Information


Name: Northern Cheyenne

Tribe: Cheyenne

Population: 4,470

Native: 91%

Counties: Rosebud
Big Horn

One morning he came home after being out drinking all night and beat Lei worse than he ever had before. He left after that, driving away drunk.

Lei went to Healing Hearts, and after getting their advice, she reported her husband to police.

But her husband, who worked at the chief tribal prosecutor's office, found out what she had done. In turn, he reported that Lei had been abusing him.

The two charges contradicted each other, so the prosecutor—Lei's husband's boss—dropped them both.

Glenn Littlebird, the current chief prosecutor in Lame Deer, says that behavior isn't tolerated any longer.

"Something like that will never happen while I work here," he says. "It may have happened, but it will never happen again."

Johanna Red Neck was taken away from her abusive mother and sent to a Catholic boarding school when she was 4 years old. They gave her the name Doreen and told her never to speak Cheyenne again.

And while she was there, she never did.

She saw the other children punching their fists against a wall until their knuckles bled, punishment for not using English. And if their hands didn't bleed, the nuns would scrape them against the wall until they did, she says.

When she was there, she says a Catholic priest used to lead her down stairs to someplace dark. He sexually abused her, but Red Neck doesn't recall if she was raped. She blocked everything from her mind until all that remains in her memory is walking down those stairs. The priest continued to abuse her until she was a teenager, she says.

She escaped at age 17, when she married.

"Then it started with my husband," Red Neck says, wiping away a tear.

To Red Neck, love was a dirty thing—something that drained away life's color.

From the age of 5 to nearly 40, Red Neck was abused by different men and felt so worthless she couldn't stand to see herself in a mirror.

For decades, Red Neck saw only gray. She stared past green grass and blue skies, unable to focus on anything but the abuse.

Red Neck and her husband were alcoholics, and things got the worst when they drank. He'd call her names, or beat her. He once kicked Red Neck in the head so hard that she nearly died from blood loss.

Still, she never left him.

"I had an obligation because of my children," Red Neck says. "They were younger and I wanted them to have a mom and a dad."

Red Neck was abused physically and emotionally, but it was the sexual abuse that tore her down the most—the times when she said no and he kept going.

Red Neck became the mother of seven children, and her body was tired. She didn't want to carry another child, so she was surgically sterilized. She says her husband didn't speak to her for an entire year.

Red Neck didn't know that domestic violence could be reported as a crime.

"I didn't know it could be done like that," she says. "More women need to know about the resources that can help them."

Red Neck is 56 years old and has been divorced for 20. White hair frames her round face, on which the lines run deep.

Like her mother, Red Neck was an abused woman. And like her mother, Red Neck became an abuser.

If Red Neck was mad, her kids knew it by the way she came down the long driveway to their house.