Please note: All highlighted links are clickable to give both the credible sources and to read further, if the reader requires additional context. This author encourages the readers to do so, to more clearly understand the legacy of this almost 250-years of human rights abuses by the US government.

Table of Contents:

1. The Ongoing Tragedy of the Native Americans in the US (2015)
2. Why are Registered Sex Offenders still allowed to enter Native American reservations to rape and murder Native American men, women, and children? (2023)

“Besides justifying unquestioned abrogation and unilateral determination of tribal treaty and property rights, the plenary power paradigm has been interpreted to permit the denial of other fundamental human rights of Indian people in the United States.”‘154 Violent suppression of Indian religious practices and traditional forms of government,155 separation of Indian children from their homes,156 wholesale spoliation of treaty-guaranteed resources,157 forced assimilative programs’158 and involuntary sterilization of Indian women,’159 represent but a few of the practical extensions of a false and un-Americanized legal consciousness that at its core regards tribal peoples as normatively deficient and culturally, politically and morally inferior to Europeans. For half a millenium, whether articulated in this notion of plenary power possessed by Congress in Indian affairs, or through the Law of Nations, or in Coke’s English common law, European-derived legal thought has sought to erase the difference presented by the Indian in order to sustain its own discursive context; European norms and value structures. Animated by a central orienting myth of its own universalized, hierarchical position among all other discourses, the white man’s archaic, European-derived law respecting the Indian is ultimately genocidal in both its practice and intent. This un-Americanized collection of legal rules and principles seeks to silence a radically-opposed teaching that in the American way of life, freedom is built on respect for my brother’s vision and his respect for mine.” – Robert A. Williams Jr, THE ALGEBRA OF FEDERAL INDIAN LAW: THE HARD TRAIL OF DECOLONIZING AND AMERICANIZING THE WHITE MAN’S INDIAN JURISPRUDENCE, from the Wisconsin Law Review.

The Doctrine of Discovery, in conjunction with the Plenary powers of the US Congress, is a violation of the fundamental rights of Native Americans in the US. The Doctrine of Discovery essentially asserted that Native Americans have no right to their own lands nor would they be recognized as equal people to White Settlers and later US citizens, but as “wards” who needed to be taken care of by “stewards” under the legal assumption that they had no critical thinking faculties. This was then combined with the US Congress’s Plenary powers, in which the US Congress has unilateral rights to unlimited powers over Native Americans; the US Congress can limit, modify, or remove any rights or powers that “Tribal” governments possess with impunity. The US Congress can infringe upon the human rights of Native Americans without any constraint, they can redefine what the relationships between the US treaties with Native American civilizations are, they can break the treaties without any legal recourse for Native Americans to use to stop them, and they can remove Native American “tribal” affiliation and deny them any legal protections without restraint within Native American reservations. Erasing Native American tribal affiliation and governance would effectively erase Native American culture and civilization; the US Congress has always had the whims and powers to do exactly that and Native Americans are considered incapable of reasoning faculties under the European legal system of British Common law that the US imported and adopted from Great Britain. I know how crazy and “biased” that sounds, but please read the entirety of the Wisconsin Law Review analysis and report, if you believe that is an exaggeration or a lie.

I do not believe that my feelings and heartache over the deprivation of basic human rights of Indigenous people throughout the US will ever go away, so long as I live. I keep making useless blog posts and I sometimes wonder if it is all so thoroughly, completely pointless to do so. What am I really contributing? What changes will really be made? What influence does a mere blog post have in the grand scheme of things when it comes to an entire country’s politics? Nevertheless, the intrusive thoughts do not leave my mind and I can’t help but think that not caring and yet, still living on this land and benefitting from living within the current framework of government is a privilege bubble and that I’m not doing enough to help people who’ve had their basic rights taken away and who constantly live in fear of violence and death due to an asinine over 250-year legal theory that has no concrete evidence to defend itself with consideration to the constant failed policies by the US. Every single point mentioned in the above quote, of which I myself have cited numerous times in previous posts with cited evidence, is incontrovertible proof that the Doctrine of Discovery’s entire premise and the stated intentions of the US government for following it are false. The Doctrine of Discovery is often argued to be paternalistic, but it really is just unabashedly narcissistic because Native Americans historically had no ability to defend themselves from US Federal, State, and local sponsored violence against them. Moreover, the Doctrine of Discovery’s legal basis and impacts upon Native Americans is both inconsistent and in complete opposition to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and “the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” and yet, the US claims to internationally be the defender of human rights. What the US has done and still defends on a legal basis is legally no different than Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea and subsequently of Ukraine itself. Technically speaking, if Putin declared the Doctrine of Discovery on Ukraine as his justification, the US would have absolutely no legal ability to refute him. Please note, the only reason anyone could ever find that statement unacceptable would be if the human rights of Indigenous people in the US are not considered equal to those of foreign-born Ukrainians. And, I’m only using that example to highlight the current injustices of the US legal system.

