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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12203114&sc=emaf

Rape Cases on Indian Lands Go Uninvestigated
by Laura Sullivan



Enlarge
Amy Walters, NPR
Tribe member Rhea Archambault opened her home to her friend Leslie Ironroad.
Ironroad lived here with Archambault's family until she died after being
brutally raped.




“She named all the people that were there, the ones that were hitting her, the
ones that were fighting her, she named everybody - what more else?”
Rhea Archambault, speaking about Ironroad's report to BIA police





Standing Rock Sioux Reservation stretches for 2.3 million acres through North
and South Dakota. Only four Bureau of Indian Affairs police officers patrol this
vast swath of land.





Enlarge
Amy Walters, NPR
Ron His Horse Is Thunder, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. He says
that as long as the tribe must depend on the federal government to police and
prosecute people on their own land, anyone who comes to Standing Rock may well
be able to rape or assault women and get away with it.




“Rape amongst our people was one of those unheard of crimes. Not because
people didn't talk about it, but at one point in time, it didn't occur.”
Ron His Horse Is Thunder, Tribe Chairman



A Brief History of Standing Rock
The people of Standing Rock are members of two of the nine nations of the Sioux
– the Lakota and Dakota. Both names mean "friend" or "ally." The two tribes
originally lived in wooded areas of the Great Lakes region, where they fished
and hunted small game. By the early 19th century, conflicts with neighboring
tribes forced them to migrate to the Great Plains.

The Dakota moved into the upper plains, forcing out several smaller tribes. But
they also traded with them and adopted some of their cultural practices. Today,
the Dakota of Standing Rock live primarily on the North Dakota portion of the
reservation.

The Lakota are the largest nation within the Sioux. Unlike the Dakota, they
largely shed their woodland practices when they moved to the plains. Their
culture became centered on the horse and buffalo. They became nomads, living in
tepees year round. The Lakota live primarily on the South Dakota portion of
Standing Rock.

For the Lakota, South Dakota's Black Hills were sacred ground. In 1868, the U.S.
government, which saw no value in the land, signed the Fort Laramie Treaty,
which gave the Lakota ownership of the Black Hills. The treaty also granted them
land and hunting rights in what is today South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.

But six years later, Gen. George Armstrong Custer discovered gold in the Black
Hills. The resulting gold rush led to an increasingly bloody series of battles
between prospectors and the Lakota. In the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, Custer
was killed and his troops soundly defeated by a combined army of Lakota,
Cheyenne and Arapahoe.

The victory turned out to be pyrrhic. In 1877, the U.S. government seized the
Black Hills — in violation of the treaty. Over the next two decades the Sioux
were scattered. Many fled to Canada. In 1889 the government broke up the Sioux
nation and created a series of smaller reservations, of which Standing Rock is
one.

— Cindy Johnston




All Things Considered, July 25, 2007 · Leslie Ironroad was 20 years old when she
moved from one side of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas to the
other — the town of McLaughlin, S.D., home to one gas station, one diner and her
friend, Rhea Archambault. She roomed in Archambault's spare bedroom.

"I make star quilts, so she was helping me make patterns," Archambault said
recently, sitting at her dining room table. "She was just a nice little girl."

One night four years ago, Ironroad left the house to go to a party a few miles
away. Early the next morning, she called Archambault's brother in tears asking
to be picked up.

"She said, 'Can [you] go get Rhea to come get me 'cause these guys are going to
fight me,'" Archambault said. "And so he said, 'Well where you at?' And she was
just crying and hangs up."

Leslie never made it home.

When Archambault found her friend in a Bismarck, N.D. hospital, she was black
and blue.

"'I said, 'Leslie, what happened?.' She said, 'Rhea, is that you? Turn the
lights on, I can't see.' But the lights in the room were on. She said, 'Rhea, I
was raped,' and she was just squeezing my hand," Archambault recalled.

Archambault called the Bureau of Indian Affairs police, a small department in
charge of all law enforcement on the reservation. A few days later an officer
arrived in the hospital room, and Leslie scratched out a statement on a tablet
laid across her stomach.

