Biden’s Move Toward Clean Energy Will Not Necessarily Stop the Murders of Native Women

Early one evening in August 2019, gray clouds rolled over the town of Missoula, Mont., as hundreds of people gathered at a yearly fair. At the rodeo stands, Valenda Morigeau took the microphone. As she held a framed picture of her missing niece, Jermain Charlo, 23, tears streamed down her cheeks. Charlo, a mother of two from Dixon, Mont., disappeared in June 2018 from Missoula.

Morigeau spoke to the crowd about a “hidden epidemic” of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in Montana and across the United States. The talk lasted several minutes, and then the rodeo continued. But for Morigeau, the search for her niece continues to this day.

While precise figures are not known and are vastly underreported, a 2018 study from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered than other American women. Data collected by the Montana Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force indicates that Native Americans are four times more likely to go missing in the state. Native Americans make up just 7 percent of Montana’s population, The Associated Press reported on Thursday, but a quarter of reported missing person cases.

And many of these cases have been linked to the extractive industries that house legions of transient male workers.

Despite the fact that activists and community leaders across North America have been ringing alarm bells for decades about the dangers for Native women who live near extractive industry sites, it is mostly thanks to Indigenous-led organizations and social media movements that the issue has finally reached the mainstream public. In Canada, an MMIWG national enquiry conducted in 2019 found the state responsible for a “race-based genocide,” which is ongoing.

But across the border, in the United States, the government has been slower to respond — until recently.

In a promising development, Deb Halaand, the first Native American to lead a Cabinet agency — the Department of the Interior — announced that she will create a unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to investigate the killing and disappearance of Native Americans.

“Violence against Indigenous peoples is a crisis that has been underfunded for decades,” Haaland said in a statement. “Far too often, murders and missing persons cases in Indian country go unsolved and unaddressed, leaving families and communities devastated.”

The 2021 change in political leadership has offered hope to Native Americans, particularly with the shutdown of the Keystone XL pipeline. On President Biden’s first day in office, he issued an executive order halting the controversial pipeline, which was meant to transmit 830,000 barrels of crude oil from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico.

The pipeline was slated to pass directly through sacred grounds and ceremonial sites of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, in northeastern Montana just north of the Missouri River. Angeline Cheek and Lance Fourstar, community activists and members of the reservation, were not only worried about the environmental impacts of the pipeline, but equally about the “man camps” that would have housed thousands of outside workers — mostly young men with disposable income. Extractive projects, often located on or near Native land, have been associated with an increase in sexual assault and violence against women.

The Fort Peck Indian Reservation is located not far from the Bakken Formation, which contains oil deposits that stretch from parts of Montana and North Dakota, to the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Residents on the reservation know well the impacts of the oil industry on their community.

Yet, even with Biden’s commitment to renewable energy, a large, outside workforce will still be in demand, sweeping through or near Indian country, threatening the sanctity and lives of Indigenous peoples.

Towns like Williston and Watford City in North Dakota have had an influx of oil industry workers, and people living at Fort Peck have seen an increase in drugs, crime, and sexualized violence since the oil boom began in 2006. There is little reason to think that the people who will live near new man camps associated with wind farms and other forms of renewable energy will be any safer.

Overly complicated laws block justice

Heather Belgrade, 25, has been grieving both the death of her best friend Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, and her cousin Olivia Lone Bear. Lafontaine was brutally murdered in 2017, and not long after, Lone Bear’s body was found in the summer of 2018. Lafontaine’s case led to the passage of Savanna’s Act, a set of reforms on how U.S. law enforcement handles the cases of missing and murdered Native Americans.

Despite such reforms, and even with the unit Haaland is creating, dealing with crimes in Indian country is fraught with complications, and cases often fall between the cracks or go unreported. In cases of sexual assault, non-native men who assault women on reservations cannot be arrested or prosecuted by tribal authorities, with the exception of a few reservations that are part of a pilot project within the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The project allows tribal authorities to prosecute non-native men who commit crimes against women within Indian country.

The Fort Peck Indian Reservation falls under this jurisdiction, which was established in large part to deal with the threats the community faces from the oil industry.

The realities of the precarious lives of Native American women and girls are gaining more attention, finally, but longstanding colonial laws and policies helped create the social settings for the MMIWG crisis, and the current system continues to uphold it. In order to address the issue at a foundational level, restoring tribal sovereignty is essential. Until Indian Nations have the full authority to govern their own land — and the power to fully adjudicate crimes that occur on it — the cries of Native women will continue to go unheard, and justice will remain elusive.

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

(All photos by Sara Hylton)