What Native Americans continue to suffer from throughout the US due to the current, genocidal policy based upon the European imperialist “Doctrine of Discovery” model of legal theory that was utilized in the so-called “Indian Civil Rights act of 1965” and the Supreme Court case of Oliphant vs Suquamish of 1978. The Supreme Court of the Oliphant vs Suquamish decision even noted that rape, torture, and violent encroachment was occurring prior to making their decision. Whole generations of Native American men, women, and children murdered, raped, and tortured by violent sex offenders with just absolute indifference from the US justice system that continues to protect these genocidal policies based on the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian churches supposedly “helping” them (and imposing laws throughout US States to stop Native American survivors of child rape to sue the Catholic Church and other such Churches which are still in effect today) and thus continuing their colonial genocide even in modern times, and corporate institutions (usually funded by Christian conservatives and Oil Corporations such as Chevron) that lobby the US federal and State governments to dump pollution into Native American reservations which increases child mortality rates. The actions of the US government, US Churches, and various US corporate institutions speak louder than the words; there is still an active, supportive genocidal policy against Native Americans throughout the US and all these groups will use every resource, excuse, and even outright lies available to continue to abuse, mistreat, dehumanize, stereotype, and vilify Native Americans and then shield themselves from culpability using colonial-based laws premised on the Christian legal principle of the Doctrine of Discovery that seem more keen on protecting violent sex offenders than innocent men, women, and children from harm. For instance, the Bureau of Indian Affairs misleads by stating Native women are abused by intimate partners more than perpetrators that they do not know while citing a source that doesn’t conflate the intimate partner violence with the question of sexual violence and the source even cites the aforementioned Oliphant vs Suquamish Supreme Court case of 1978 as the reason for majority non-Native perpetrators raping and murdering Native American women. The other reason that it is misleading is because the Office of Justice programs study that they also cite found that approximately 58 percent of the cases listed the perpetrators as friends / acquaintances or people they do not know as the perpetrators on Table 16 and on Table 17, the survivor stated that the perpetrator was White in approximately 55 percent of the documented cases. Likewise, the supposed higher percentage of Native American men being put into Federal prisons for crimes pertaining to sexual abuse are because of US Federal laws limiting the authority of State governments to impose laws when the crime is between two Native Americans (and, just to clarify, in approximately 84 – 86% of the cases involving Native Americans, it is non-Native men, almost certainly registered sex offenders, committing assault, rape, and murder of both Native American men and women). Thus, because the initial, unpublished 2008 study separated “friend / acquaintance” without distinguishing the two and separated that category of stranger as another bracket, the study seems to have wrongly attributed the majority of cases to intimate partner violence, when it is largely non-Native sex offenders taking advantage of US government incompetence.

