In one case, a 14-year-old boy, high on methamphetamine, climbed through a bedroom window with two of his friends to rape his 13-year-old sister before hitting her in the head with a hatchet. She survived but was left with the wobbly motor skills of a toddler.
In another, drug dealers used a screwdriver to decapitate a “snitch” before turning on each other, with two of the killers shooting the third one in the head and burning his car.
“The stories are shocking,” said Amy Proctor, a criminal justice instructor at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah. She drove 10,000 miles crisscrossing the western United States to study the meth epidemic’s impact on the country’s Native American population. “It’s affecting tribes everywhere.”
Proctor concluded that drug cartels are specifically targeting Indian communities, singling them out as relatively easy places to do business. Poverty creates a sort of labor pool for cartels as people become desperate to make money. Rural isolation helps to keep non-tribal law enforcement away. And for many tribes, their own law enforcement lacks the manpower to cope with the cartels.
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“Isolation. Poverty. Lack of law enforcement,” Proctor said. “It’s the perfect storm for letting a drug cartel infiltrate a community.”
With many drugs, violence becomes an outgrowth of the black market as addicts rob and steal to support their habits and dealers resort to drastic measures to defend their turf, Proctor said. But with meth, violence seems to be “a direct result of the drug use itself,” she said.
“There’s a ripple effect, causing sex abuse and domestic abuse and all kinds of violent crimes,” said Proctor, who used federal grant funding to visit 10 tribes in five states, from Oklahoma to California, as part of her study. “Tribes all across the country are seeing the effects.”
Native Americans suffer higher rates of violent crime than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States, according to Proctor’s study. Per capita, American Indians are twice as likely as the general population to become victims of violent crime, according to Proctor’s analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey.
Despite the widespread problems, the research project ultimately made Proctor more optimistic about the future of Indian tribes and cultures.
“I saw a lot of people — especially young people — fighting hard every day to preserve their cultures and pass them on to the next generation,” she said. “It was the greatest experience of my life.”