Ironroad told the officer how she was raped and said that the men locked her in
a bathroom, where she swallowed diabetes pills she found in the cabinet, hoping
that if she was unconscious the men would leave her alone. The next morning,
someone found her on the bathroom floor and called an ambulance.

A week later, Ironroad was dead — and so was the investigation. None of the
authorities who could have investigated what happened to Leslie Ironroad did —
not the Bureau of Indian Affairs, nor the FBI, nor anybody else.

People who know the men who likely attacked her say they were never even
questioned.

Archambault couldn't believe nothing came of Ironroad's report.

"She named all the people that were there, the ones that were hitting her, the
ones that were fighting her, she named everybody — what more else?" Archambault
asked.

Unreported, Uninvestigated and Unprosecuted

This case was not an isolated incident. NPR spoke with at least a dozen people
on Standing Rock — rape counselors, doctors, tribal leaders and victims — people
who were either assaulted or know women who were in cases where no charges were
filed.

The story of what happened to Ironroad, and more importantly what happened to
the investigation of her death, is a window into what is happening on Native
American reservations across the country. Cases like hers are going unreported,
uninvestigated and unprosecuted, according to tribal officials.

The Justice Department found that one in three Native American women will be
raped in her lifetime. In many cases, on rural reservations like Standing Rock,
NPR found that there aren't enough police to investigate sexual assaults, and
few of the cases are prosecuted.

On Standing Rock, there's one person in charge of law enforcement: Bureau of
Indian Affairs police Chief Gerald White.

"I consider any sexual assault a serious problem. I mean, we don't take them
lightly," White said at the police headquarters on the reservation. "Every
sexual assault that is reported to us — we investigate them to the fullest."

When asked what happened in the Ironroad case, White responded, "I looked back
and there was nothing that could substantiate that happening. I'm sure she
passed away, but as far as her being involved as a victim of sexual assault, I
couldn't find anything to support that ... You know, if a person doesn't report,
then how can we investigate it, if we don't know about it?"

Overwhelmed and Overworked

Although Ironroad did report her attack to a BIA officer in her hospital room,
authorities did not conduct an investigation. Through records, interviews with
officials at the hospital, the state medical examiner's office and the police
department, and conversations with more than a dozen people familiar with
Ironroad's case, NPR learned the officer in her hospital room was BIA police
officer Doug Wilkinson.

Officer Wilkinson resigned from the Standing Rock police department two months
ago. NPR tracked him down in the small town of Little Eagle, S.D. In a phone
conversation, he confirmed the basic details of the story.

Wilkenson said a lot of sexual assault cases like Ironroad's are never
investigated. He said he was too overwhelmed and overworked to keep up with the
number of calls for rape, sexual assault and child abuse he received each week.

When it came to federal prosecutors, he admitted, "We all knew they only take
the ones with a confession ... We were forced to triage our cases."

Wilkenson has now joined a ministry and says he hopes to help survivors through
preaching.

"I felt like I was standing in the middle of the river trying to hold back the
flood," he says, describing his decade as a federal police officer.

On Standing Rock, there are five BIA officers for a territory the size of
Connecticut. On this and other reservations, police are stretched thin and often
can't or won't make arrests.

Allocating the Limited Resources

Fourteen years ago, Archie Fool Bear, who sits on the Standing Rock Tribal
Council, was chief of the BIA police department on the reservation, heading a
force three times as large as today's. Now, he says, tribe members are coming to
him with terrible stories of rapes and crimes, even though he can no longer do
anything about them.

"We know with that size of force, I know from experience, there are cases that
are going to be sitting on the shelf or cases where people don't want to come
forward because they have no confidence in law enforcement," he said.

Money for new officers can only come from one place: Washington, D.C. The Bureau
of Indian Affairs' director Pat Ragsdale sits in his office just across the
street from the White House grounds. Ragsdale says he knows cases may be falling
through the cracks. He'd love to have more officers, he says, and expects the
situation to improve with $16 million in new funding that the Bush
administration has proposed, which would add about 50 new BIA police officers.