US journalists seem more interested in outright lying by claiming it is because of Native American reservations being supposedly “sovereign” when the reality is that the US Congress has recognized these reservations as “dependent nations” under the Doctrine of Discovery and the US Congress do nothing about the Supreme Court case of Oliphant vs Suquamish of 1978 or the fact they wrote into law that the murder or rape of “Indians” is limited to the punishment of one year’s jail time or a $5000 dollar fine and only extending it to three years jail-time and a $15,000 fine except in the case of non-Native perpetrators who have no relation to Native American reservations. The legal definition of describing Native Americans is still “Indian” in US law; it is my understanding that Native Americans generally have differing views about this term as some love to use it to mock at the historic stupidity of Columbus and the White Settlers for the usage of the term and some view it as the racist codification of US law in legally defining Native American people that is still the current law of the US. After all, they didn’t mean people of Indian descent from India, what they meant by Indian was “savage” as per the historical Eurocentric-colonialist racial stereotypes. Thankfully, to my honest surprise, despite the abject racism of US corporate media, the US independent media and the UK media like the The Guardian are more objective and honest about the situation. The UK media and the US independent media don’t seem to have the socio-political blinders that the US corporate media does; that is, vilifying the specific ethnic group known for the highest rates of US military service on a per capita basis to “protect” the image of the US.

Think about this: since the prevalence of violence against both Native American women and Native American men is over 80 percent and Amnesty International documents that one-in-three Native American women will be raped in their lifetime (96% of Native American women and 89% of Native American men report being victimized in some form of violence by a non-Native perpetrator according to the US Congress), that means it is a statistical fact of life that Native American men and women who are service members coming home from serving the US government’s armed forces will come home to learn that their spouse, son, daughter, or other such family member was either raped, raped and murdered, or disappeared into a missing persons list (almost certainly to have been raped and murdered by a registered sex offender), the police will usually have mischaracterized their loved ones as “Hispanic, Asian, or White” in their police reports, and the local, State, and US federal government officials still do not care enough to update these genocidal laws to safeguard the safety and welfare of Native American communities from this harm. Of course, the Indigenous families will then likely be stereotyped as either the dying Indian or drunken, disorderly Indian stereotype by the US Corporate media who will gleefully lie to the US public about how it is because of “sovereignty” and not the dehumanizing, colonial “doctrine of discovery” legal basis that is still in effect today in the US upon the ethnic group most likely to voluntarily sacrifice their wellbeing to protect the US government and US public.

Incidentally, if the Brackeen vs Haaland decision goes in favor of Brackeen, I don’t understand why this wouldn’t negatively impact future Army military recruitment considering Native Americans have a longstanding and proud cultural history of military service for the US. To the best of my understanding, based on what little I’ve researched on the subject, the ubiquity of military enrollment among Indigenous communities in the US seems to be based on this unique socio-religious worldview of process-metaphysics that has similarities throughout the multitude of various Native American cultures in North America and Central America. By contrast, the Brackeen family are part of a religious denomination of Christianity that thankfully admits that it has a problem with child raping priests and as of a month ago, the International Church of Christ is facing a class-action lawsuit for systemic and repeated incidents of molestation of children due to top-level Christian priests willfully protecting a convicted pedophile to the extent the alleged victims coming forward are reaching up to the hundreds. In 2006, when the Bush administration investigated the religious views of sex offenders, they found the opposite of what they had hoped: approximately 59 percent of sex offenders were highly religious Christians and the researchers found that the stronger their belief in divine punishment from sources like the Bible, the more likely they were to target and rape children and become repeat offenders. Moreover, the highly religious Christians were more likely to target younger children than the 41 percent of sex offenders who held more secular views. Given all this, the domino effect of the Brackeen vs Haaland decision in favor of Brackeen could have serious repercussions that most of the people making these decisions haven’t even thought about in the long-term. The recent Dobbs decision and subsequent abortion pill decision shows evidence that the US Supreme Court has not adequately considered the long-term. Unfortunately, the CDC has found the Dobbs decision emboldened child rapists and one-in-ten US teenage girls have reported being raped in the CDC survey; the saddest (or dumbest or both) part is that these could be the same people who had been raping Native Americans for years and may have learned, from the lack of punitive measures by the US justice system upon their violent sexual offenses to Native Americans; how to coerce, threaten, or otherwise escape detection due to the US justice system refusing to prosecute violent sex offenders for more than forty years when they raped and murdered Indigenous people. Unfortunately, part of the ramifications of living in a digital age, is that even violent sex offenders can organize in internet forums to plan or learn how to get past legal loopholes to rape and a VICE article even notes one such example. As such, the Dobbs decision may have been seen as a greenlight by the US Supreme Court for sexual predators and registered sex offenders who have been emboldened by the fact the US justice system did not do anything for over forty years to protect Indigenous communities; keep in mind, that this doesn’t count the centuries prior in which the US government funded Christian boarding schools that abused Native Americans and currently still protects the abusers. I do not attribute the current US Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs to malice, although I do believe they have harmed their own legitimacy to a degree. The Supreme Court of the United States simply does not understand that we live in a digital age and how this impacts people’s everyday lives or how criminals and those intent on harming entire communities throughout the US can benefit from their decision-making. It probably did not factor into their decision-making at all.

