Kathy Dobie
Harper's Magazine

Citation
After spending months winning their trust, Kathy Dobie convinced women on the Standing Rock reservation straddling North and South Dakota to tell her their stories. They re counted the sexual abuse they had suffered on the reservation and the indifference and intimidation they faced from the police, the courts, and other government authorities. Supported by The Investig ative Fund at The Nation Institute, Dobie wrote an article for Harper's Magazine that vividly portrays the consequences of an atmosphere of social stigma, inadequate policing, and a broken legal syst em - a system weakened by divisions between federal and tribal law. "Every citizen of Standing Rock was a teacher," Dobie said later. "I just had to stick around and listen."

Excerpt
Tiny Little Laws
February 2011

My second day on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas, an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent a memo to all its law enforcement employees forbidding them to talk to me. One of those officers working the jail at Fort Yates, North Dakota, walked into a tribal judge's office, and throwing the memo down, said, "Can you believe this shit?" Since I was on the reservation to write about crime - sexual assault and rape, in particular, and how often these crimes go unreported when they take place on tribal land - I had naturally hoped to speak to the police. But after politely declining to be interviewed, Standing Rock's police chief, Michael Hayes, referred me to Elmer Four Dance, who, as the BIA's special agent in charge of District 1 - which serves fifty-two tribes in the states of South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa - was the man who had issued the memo from his office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, 150 miles away.
"Who gave you permission to come here and talk to people without getting permission?" Four Dance asked me when I reached him by phone. He said I had to make a formal request in writing, which I emailed to him immediately. He promised to get back to me shortly. "Don't call me, I'll call you," he said. And that was the last I heard from him.
"Just keep digging, keep asking questions," a former police officer I'll call Tom, who lives on Standing Rock, urged me a few days later. In his forties, with short dark hair, a long tapered mustache, and watchful eyes, he had been born and raised on the reservation, and as a young teenager he had watched a group of older guys rape a drunken, unconscious woman at a house party in Fort Yates. After which, he stumbled outside to the yard and vomited on the lawn. "People are just aching to tell somebody, anybody," he said. "Even the people who aren't supposed to tell." And then he told me that he, too, had been sexually assaulted, when he was a young boy. "People are tired of this."
For decades the people of Standing Rock have been plagued by sexual violence, inadequate police protection, and an ineffectual legal system that allows rapists and child molesters to go unpunished, free to commit the same crimes again and again. Complain as they might - and many women's advocates, social workers, and ordinary citizens have complained - no one listened until Amnesty International ("that white group," is how one embittered Sioux activist described them) published a report in 2007 titled "Maze of Injustice: the failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA." The report was issued after two years of research in Oklahoma, Alaska, and on the Standing Rock Reservation. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, almost two thirds of Native American and native Alaskan women have been physically assaulted, most often by an intimate partner. They are nearly three times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than other American women, and the assaults are more violent, more likely to require medical care. On many reservations, women have given up on the idea of justice and have come to consider sexual assault as just another part of their rough lot.


Biography
Kathy Dobie

Kathy Dobie writes for Harper's, GQ, The Nation and O magazine. Her memoir, "The Only Girl in the Car" was published by Dial Press. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Awards for her GQ story on a Vietnam War veteran's mental breakdown on the day the United States invaded Iraq. Dobie lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.


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Tiny Little Laws