Information


Name: Northern Cheyenne

Tribe: Cheyenne

Population: 4,470

Native: 91%

Counties: Rosebud
Big Horn

"I think I'm just as good as anyone now," she says. "Before, I felt I was beneath everyone. I don't have to be a doormat or a punching bag for anyone."

Police officers may have not helped Boushie in the past, but Hawkan Haakanson, the acting police chief with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, says things like that don't happen now.

"It just doesn't happen a whole lot that I'm aware of," he says.

Haakanson, who's been the police chief for about eight months, says he's gotten as many as four calls a day from people reporting domestic violence. That's especially true during holidays and the winter months. Still, he says they always follow up on cases and he's never seen a case where family ties kept an abuser out of jail.

August "Tiger" Scalpcane knew people would think he was a weak man if he took the job at Healing Hearts, a center for domestic abuse and sexual violence victims, but he did it anyway.

According to the American Indian Women's Chemical Health Project, three-fourths of Native American women have experienced some type of sexual assault in their lives. The statistic seems to hold true on the 694 square miles of the reservation east of Billings, but it wasn't always that way. Women were a sacred part of Northern Cheyenne history and tradition.

But for Scalpcane, fighting domestic abuse is a personal matter. Both of his sisters have been abused, as was his niece. So he helps victims find safe shelters, encourages them to leave their abuser and report him or her to the police.

Domestic abuse is "a cycle that I hope can be broken," he says. "That's what we're trying to do. That's why I put my best foot forward and hope others will follow in my footsteps."

But after one year at Healing Hearts, Scalpcane knows victims often don't listen to his advice. A victim is usually abused nine times before she leave her batterer, he says.

And the majority of women refuse to report the crime or cooperate with the chief prosecutor. Many women are afraid of reprisal, Scalpcane explains, and others can't afford to lose their household's only breadwinner.

"There's one million reasons," he says.

"And they're all good reasons when you're living it," adds Diane Spotted Elk, an advocate at Healing Hearts.

She knows from experience.

When he comes home, will he be drunk? Will he be angry? What if I say the wrong thing?

Nervous and afraid, Spotted Elk would wait for her husband to come through the door.

Maybe it would be a good day, and he'd just ignore her. Or maybe he'd come home and knock her around or slap her. If he was really mad, he might beat her with a metal hanger.

"He would snap at everything and anything, or nothing," Spotted Elk says. "I was not comfortable. Not ever comfortable."

There was always the fear that something would spark his anger, cause him to reel back and hit her. Spotted Elk felt like there was no one to turn to. He wouldn't let her have friends and she hadn't seen her family in two years. He wouldn't even let her walk to the corner store by herself.

"My self-esteem was really low," says Spotted Elk, a woman with curly black hair that's pulled back so tightly it looks straight. "I felt like I wasn't pretty enough."

But that was a long time ago. It's been 17 years since Spotted Elk was abused, and 17 years since she chased her husband with a knife and told him she was leaving.

"I would never allow no one to mistreat me in that manner again," she says.

It's the first time her voice has risen during her matter-of-fact account.

At Healing Hearts, Spotted Elk, 44, helps women who are abused and feel "worthless," the way she used to feel. She tells each of them to do something she was too afraid to do: report their abusers to the police.

It's advice that Karla Lei took.

"You're not gonna turn me in. You're too chicken," her husband, a 6-foot-tall, 300-pound man used to say, Lei remembers.

He was a controlling man, and didn't want Lei to see her friends or parents. He was abusive too, and sometimes he'd push her around or slap her.