Spread among 200 tribal jurisdictions, 50 new officers comes out to well below
one per tribe. Director Ragsdale says they plan to cluster the officers on
reservations where they are needed the most.

On Standing Rock, getting an officer to respond to a call for help can mean
waiting for days or even months. The reservation's only women's shelter is still
waiting for police to come after someone cut all of their phone lines two months
ago.

The shelter's director, Georgia Littleshield, can attest firsthand to the lack
of police response. When her daughter's boyfriend, a non-native, broke her
daughter's nose, her daughter filed a report and attached statements and photos
from the doctors. But when Littlefield called special investigators the next
morning, an officer told her that her injury was not considered a broken bone,
but broken cartilage and that the case would not be prosecuted.

"This is a lawless land where people are making up their own laws because
there's no justice being done," Littleshield said.

A study from the Justice Department found that Native American women are two and
half times more likely to be raped than other women. The majority of victims
said they were raped by men from outside the reservation, according to a
victimization survey.

Many of those victims wind up at the Indian Health Service Center. When Ironroad
arrived at the center, her injuries were so severe that doctors told the
ambulance to take her two hours north to Bismarck.

The health center does not have rape kits to collect the vital DNA evidence
needed to prosecute attackers. They are also inadequately staffed and cannot
spare an exam room for the hour it takes to complete the rape examination.

For that, women must go to Bismarck, but most women don't want to go because
they don't know how they will get back home.

Staff physician Jackie Quizno says she sees rape cases several times a month.
When she and other doctors turn over their information to the BIA police and
federal prosecutors on the women they see, she says nothing happens.

"I have only been involved in one court hearing where I was actually called to
testify," Quizno said, who has worked at the center for more than five years.

A Federal Responsibility

Tribal leaders say the Justice Department ignores them, and one of the
department's own former top officials agrees.

"Our committee was frequently met with indifference," said Thomas Heffelfinger,
who until last year chaired the department's Indian Affairs Committee, which
tried to get resources to Indian country. He said department officials "simply
don't recognize the magnitude of the problem and the degree to which it is a
federal responsibility."

Mary Beth Buchanan, acting director of the Justice Department's Office of
Violence Against Women, disagrees. She says Indian sexual assaults are a
priority, especially for U.S. attorneys.

"Most prosecutors in Indian country are very committed to assisting in the
prosecution of these cases and are very sensitive to the problems associated
with crime in Indian country," she countered, citing millions of dollars the
department has funneled to a new pilot project to reduce violence and a new
study that will examine the rate of sexual assaults on reservations.

However, actual figures are difficult to pin down. Justice officials and local
U.S. attorneys say they can not provide the number of sexual assault cases they
decline from Indian reservations or even the number of cases they take.

A 2004 study conducted by the department found that the number of suspects
investigated by U.S. attorneys for crimes on Indian land declined 21 percent
from 1997 to 2000.

On Standing Rock, where the bright green grass seems to stretch as far as the
sky, women like Ironroad can live and die without any federal official taking
notice.

The tribe's chairman, Ron His Horse Is Thunder, stood on the porch of his log
cabin overlooking the plains where his people have lived for thousands of years.

"Rape amongst our people was one of those unheard of crimes, he said. "Not
because people didn't talk about it, but at one point in time, it didn't occur."

That is no longer the case, and the chairman says that as long as the tribe must
depend on the federal government to police and prosecute people on their own
land, anyone who comes here may well be able to rape or assault women, like
Leslie Ironroad, and get away with it.

"There's a word amongst our people," he said, pronouncing an Indian phrase.
"Simply stated, that we are all related, but it's more than just me and my
cousin being related. It means that anything that happens to the tribe or one
its members will affect everybody."

Two weeks after NPR began requesting documents and interviewing officials, the
Bureau of Indian Affairs reopened the investigation into Leslie Ironroad's
death. Officials say the results are still pending.


Related NPR Stories
a.. April 24, 2007
Rapes, Abuse High for Indigenous U.S. Women


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