A trail of tears: the link between missing and murdered Aboriginal women and the uptick in missing black and brown girls
CW: rape, murder
Only recently have the connections been made between missing First Nations women and girls in Canada and the United States, linking their disappearances to “man camps,” a term that describes lodging for tar sands workers. As of 2014, approximately 64,000 women are currently missing in the United States.
For one, neither the Canadian nor the United States governments give a damn about what happens to us. If a police officer kills one of us, or “pimps” us, it’s all the same; if we are the victims of intimate partner violence, it’s our fault. Our black and brown bodies will either come under fire and be tried as criminals postmortem, or we will be punished for attempting to find a shred of justice against the brutality committed against us on a daily basis. Victim blaming is part of the fabric of our supposed justice system, and victims of domestic abuse do not report their abusers for a myriad of reasons, one of them being the fear of retribution.
We are trafficked because no one cares about us - one missing black girl in D.C. or a missing Aboriginal woman in Alberta is all the same.
The state protects our oppressors. They’ve already institutionalized our oppression, so what else is left? Before we make any attempts to scratch the surface on this proverbial question, let’s take a closer look at the phenomena linking the oil extraction industry and missing Aboriginal women.
Oil extraction in Alberta is a multi-billion dollar industry operating over 143 kilometers of open pits and 4,000 kilometers of bitumen in the north. Oil production is lucrative and essential to the Canadian economy as it contributes to overall GDP and provides employment as well as energy exports. In the same vein, adverse environmental effects may result from oil extraction including “limited social tolerance at local to international levels for externalities of oil sand production; water demands are greater than its availability; limited natural gas supplies for oil processing leading to proposals for hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors to be constructed; difficulties in reclaiming sufficient habitat area to replace those lost.” (Lee Foote, 2012 ) There are approximately 840 billion liters of toxic byproducts held in reservoirs without any means to purify the water supply, and these toxins leak into neighboring bodies of land and water. Wetland reclamation would cost energy companies anywhere from $4 to $13 billion, or 6% of their overall profits.
Indigenous people living on reserves close to tar sands plants in Alberta are residing downstream from tailing ponds, or dwelling on land slated to accommodate government pipelines. Their battles are against soaring rates of cancer, and against a government that is constantly attempting to push them farther off of their land for the purpose of extraction and exploration. The northern Alberta communities of Fort Chipewyan and Fort MacKay, are fighting to stop the pollution and destruction of their homes. Some are deriving what benefit they can from jobs in the tar sands industry, and others are leaving their reserves with little or no money to attempt a better life in Edmonton, Calgary, or Fort McMurray.
Alberta’s “successful” tar sands economy has created a severe lack of affordable housing, transitional housing and shelter spaces, particularly for women. “Unequal wages, gender discrimination and sexual harassment are all significant deterrents. Those profiting most from the oil and gas workforce are predominantly male; current male-female ratios are 79 to 21 per cent for geoscientists and 96 to four per cent for trades.” (Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, 2010) Under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s conservative government, cuts to legal aid and income assistance, the closure of women’s centers, political assaults on women’s advocacy and support services, a lack of childcare support, cuts to welfare and changes to eligibility for welfare, the rising cost of living, and low-income work all contribute heavily to the significant disadvantage that many First Nations women face. The BC Human Rights Commission and Ministry of Women’s Equality, both considered tools to fight discrimination, had also been eliminated.
Fort McMurray, an oil town in Alberta, has nothing short of a housing crisis. Because women’s wages are unequal, it makes it exceedingly difficult to be able to afford rents. Shelters in this town do not accept minors, so they are forced to exchange their labor via sex work - which is illegal in Canada - in order to have a place to sleep for the night. For women who find housing within the shelter system, there is no transitional or supportive housing programs for them. This also makes the prospect of sex work for housing an alternate solution, thus increasing the chances of their becoming victims to violent crimes.
There are links between the presence of the tar sands industry and heightened rates of missing and murdered Indigenous two-spirits, women, and girls. These attacks are one feature of an increase in rates of sexual, domestic, family, homophobic, and transphobic violence in northern Alberta, where the male-dominated oil extraction industry has the strongest foothold.
Because the Canadian government has refused to do thorough enough investigations in Alberta, the case in Montana and North Dakota’s Bakken tar sands project in Fort Berthold will be examined.
In 1978, the Supreme Court case Oliphant v. Suquamish stripped tribes of the right to arrest and prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on Indian land. If both victim and perpetrator are non-Indian, a county or state officer must make the arrest. If the perpetrator is non-Indian and the victim an enrolled member, only a federally certified agent has that right. If the opposite is true, a tribal officer can make the arrest, but the case still goes to federal court. Even if both parties are tribal members, a U.S. attorney often assumes the case, since tribal courts lack the authority to sentence defendants to more than three years in prison. The harshest enforcement tool a tribal officer can legally wield over a non-Indian is a traffic ticket.
