Attempts to address the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis could be counteracted by the problems “man camps” cause for reservation communities....
In 2017, 5,646 Native women were reported missing in the United States. Nationwide, the murder rate for Native women is ten times that of the average American; in Montana, Native citizens are 6.7 percent of the population, yet between 2016-2018, they made up 26 percent of the state’s missing persons reports.
Some of the factors are easy to identify:
jurisdictional confusion between local state-run police, the FBI, and tribal or Bureau of Indian Affairs police departments routinely leads to slow response times; slow response times allow for bodies, and thus the perpetrator’s DNA, to decompose and disappear; and slow response times lead to cold trails and dead-end cases, which make local law enforcement hesitant to undertake new cases.
In 2017, U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute 37 percent of Indian Country cases, citing lack of evidence in 70 percent of the cases they dropped....
A number of studies,
reports, and
congressional hearings now connect man camps—which can be used in mines and other extractive efforts as well—with increased rates of sexual violence and sex trafficking. The most well-documented cases thus far have occurred in the Tar Sands region of Alberta, Canada, as well as in western North Dakota and eastern Montana—an area known otherwise as
the Bakken oil fields—though such activity is
in no way exclusive to the region.
Because pipelines are typically routed through rural communities, local law enforcement, often times already stretched thin, are left trying to police a sudden, months-long influx of hundreds of outsiders. This was among the many points underscored in June, when Canada’s federal government released
its MMIWG report, a years-long study undertaken by the federal government that declared the missing and murdered indigenous women epidemic a state-induced genocide. Among the findings presented in the 1,200-page document, the Canadian government pinpointed extractive industries and man camps as hotbeds of violence. “We call upon resource-extraction and development industries and all governments and service providers to anticipate and recognize increased demand on social infrastructure because of development projects and resource extraction, and for mitigation measures to be identified as part of the planning and approval process,” the report’s authors wrote....
The problem, as always in Indian Country, is getting American politicians to care about human beings more than campaign contributions. As it stands, U.S. officials, rather than heeding these side effects of the nation’s addiction to oil and natural gas, are instead focusing on fighting protesters. As the
Montana Free Press has previously reported using public records requests, Fox and other Montana politicians have repeatedly met with local and federal law enforcement, but not to talk about the increased rates of violence along the pipeline route. Instead, following the lead of
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, they have been meeting with police to discuss how to best proactively combat future Keystone XL demonstrators.
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