One might think that prospect of organized sexual predators bewildering or highly unlikely, but consider this: Montana is the State known for the worst issues of Indigenous women being raped and murdered or gone missing, but why is it that no one in any district, State, or Federal attorney office thought of the fact that the Catholic Church used Montana’s reservations as a dumping ground for its pedophile priests? Why do people think of these two facts in isolation when we’re talking about the same locations and the same people within a US State? The only difference between a registered sex offender and a Catholic priest in the context of Montana is that the sex offender is registered and the Catholic priest will be expected to have his name rolled out on a list of possible accusers in a public hearing after he passes away and the statue of limitations is expired. Typically, this is largely thanks to the Catholic Church’s lobbying groups making sure that it wasn’t extended while moving him out of the country to avoid due process. Why do people think that such priests wouldn’t find friendship and work with sexual predators? Are they not “like-minded” in behavior? Moreover, why couldn’t the seal of confession then be used as priest-penitent legal privilege to hide any premeditated rape and murder of Indigenous people? How can we know, given the fact the US legal system has done everything possible to protect pedophiles and sex offenders, that this hasn’t already been happening for decades or longer? Consider the fact that Christian boarding schools, including Catholic boarding schools, from the 1870s – 1960s were known for sexual exploitation of children alongside physical and emotional abuse; does it still seem implausible that this could be happening? How about the fact that in another case of a Christian denomination protecting people who rape children; the Jehovah’s Witnesses successfully argued that the exercise clause of the First Amendment protected them from giving local and State government officials their internal list of people they knew for a fact had raped children within their Christian congregations. The ugly truth may have been in front of the US public’s face the entire time, but the US public still seems keen on writing it off as individual bad actors or burying its collective head in the sand over this issue.

While I can appreciate the efforts by the Obama administration in signing the Violence Against Women’s act of 2013 in adding some protections for Indigenous people living in Native American reservations, the signing of the Savannah act and the Not Invisible act by the Trump administration along with Attorney General Barr’s updated policies to enhance Alaskan policing to protect Alaskan Natives, and President Biden’s administration in acknowledging the epidemic levels of rape of Native American and Alaskan Native women by non-Native men along with policy updates for the Bureau of Indian Affairs under Debra Haaland; nevertheless, these are all piecemeal efforts to ignore the dehumanizing and destructive impact of the 1978 Supreme Court decision of Oliphant vs Suquamish and the limitations on “Tribal” governments to impose penalties upon registered sex offenders due to the discriminatory impositions of the Indian Civil Rights act of 1968. I cannot write an exhaustive list of the centuries of history of specific abuses by the US government upon Native American human rights and I don’t believe that I, an outsider looking in, have any right to argue on behalf of what Indigenous communities say that they require to fix a brutal legacy of injustice. What I will say is that from my own perspective, I do not understand how the legacy of US policies upon Indigenous human rights should be considered anything short of grossly incompetent and should serve as a lesson to all forms of democratic government institutions throughout the world that no government should ever have any unlimited power over any human beings. The US government has proven both domestically with regards to its policies upon Native Americans and internationally in its war campaigns of Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan to be grossly unfit and too incompetent to ever be allowed such powers. As I do not want to be misconstrued as speaking for Native Americans, my only real recommendation from my own personal perspective as a human being who believes wholeheartedly in the human rights of all people, would be that Indigenous “Tribal” governments should be allowed to assert and impose their own inalienable rights (whether comporting to international human rights standard or a more culturally-sensitive approach) which the US Congress, US judiciary, and US Presidential office have absolutely no right to infringe or reduce to any capacity similar to the US Constitutional rights granted to the US public. In other words, the best and most effective way to fix the present issues in my personal opinion, would be to allow “Tribal” governments to assert their own self-defined Indigenous human rights within their “Tribal” lands that the US government cannot ever infringe upon via the Plenary powers or Doctrine of Discovery under any circumstances. Restraint on what the US government can do to Native American lands and communities seems to be the only rational recourse in my honest opinion. Whether by uniform plebiscite among all Tribal governments working together or each individually asserting their own intrinsic rights with different legal classifications, I think this is the only rational recourse; however, if Native American communities living in their Indigenous lands disagree and have better ideas, then I would humbly acquiesce to their suggestions. In an effort to give a more concrete idea of just how grossly incompetent the US Congress is in its policymaking for Indigenous lands and Indigenous communities, consider the openly racist arguments of Congressman Chuck Grassley of Iowa in his opposition to the Violence Against Women’s act of 2013 allowing protections for Native Americans:

