 |
|
|
|
There is no death. Only a change of worlds.
-- Chief Seattle |
|
| ShoutBox - Shout To Your Friends |
|
|
|
| |
This is Topic: Native News
Following are the News Items published under this Topic.
|
|
See all
|
|
|
|
Just off the deserted highways, the silver pickup truck eases down quiet streets, its driver offering a numbing tour of a remote reservation framed by the beauty of snowcapped mountains.
There, Leon Tillman says, over there — the house on the right, a white, two-story building set off by itself. It used to be a big drug house. Now it's shuttered, its owners in prison.
A man dressed in an army green shirt and pants appears on the side of the road, his thumb up, looking for a ride. "That's a meth head," Tillman says. "He's bumming right now."
A few more drug houses and Tillman's tour of the despair of methamphetamine ends.
Not long ago, most people here had never even heard of meth. But today, most know someone on meth or in prison because of it. Tillman, 39, knows too many to count.
"It's everywhere," he said.
Indeed, American Indians have been especially hard hit by meth. Drug cartels have targeted Indian Country because the people are vulnerable, and law enforcement struggles to keep up.
But the story of how meth came to this remote reservation is really quite remarkable.
Like a cancer, a Mexican drug gang permeated the reservation and its families. It left behind a landscape strewn with broken lives.
Some 12,000 Indians — members of the Northern Arapaho and the Eastern Shoshone tribes — live on 2.2 million acres, an area so vast many homes are separated by miles of barren land.
Poverty and unemployment are high, alcoholism is rampant and the police department is so understaffed — patrolling such a large area — that the average response time is 15 to 20 minutes.
Jesus Martin Sagaste-Cruz knew that. And he knew the reservation's isolation would be perfect for his business.
Authorities learned of the Sagaste-Cruz drug ring back in 1997. Sagaste-Cruz and his Mexican gang had already been selling around Indian reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska.
But it was an article in The Denver Post that changed the way they did business. The story talked about how a Nebraska liquor store near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota did millions of dollars in business. Sales were especially high immediately after Indians received their per capita checks — their share of their tribe's income.
Sagaste-Cruz figured if there were already so many Indians addicted to alcohol, it would be easy enough to addict them to methamphetamine.
So around 2000, the Mexicans moved in and near Wind River Reservation.
"They came to a place where people don't have anything," said Frances Monroe, who works in the Northern Arapaho Child Protection Services office.
They started with free meth samples. The men pursued Indian women, providing them with meth even as they romanced them and fathered their children. Eventually, the women needed to support their habit, so they became dealers, too — and they used free samples to recruit new customers.
It was all part of the plan.
For the next four years, the gang sold pounds and pounds of meth, much of it 98 percent pure. The drugs came from Mexico, then on to Los Angeles; Ogden, Utah (where Sagaste-Cruz lived); and finally Wyoming, where gang members had a handful of local distributors, each with their own customer base.
Customers became dealers and recruiters, and their customers did the same.
Before, meth was barely mentioned on the reservation. Police reported only sporadic arrests.
But now the reservation was saturated with it. Crime soared. From 2003 to 2006, cases of child neglect increased 131 percent. Drug possession was up 163 percent; spousal abuse rose 218 percent.
The Wind River reservation is not alone. The Bureau of Indian Affairs found that methamphetamine was listed as the greatest threat to Indian communities by police departments.
Mexican drug cartels take advantage of the often complicated law enforcement jurisdictions in Indian Country. Isolated communities are hit the hardest, and sometimes even tribal leaders are not immune, said Heather Dawn Thompson, director of government affairs for the National Congress of American Indians.
Here on the Wind River, a tribal judge, Lynda Munnell-Noah, was arrested in a 2005 drug ring bust and accused of trying to assault and murder a Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement officer.
Resources are few, and most reservations don't have treatment centers. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of methamphetamine contacts in Indian Health Services facilities increased by almost 250 percent.
"Even if we arrest people for use or sale, there's almost nothing to do with them in order to help them recover," Thompson said. "Where do you go and how do you pay for it?"
In his 2008 budget, President Bush proposed a $16 million increase in law enforcement funding in Indian Country to help combat methamphetamine, a godsend to police departments like Wind River's, which has only 10 police officers.
"The heartbreaking part of it is, it's had this absolutely devastating effect on our community," Thompson said. "I have tribal leaders coming to my office all the time just crying. I mean, how do you fight this? How do you function as a government when 30 percent of your tribal employees are now using meth?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Native American and Alaskan women are suffering rates of rape and sexual violence nearly three times higher than the US national average, Amnesty says in a new study released Tuesday.
The human rights watchdog said a complex maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions often allowed men to rape with impunity, creating a vicious cycle that emboldened rapists and led to more attacks.
The study cited Justice Department figures which indicated that American Indian and Alaska Native women were 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than women in the United States in general.
The figures said more than one in three Native women would be raped in their lifetime, although that figure may in fact be substantially higher because of a traditional reluctance to report sex crimes.
"Native women are brutalized at an alarming rate, and the United States government, a purported champion of women's rights, is unfortunately contributing to the problem," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
"It is disgraceful that such abuse even exists today. Without immediate action, an already abysmal and outrageous situation for women could spiral even further out of control."
The Amnesty report "Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women From Sexual Violence in the USA" said many rape investigations stalled as officers tried to establish who the investigating authority was.
A dearth of trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners at Indian Health Service facilities also meant Native Women do not get timely responses from police and sometimes never received basic forensic medical examinations.
Amnesty accused the US government of undermining tribal justice systems by consistent under-funding.
It cited the example of the 2.3 million acre Standing Rock Sioux Reservation spread across North and South Dakota which occasionally has only one police officer on duty to cover the entire region.
Amnesty said women reporting rape or sex crimes in Standing Rock often had to wait hours or days before receiving a response from police.
Alaska was the rape capital of the United States, Amnesty said citing FBI statistics. Between 2000 and 2003, one study found that native Alaskan women in Anchorage were roughly 10 times more likely to be raped than other women in the city.
To tackle the problem, Amnesty called on Congress to increase funding to the Indian Health Service in order to train and employ more nurses qualified to examine victims of sex attacks.
Amnesty also demanded the federal government provide necessary funding for police forces on Indian reservations and in Alaskan Native villages.
|
|
| (760 Reads) |
comments?   |
|
|
|
black elk
Posted by: sonofthebear on Thursday, July 22, 2004 - 12:01 AM |
|
|
In Memory
For Our Uncle, Wallace Black Elk
By Carter Camp
January 28, 2004
My Relations;
Uncle Wallace Black Elk has gone to join his relatives in the far country. So at this sad time for my Black Elk relatives I want to send them my condolences on behalf of the warrior society of the ION (the Independant Oglala Nation of Wounded Knee). As people around the world mourn him as a healer and kind medicine man who served and doctored all who came to him, I would like to remember him and my Auntie Grace Black Elk as the special caretakers of all us who fought at Wounded Knee. I want to acknowledge how bravely he stood for his people and how well he served those us who were risking their lives in that sacred place. I say this on behalf of the warriors who know and I say this to all who would understand a traditional man of the People. Black Elk.
|
|
|
|
|
|