonged not to Cummings, nor to the U.S. attorney, but to
the state. "I did what I could," Cummings later told me, but in the end, she called a
county deputy to take the girl off the reservation.
In 1978, the Supreme Court case Oliphant v.
Suquamish stripped tribes of the right to arrest
and prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes
on Indian land. If both victim and perpetrator
are non-Indian, a county or state officer must
make the arrest. If the perpetrator is non-
Indian and the victim an enrolled member, only a federally certified agent has that
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On Indian Land, Criminals Can Get Away With Almost Anything - The Atlantic
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right. If the opposite is true, a tribal officer can make the arrest, but the case still
goes to federal court.
Even if both parties are tribal members, a U.S. attorney often assumes the case,
since tribal courts lack the authority to sentence defendants to more than three
years in prison. The harshest enforcement tool a tribal officer can legally wield over
a non-Indian is a traffic ticket.
The result has been a jurisdictional tangle that often makes prosecuting crimes
committed in Indian Country prohibitively difficult. In 2011, the U.S. Justice
Department did not prosecute 65 percent of rape cases reported on reservations.
According to department records, one in three Native American women are raped
during their lifetimes—two-and-a-half times the likelihood for an average
American woman—and in 86 percent of these cases, the assailant is non-Indian.
Last April, Senate members added a provision to the Violence Against Women Act,
first passed in 1994, that would allow tribal courts to prosecute non-Indians who
sexually assault tribal members. But the bill has languished since House
Republicans opposed the measure as a dangerous expansion of tribal independence
—it is, after all, a partial reversal of the Supreme Court's 1978 decision.
Fort Berthold, like many reservations, has a long history of crimes slipping through
jurisdictional cracks. Sadie Young Bird, director of the Fort Berthold Coalition
Against Violence, told me that before 2010, when the Tribal Law and Order Act
passed Congress, very few sexual assault cases reported on the reservation were
prosecuted. The Act provided greater resources for tribal law enforcement
agencies, in part by encouraging U.S. attorneys to hire special assistants to boost
prosecution rates. In 2011, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Volk was appointed to
work specifically with Fort Berthold. Between 2009 and 2011, federal case filings
on North Dakota reservations rose 70 percent.
When I asked Tim Purdon, North Dakota's U.S. attorney, if the numbers had
anything to do with a rise in crime, he first insisted they did not. He believed there
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was a growing sense among Native American victims that the crimes they reported
would be prosecuted, and this encouraged more women to come forward.
But beginning last summer, Purdon noticed a peculiar pattern emerging from Fort
Berthold. Many of his filings—a surprising number of them—involved non-Indian
perpetrators. "We had five or six in a month," he told me. "Why was this? We
realized it's non-enrolled folks moving to the oil patch."
The Bakken oil boom hit western North Dakota in 2008, and for all the hype,
there's been little said about the reservation at its center. When I first reported on
Fort Berthold in April 2011, the development had barely begun. Since then,
thousands of oil workers have rushed onto the reservation, the boom a salve to
foreclosure, debt, and the recession's other wounds. Now Fort Berthold really is in
the middle of it all, and while the tribe and its members will earn billions of dollars
in taxes and royalties before the decade is out, the development, for many
residents, is far from a relief.
The immediate side-effects are the obvious ones, and they come with any boom:
limited jail space, an overworked police force, a glut of men with cash in their
pockets. In 2012, the tribal police department reported more murders, fatal
accidents, sexual assaults, domestic disputes, drug busts, gun threats, and human
trafficking cases than in any year before. The surrounding counties offer similar
reports.
But there is one essential difference between Fort Berthold and the rest of North
Dakota: The reservation's population has more than doubled with an influx of non-
Indian oil workers—over whom the tribe has little legal control.
***
I met Sanchez one night last July at the police station. He was 25, tall, and tattooed.
He greeted me with a nod. He wasn't from the reservation but had moved there
with his fiancée and son. Having worked four years as a tribal officer, he was one of
the unit's most senior members. "People don't last long here," he told me. The pay
was hardly enough to afford rent, the work emotionally draining.
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One in three Indian
women are raped during
their lifetimes—two-and-
a-half times the
likelihood for an average
American woman—and
in 86 percent of these
cases, the assailant is
non-Indian.
One morning a few weeks earlier, Sanchez had just come on duty when he stopped
a man for reckless driving. "Come to find out, this guy is one of those sex offenders
that kills his victims after. It's like, what the freak is going on here? I don't even have
my coffee yet."
We drove west out of New Town, over Lake Sakakawea and into the Four Bears
campground. In the summers before the boom, families would come from
Williston and Bismarck to fish on the lakeshore. Now there were hundreds of
trailers hidden under trees and battened with plywood against the coming cold. A
year earlier, I had stood in this camp with a mechanic from Washington, a friendly,
jovial man, who marveled at the seeming lack of rules here. "Basically," he said,
"you can do anything short of killing somebody."