“the jury is supposed to be a reflections of society… But under the laws of our land, you got to have a jury that is a reflection of society as a whole, and on an Indian reservation, it’s going to be made up of Indians, right? So the non-Indian doesn’t get a fair trial.”

And the date of his statement, on February 2013, coincides to the moment prior to a shockingly depressing rise in suicide rates among Native American service members according to statistical research into US military suicide rates by the Veterans Affairs administration of the US federal government:

Source: “2022: NATIONAL VETERAN SUICIDE PREVENTION ANNUAL REPORT .” Veteran Suicide Data and Reporting, US Department of Veterans Affairs, 14 Sept. 2018, https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2022/2022-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-508.pdf. 

While correlation does not equal causation, it seems highly implausible to me that this Congressman’s statement, which occurred slightly before the massive rise in suicide rates among Native American service members, did not have a substantially negative impact. After all, how would any of us feel if we were serving our country and a Congressional representative publicly stated that he did not consider the lives of our family members to be worth protecting from rapes and murders by registered sex offenders? This Congressman, who is currently still an elected official of the Senate for the State of Iowa as of writing this, did not understand that he was talking about the same people who put their lives on the line, who make personal sacrifices in defense of the US, and often suffer permanent bodily injuries and personal trauma related to their time in military service. This Congressman did not have the rational capacity to understand that the people who suffer the most dehumanizing conditions of violence, sexual assault, rape, and murder are the families of the people who are serving the US armed forces and highly likely to be what Native American service members themselves suffered from growing-up and still choosing to serve their country. One may think that Native Americans could have a conflict of interest between serving “Tribal” (I use the word euphemistically in the absence of an alternative; as I believe Indigenous people should be allowed to define themselves) and US governments, but this is the same land and it would appear that the opposite is true; many Native Americans seem to be duly patriotic to both the US government, respective “Tribal” governments, and their Indigenous communities on “Tribal” lands without any contradiction. So, what reason would Grassley have to say such shockingly racist statements that may have contributed to these suicide rates in the armed forces? Did he think of Native Americans as real human beings, or did he think of them in terms of racist Hollywood stereotypes of “drunken Indians” or “dying Indians” as somehow being an unalterable reality based on the fantasy stories that he imbibed growing up?

