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The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation

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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 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 …show more content…

“Basically,” a mechanic told me, “you can do anything short of killing somebody.” 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 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

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