In 2011, the U.S. Justice Department did not prosecute 65 percent of rape cases reported on reservations. According to department records, one in three Native American women are raped during their lifetimes — two-and-a-half times the likelihood for an average American woman — and in 86 percent of these cases, the assailant is non-Indian.
The Violence Against Women Act has a provision for the prosecution of non-Natives in tribal court, but it only deals with non-natives accused of intimate partner violence and also requires federal funding. Rick Ruddell, a professor at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, studies the relationship between crime and boomtowns. His team found an 18.4 percent increase in violent crime during the post-boom years in oil producing counties. Those counties also reported 24.6 percent more property crimes. A separate study in 2014 by Old Dominion University researcher Timothy Komarek found that rates of rape and violent assault jumped 30 percent in Pennsylvania fracking boomtowns.
North Dakota’s Uniform Crime Report shows that violent crime has increased 7.2 percent, while 243 reported rapes occurred in 2012 — an increase from 207 in 2011. 12 of the state’s top oil-producing counties accounted for much of that crime. The cause for this is the camps of thousands of male workers who have come to their territory to profit from the Bakken oil boom. According to The Atlantic, “in 2012, the tribal police department reported more murders, fatal accidents, sexual assaults, domestic disputes, drug busts, gun threats, and human trafficking cases than in any year before. The surrounding counties offer similar reports. But there is one essential difference between Fort Berthold and the rest of North Dakota: The reservation’s population has more than doubled with an influx of non-Indian oil workers — over whom the tribe has little legal control. With former president Barack Obama striking down the Keystone XL project, and current president Donald Trump’s subsequent approval to restart it, the fate of First Nations people in the United States and Canada is in the balance.
In a report from February 2017, data gathered from the National Human Trafficking Hotline shows the number of reported human trafficking cases in South Dakota increased from 14 in 2015 to 19 in 2016. If you transpose the map of sex trafficking hot spots over where oil extraction projects are present, you will find that they happen to be very close to man camps and indigenous reservations. The booming oil extraction industry indeed has a hand in the disappearance of First Nations women and girls.
The summer of 2016 was a terrifying time, as 12 teenaged Bronx girls had gone missing. As a Bronx native and resident, the story of Maylin Reynoso has been a major eye opener — Maylin’s disappearance did not lead to any citywide amber alerts or major media coverage. Because of overall negligence, her friends and family took to social media, posting homemade missing signs in subway stations asking anyone with information on Maylin to come forward. When Reynoso’s body was found in the Harlem River, NYPD’s 32nd precinct did not inform her family that they found her until a week later. This comes at the same time as Karina Vetrano’s body was found in Queens. The media coverage for Vetrano was overwhelming; her story is still being talked about almost a year later. Reynoso’s case remains unsolved, but the little bit of coverage given to her story alluded to her mental illness, almost as to erase her or blame her for her death.
Similar to Canada’s negligence on following up with cases of missing and murdered First Nations women, D.C.’s police force has exemplified similar patterns of negligence. Tina Frundt, the founder of Courtney’s House, says statistics regarding sex trafficking are not being coded properly. Children that often go missing are falsely categorized as runaways, but no distinctions are made between family-controlled sex trafficking, or trafficking from pimps and gangs. These “runaways” are charged with abscondence.
D.C. residents have taken to social media, specifically Twitter, to begin a conversation around what the Metropolitan Police Department calls an “anomaly.” As of February, there are at least 25 missing Black and Latina girls in the DC area. Since the beginning of 2017, the number skyrockets to approximately 500 missing children. In the Metropolitan Police Department’s negligence, one of their brilliant tips to young girls is to “stay home” in order to avoid being trafficked. Will this bootstraps rhetoric solve the disappearance of girls like Angel Burl, Unique Lucas, or Demetria Carthens, or will it further pathologize black and brown youth from living their every day lives? D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser claims there is no evidence to suggest an increase of missing people. Dericca Wilson, co-founder of Black & Missing Foundation, expresses concern on these missing cases as D.C. is a historical hotbed for human trafficking.
With D.C.’s state officials issuing such damning rhetoric, it comes as no surprise that the #MissingDCgirls contains thousands of tweets pinpointing the names and ages of girls gone missing as well as their last known whereabouts.
D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department’s neglect in finding girls that have been literally plucked off the street, the NYPD that responded poorly to the disappearance of Maylin Reynoso, and Canada’s overarching decades’ worth of utter neglect in the continuation of missing and murdered First Nations girls and women are all part of an ongoing campaign to allow for the continued genocide of people of color. Blatant racism and stereotyping femininity, whether it is the idea that Indigenous women are all “squaws” or that Black and Latina women are overtly sexual allows for violence to be perpetuated and the perpetrators to be let off the hook with a warning, or never prosecuted for their crimes against us.
White women receive amber alerts and plenty of media coverage. Without community outcry and the power of social media, the rest of us will be hung to dry, and our stories ignored, time and time again.