The legal framework of the Doctrine of Discovery and the Plenary power of the US Congress should ipso facto be labeled as an intentional policy of auto-genocide towards Native American communities, Native American lands, and especially Native American human rights. The premise of imposing the dependent nations status and the historic abuses of nearly 250-years are simply indefensible and unjust. I say this as a committed patriot / nationalist to the US who wholeheartedly believes in unilateral US hegemony in foreign affairs. Most “Tribal” lands cannot reasonably be called foreign when they’re within the bounds of the continental US government territory and those that aren’t within the continental US are already interconnected to the US. Although, it may not matter much, I want to make this next portion unambiguously clear. As a born and raised citizen of the US, who has no Native American affiliation or heritage; I wholeheartedly denounce the Doctrine of Discovery, the Plenary power of the US Congress, and the limitations imposed by the Indian Civil Rights act of 1968 and the 1978 Supreme Court case of Oliphant vs Suquamish as acts of intentional, State-sponsored genocide by the US government upon Native Americans living predominately in Native American reservations and upon all Native American communities living in the US as a whole. I denounce William Rehnquist’s Supreme Court decision as an act of genocide that is no different than the State-sponsored genocides of Adolf Hitler (who was inspired by the US policies imposed upon Native Americans, to begin with), Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, or any other leader of any country that has committed wholesale, intentional genocide such as what was done to the Armenian Christians, the Tasmanians, the Irish, and my own family background of what Indians of India under British rule suffered from on four consecutive occasions. Likewise, any US government agent or policy maker who harmed Native Americans with dehumanizing policies in whole or in part, likewise deserves to be branded as no different than any other genocidal leader in history. If we of the US are truly the “greatest”, then we have a duty to hold ourselves to a higher standard in defending the human rights of our own citizens regardless of what the rest of the world does. As I’m sure that this will seem either extreme, nonsensical, or stupid by some readers; I’d like to spotlight why it should be considered an intentional genocidal policy in a more concrete manner by quoting the Article II definition of the genocide under the UN “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide” and have a link for each of those offenses that Native Americans part of “Tribal” lands within the US suffered from:

Definition

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

To conclude, I’d like to posit the following questions: if the government of the United States of America was truly sincere about protecting Native Americans within Native American lands; why didn’t they impose a blanket ban on non-Native, registered sex offenders from being allowed to enter into Native American territories? Irrespective of if that was feasibly enforceable, why does the disastrous legacy of rapes and murders upon Indigenous men, women, and children by violent sex offenders not prompt any legal repercussions for non-Native, violent sex offenders by the US government? Why is the US government more focused on protecting registered sex offenders than protecting Native American children from rape and murder by these registered sex offenders? Regardless of your political leanings, personal beliefs about Native Americans, or views on the Doctrine of Discovery; I just ask that you seriously consider those questions. It doesn’t even make sense from a financial or rational standpoint; most of these programs to prevent violence against Indigenous people are thoroughly undercut by the real-world consequences of the Oliphant vs Suquamish decision. The US government is essentially imposing additional burdens on police forces throughout the country that are already critically short-staffed to the extent that police detectives working on sexual assault cases have been moved to other assignments and additional burdens on US taxpayer finances; just because the US government prioritizes protecting registered sex offenders over Native American communities. Whereas granting Native American “Tribal” governments more power would have more readily prevented and protected Native American communities; any funding by the government for these efforts could have allowed Native American communities to finally build robust economies so they could focus on their livelihoods instead of having to worry and fear of their children being raped and murdered. Please note, I am not arguing in favor of defunding initiatives, I’m questioning how it is that US government policy could be so utterly incompetent in the first place to require these measures. As it stands, the US government’s failure to act may have emboldened these sex offenders to seek out teenagers from the general US populous after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade with the Dobbs decision and the evidence shows that they’ve learned how to coordinate to commit sex trafficking and other organized crime; all because the US government willfully protected these sex offenders for more than forty years and valued their lives above the lives of Native American communities. If that isn’t a policy of auto-genocide, what is?

Additional Resources: 

For those interested in donating to Native American human rights causes, please click here and here for posts regarding the Indigenous services I’ve donated to; which contain links for more information about them.

For those who want more concrete information on the historic, almost 250-years of abuse by the US government upon Native Americans and Alaskan Natives; the University of Alaska Fairbanks has free education course on US federal policy with regarding Indigenous people and a brief summary of each of their impacts chronicled throughout the years, which are divided into four sections. I highly recommend it as I personally found it to be very informative.