When I share this quote with tribal officers,
none ever seems surprised. What the mechanic
said was not entirely true—cases that fall
outside tribal and federal jurisdiction belong to
the state. But several officers insinuated that
crimes committed on Fort Berthold are often a
low priority for deputies and sheriffs, who are
already overworked by the boom outside
reservation borders.
Each county that overlaps Fort Berthold has
only one or two deputies stationed there—a low number, given that at least 4,000
non-Indians live on the reservation. If an incident requires a deputy, he could take
hours to arrive, due to the volume of calls he receives and the reservation's
enormity. A sheriff in a county that overlaps the reservation admitted that
sometimes his deputies escort non-Indian drunk drivers home rather than arrest
and deliver them to county jails, which are far away and often full. If jurisdiction is
ever in question—as in the girl's case last summer—then getting the right officers on
scene takes even longer.
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"Time is sensitive," Cummings told me. It could be the difference between finding
the perpetrator and having no evidence at all.
It was as though, tribal officers said, their lack of jurisdiction had encouraged a
culture of lawlessness. Every officer could recount being told by a non-Indian, "You
can't do anything to me." Once, when Young Bird and Cummings went into a man
camp to check on a domestic violence victim, the manager of the camp said,
"Women aren't allowed here," and shut the door. "Perpetrators think they can't be
touched," Young Bird told me. "They're invincible."
We drove west toward Mandaree and then north, through rows of concrete
government houses, and across long, empty stretches lit by gas flares. Around 2
a.m., we idled outside Sportsmen's Bar in New Town, where a young Native
American girl in a silver skirt waited by the door. "That's one of the girls you'll see
tonight," Sanchez had said earlier when we spotted her on the street. He suspected
she was prostituting herself. How did he know? "I work 80-some hours a week, and
I sit in front of these bars every night. I know that this night she left with that guy,
and last night she left with this guy, and then the night before..." But, he conceded,
"That doesn't prove anything."
Sometimes, in the back of his patrol car, a woman would admit that she—or her
daughter—had been prostituting herself. He saw other signs, too: the man who
stuffed girls into a car when Sanchez drove near, the girls on the casino security
cameras who moved in and out of hotel rooms, the strippers who came from out of
town to dance at parties, the meth-addicts whom investigators suspected of trading
sex for drugs in the man camps, the girls who came to school with new iPods and
jewelry. On a reservation where everyone once knew everyone, noticing was easy.
"I know these girls. I know their parents," Sanchez told me, "And I know for a fact
that their parents cannot afford to buy them these things."
***
In August, a tribal member, Dustin Morsette, was convicted in federal court of
sexually abusing minors and forcing them into prostitution. Five victims served as
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witnesses in the case, and their testimonies have led investigators toward other
trafficking incidents that sprung up with the boom. Tribal officers and victims'
advocates are pleased with Purdon and Volk's diligence but say it's not enough to
counter the recent flood of crimes. Officers are training for certifications that would
allow them to arrest non-Indian perpetrators involved in federal crimes.
The Tribal Law and Order Act also encourages cross-deputization agreements.
These certify tribal officers to act under county jurisdiction, arrest non-Indians, and
follow through on cases in county court. Likewise, the tribe would grant deputies
the authority to arrest tribal members. This would allow any officer who first arrives
on a crime scene to make the arrest instead of waiting for someone with proper
jurisdiction.
It's a precarious arrangement, however, as counties or the state can rescind the
contract at any time. Sheriff Ken Halvorson, whose county overlaps the reservation,
told me he thought cross-deputization was a bad idea—"Too complicated," he said.
On the June morning that Sanchez came across the girl, county officers, still unsure
who had jurisdiction in the case, called in the FBI. According to the crime report, by
the time the girl arrived at a hospital, she refused to be examined. She didn't want
to press charges. She wanted it all to be over.
It was not the first time a woman had been picked up at a reservation bar and
assaulted. A few months earlier, a young tribal member had been at another bar in
New Town when three oil workers offered her a ride home. They drove, instead, to
the reservation's desolate center, raped her, and left her on the road. They returned
several times before morning, and each time, they raped her again.
"I don't think these are isolated incidents," Cummings told me by phone in
October. Since the summer, she had seen several similar cases and had begun to
suspect the rapists were repeat offenders. "They think they got away with it, but we
may find there's an escalation of assaults in the same pattern. Eventually, we'll get a
confession."
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Sanchez drove me east out of New Town, past the Cenex station and the truckers
who still lingered by the pumps, and onto a dark expanse of prairie. He wanted to
show me the place where he found the girl that morning. We turned right at
Trustland Oil Field Services, a large metal warehouse with trucks and trailers
scattered about its perimeter, and stopped in a dirt-packed lot at the entrance to a
man camp. (Author's note: Trustland Oil Field Services does not own the man camp
where the rape may have occurred.)
"When the oil boom's over, what's it going to be like here?" Young Bird had asked
me earlier that day. "My staff talks about this a lot because we all want to know.
They're not going to take their trailers with them. It'll just be deserted, with a lot of
broken people."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SIERRA CRANE-MURDOCH is a freelance journalist and contributing editor for High Country News.
