May 5 was a National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People (gay, lesbian and gender-fluid individuals) about violence against these groups, which is reaching epidemic levels in Indian Country.
On May 6, 11 people locked down in front of a man camp in northern Minnesota, which houses workers on the Line 3 tar sands pipeline being built from Canada, extending across a few miles of North Dakota and Wisconsin, and the entire state of Minnesota.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus participated in the direct action that shut down the man camp on May 6. The day before, she spoke with Tara Houska, a member of the Bear Clan of the Anishinaabe Couchiching First Nation and the founder of the Giniw Collective, which is fighting the Line 3 pipeline. Here, she talks about the urgent need to raise public awareness about the violence targeting indigenous people.
TARA HOUSKA: There is an epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women and 2-spirit and girls, and also men, happening in Indian Country, and it’s been happening for a long time. It’s a lot of different things, at least as far as I understand it: the lack of criminal jurisdiction of native nations over non-native offenders; we were stripped of that right as sovereign nations back in the 1950s by the Oliphant decision going to the Supreme Court. So we just simply can’t prosecute non-native offenders like they would be anywhere else. You go into Mississippi and commit a crime, you get charged by Mississippi, you’re going to go through Mississippi court and you’re going to go to Mississippi jail, if you’re found guilty.
That’s not how it is in Indian Country. And so there’s this really complicated web. Sometimes the feds have jurisdiction and they often decline these cases. The actual prosecution rate coming from the federal government of U.S. attorneys on rape cases, on murder cases, on violent crimes is incredibly low. They didn’t sign up to do this kind of work. You got police officers, tribal officers, who are patrolling places that are sometimes the size of almost an entire state, like the state of Rhode Island, and you have two officers on duty. No funding. No evidence to be collected. Like a victim is brought in and if it’s a two- or three-hour drive, how are you really going to protect that person?
So there’s that issue. And sex-trafficking rings know this. Human trafficking rings know this. Cartels know this and pipeline companies and mining companies and extractive industry companies know this also. In relation to fossil fuels, somebody has to build these things and it’s typically a very large non-local workforce. To build Line 3 they need 5,000 people to do it. They said they were going to hire 75 percent locals, and their rates are about 30 percent. Almost everyone is coming from somewhere else. The state is full of Texas and Utah plates.
Precision Pipeline, or whoever the subcontractor is, they are people who come in to destroy places they don’t live in. And with that comes upticks in violence to the community. There’s nowhere else to go. We’re in rural northern Minneapolis; we’ve got towns of 2,000 or 3,000 people – sometimes 200, 300 people – and you got a man camp that’s 1,000 people next door. Where are they going to go? They’re going to go on the rez (reservation), they’re going to go to these little border towns. That becomes compounded with lack of jurisdiction and some of the inabilities of us to prosecute our assailants.
Then there’s other issues that also play into those rates. I think the dehumanization of native people has a large role to play. We are very heavily fetishized and romanticized. We are Indian maidens who kneel on the side of a butter stick for how many years, how many decades? What does that do to a people when you are a Halloween costume that’s very scandalous every year, as a race of people, as a living people? And there’s a lack of respect for your agency and for your personhood because you are less than, and you are an Indian maiden, or you are not a real person – you’re like this relic of the past that got left over.
We are most likely to be killed by the police. We are most likely to experience violence. We are most likely to experience sexual violence. The rates of Indian women that experience sexual violence in their lifetimes is one in two. it’s obscenely high. And there’s also the traumas of our own people, which is intergenerational loss of land, of culture, through the forced assimilations and boarding schools. There are so many different issues that have plagued our people. Then we are cut off from our ability to economically provide for ourselves, to govern ourselves, to protect ourselves legally. And then told, Why are your people still so hurt? Why are you still so poor? Why are you still so drunk?
For more information, including videos of several non-violent direct actions against the pipeline, visit the Giniw Collective on Facebook at facebook.com/giniwcollective.