Amnesty International’s updated 2022 report. I found this information about the Standing Rock conflict striking as I do not recall the US Corporate media reporting this portion of events:

“When you bring in large groups of men working
away from home with money in their pockets
and time on their hands you are going to see
an increase in sexual assault, sex trafficking,
domestic violence, and drug use… Standing Rock
wasn’t just about water; it was about the true
exploitation of Native people. 200 rape kits went
missing, so it didn’t do any good to file the report
when the evidence goes missing. There are still
26 women missing from Standing Rock. Women
would go to the store and not come back.”
Sheila Lamb, MN350 co-chair and Minnesota MMIW
Task Force and Steering Committee member, Extractive
Industries and Sex Trafficking of Native Women and Youth
Webinar, April 2021

Works Cited

1. “2022: NATIONAL VETERAN SUICIDE PREVENTION ANNUAL REPORT .” Veteran Suicide Data and Reporting, US Department of Veterans Affairs, 14 Sept. 2018, https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2022/2022-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-508.pdf.
2. “687. Tribal Court Jurisdiction.” The United States Department of Justice, 22 Jan. 2020, https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-687-tribal-court-jurisdiction#:~:text=The%20Supreme%20Court%20held%20in,the%20tribe%20in%20Duro%20v.
3. Bachman, Ronet, et al. “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and the Criminal Justice Response: What Is Known.” Office of Justice Programs (.Gov), Department of Justice, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/223691.pdf.
4. Bear, Charla. “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.” NPR, NPR, 12 May 2008, https://www.npr.org/2008/05/12/16516865/american-indian-boarding-schools-haunt-many.
5. Begay, Chrystal, and Tinesha Zandamela. “Sexual Assault on Native American Reservations in the United States.” Ballard Brief, Brigham Young University, 17 Feb. 2023, https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/sexual-assault-on-native-american-reservations-in-the-us.
6. Borecka, Natalia. “US Christian Group Accused of Covering up Sexual Abuse of Minors.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 19 Mar. 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/19/international-churches-of-christ-lawsuits-alleged-sexual-abuse.
7. Brooks, Brad. “Native American Survivors of Alleged School Sex Abuse Want Justice.” Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 10 July 2022, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-native-americans-schools/.
8. Bundy, Trey. “Jehovah’s Witnesses Use 1st Amendment to Hide Child Sex Abuse Claims.” Reveal, 30 June 2021, https://revealnews.org/article/jehovahs-witnesses-use-1st-amendment-to-hide-child-sex-abuse-claims/.
9. Cooper, Renee. “Behind the Grim Statistics for Sexual Violence on Reservations.” KX NEWS, KX NEWS, 22 Dec. 2020, https://www.kxnet.com/news/local-news/being-raped-is-a-right-of-passage-behind-the-grim-statistics-for-native-american-women/.
10. “Doctrine of Discovery.” Legal Information Institute, Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/doctrine_of_discovery.
11. Eshuys, Donna, and Stephen Smallbone. “Religious Affiliations among Adult Sexual Offenders.” Religious Affiliations Among Adult Sexual Offenders | Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice: Office of Justice Programs, https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/religious-affiliations-among-adult-sexual-offenders.
12. “Federal Indian Law for Alaska Tribes: Tribal Governance.” Federal Indian Law for Alaska Tribes | Tribal Governance, University of Alaska Fairbanks, https://uaf.edu/tribal/academics/112/.
13. Golden, Hallie. “US Indigenous Women Face High Rates of Sexual Violence – with Little Recourse.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 May 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/17/sexual-violence-against-native-indigenous-women.
14. Grassley, Chuck. “U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.” Https://Www.grassley.senate.gov/, United States Senate, https://www.grassley.senate.gov/.
15. Hanegan, Michael. “#SILENTCOFC: Child Sexual Abuse and Churches of Christ.” MICHAEL HANEGAN, MICHAEL HANEGAN, 22 July 2014, https://michaelhanegan.com/blog/silentcofc.
16. Harper, Sarah Rose, and Jesse Phelps. “Texas, Big Oil Lawyers Target Native Children in a Bid to End Tribal Sovereignty.” Lakota People’s Law Project, Lakota People’s Law Project, https://lakotalaw.org/news/2021-09-17/icwa-sovereignty.
17. Heart, Michael No, et al. “Grassley on Vawa: ‘the Non-Indian Doesn’t Get a Fair Trial’.” Indian Country Today Media Network.com, https://web.archive.org/web/20151120023211/http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/02/21/grassley-vawa-non-indian-doesnt-get-fair-trial-147823.
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