As a Cherokee woman charging rape by a non-Indian, Jami Rozell could not go to the tribal court, ... For Indian Victims of Sexu | Sex Press
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As a Cherokee woman charging rape by a non-Indian, Jami Rozell could not go to the tribal court, ... For Indian Victims of Sexu

Submitted by admin on Wed, 2007-04-25 11:00.

As a Cherokee woman charging rape by a non-Indian, Jami Rozell could not go to the tribal court, which handles only crimes by Indians against Indians in Indian country. So after five months of agonizing, she went to the district attorney in Tahlequah, Okla., and testified at a preliminary hearing.

“It was the hardest thing I've ever done, get up there in front of my family with all these men I've grown up with all my life,” said Ms. Rozell, now 25 and a first grade teacher in another town. But that was not the worst of it. The police, she said she was soon told, had cleaned up the evidence room and thrown out her rape kit, and with it all chances of prosecution.

However, Chief Stephen Farmer of the Tahlequah police says the department had received permission to destroy the evidence after Ms. Rozell initially declined to press charges.

Human rights advocates say such troubled cases involving Indian victims are common. And, American Indian women are voicing growing anger at what they call their disproportionate victimization in crimes of sexual assault, most often committed by non-Indians, and attitudes and laws that they say deter many from even reporting an attack.

“Indian women suffer two and a half times more domestic violence, three and a half times more sexual assaults, and 17 percent will be stalked — and I'm a victim of all three,” said Pauline Musgrove, executive director of the Spirits of Hope Coalition, an advocacy group in Oklahoma.

Now Amnesty International has taken up the issue, calling on Congress to extend tribal authority to all offenders on Indian land, not just Indians, and to expand federal spending on Indian law enforcement and health clinics.

Chris Chaney, deputy director of the office of justice services at the Bureau of Indian Affairs , and a member of the Seneca-Cayuga tribe of Oklahoma, said that Indians fell victim to crime at a higher rate than members of any other ethnic group and that domestic violence was on the rise because of methamphetamine abuse.

But Mr. Chaney said that the bureau recognized the problem and that the new federal budget proposed an increase of $16 million to aid Indian law enforcement agencies.

With just over 4 million American Indian and Alaska Native people in 550 federally recognized tribes scattered over Indian and non-Indian lands throughout the United States, jurisdictional questions often throw cases into limbo, Amnesty International found. In cases where tribal courts have jurisdiction, they can only impose punishments of up to a year in jail and a $5,000 fine. The report cited Justice Department figures suggesting that more than one in three American Indian and Alaska Native women would be raped in their lifetime, almost double the national average of 18 percent.

In 86 percent of the cases, the report said, the perpetrators were non-Indian men, while in the population at large, the attacker and victim are usually from the same ethnic group.

Alaska has the highest incidence of forcible rapes of all women, the report said, and Native Alaskans in Anchorage were nearly 10 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault than non-natives. Oklahoma's 401,000 American Indians (according to 2005 Census estimates that include people listing mixed racial heritages) share 39 tribal governments and a patchwork of Indian and non-Indian lands; there are no reservations in Oklahoma, which is second only to California in its Indian population.

At Help in Crisis, a shelter for Indian women and their children in Tahlequah in eastern Oklahoma, many told of suffering assaults, often by husbands, without filing complaints.

Among them was Kendra Hunter, 25, who said she had been raped by three white men who held her captive for three days in 2001. Ms. Hunter said that she did report it, but that police officers turned away the complaint, saying that the sex was consensual and that with three witnesses against her, there was no chance of a case. “I had cigarette burns on me, and they called it consensual,” she said.

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