On the bright side, there will be a lot less raping going on
In addition to the environmental impacts, oil extraction projects can have devastating social consequences. The North Dakota oil boom has attracted thousands of workers ready to take advantage of some of the highest employment rates in the nation. In order to house this new and semi-transient workforce — workers
often work 12 hours days for two week stretches — company housing units have sprung up. These are huge swaths of land covered with trailers, often without running water or electricity, and populated almost entirely by men. They’ve become known as “man camps.”
This enormous influx of non-Native men — who are often inexperienced workers putting in dangerously long hours at risky jobs — has lead to a horrifying increase in violence against Native women. Nationally, Native American women experience sexual violence at a rate that is 2.5 times that of any other women;
eighty-six percent of the time, their assailants are non-native. But North Dakota now has the eighth highest incidence of rape in the country, and to read
accounts from Fort Berthold residents, sexual violence is becoming increasingly normalized.
This is particularly problematic given that up until this year, Native Americans
could not arrest or prosecute non-Natives who committed crimes on tribal land. Only a federally certified agent could arrest a non-Native person who committed a crime against a Native person, which too often meant that rapists and abusers simply went unpunished. In 2011, only
65 percent of rapes reported on reservations were prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department.
However, in April of this year the newly reauthorized
Violence Against Women Act went into effect, allowing tribal courts to investigate non-Native men who abuse Native women on reservations. This is a big step towards justice, but rape and intimate partner violence continue to be underreported, a fact which is compounded on rural reservations with under-resourced tribal law enforcement.
