Information
Name: Northern Cheyenne
Tribe: Cheyenne
Population: 4,470
Native: 91%
Counties: Rosebud
Big Horn
Battling Back
Northern Cheyenne women—physically and emotionally scarred—rise from a debilitating cycle of domestic violence
Written by Carly Flandro
Scars cover Dee Dee Boushie's head, and she parts her thin, dyed-blonde hair to show them. She can't remember how she got them all, but says they're probably from glass bottles or frying pans—whatever her husband could grab first.
Sitting on the edge of her chair, 62-year-old Boushie stretches out her legs and pulls up the hem of her pants. A light pink scar on her right ankle marks where she was kicked with a brand-new pair of cowboy boots. She doesn't remember getting the scars on her left leg, but knows they're from her third husband.
He's the same man who broke a bottle over her head and then lunged at her with a piece of the broken glass, trying to slice her face open. Boushie blocked him with her left arm, which is still marred by a thin red line.
Farther up on Boushie's arm is a scar where she tried to cut open her vein and kill herself.
"I'm sitting here, a living, talking miracle," she says.
Boushie says she's been abused since she was 3 years old, but the men who have sexually abused her and tried to kill her have never been punished. Boushie reported her third husband to the police, but they didn't arrest him because they said it was a "family matter."
Boushie's one of several Indian women living in the town of Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation who volunteered to share their stories. They are women who have been smacked, thrown against walls and abused by men.
Their pasts vary, but one thing is the same: The men who hurt them have never spent more than a few days in jail.
Lame Deer is a one-stoplight town. Home to just more than 2,000 people in southeast Montana, it's a place where going to the grocery store often means running into a cousin, a place where people know each other by name. Sometimes, it's a place where husbands beat their wives. And when that happens, it can be a place where reporting a domestic violence crime is the same thing as asking a policeman to jail his cousin, brother, father or son.
That's why some women don't tell, and why when they do, their abuser often remains free.
He fractured her skull with a kerosene lamp and tried to run over her with his car.
He'd take her leg over his knee and try to break it like a piece of firewood. In one of the most painful beatings Boushie ever had, he hit her over and over again with a dog chain.
He was Boushie's third husband, and though all her husbands had been abusive, he was the worst.
"I thought I'd die in that marriage," she says. "I imagined myself—accepted myself—ending up in a coffin."
The day after their wedding, he broke Boushie's jaw with a folding chair and didn't take her to the hospital for 12 days. For nearly two weeks, Boushie was unable to eat.
After that, she tried to get help. She reported her husband to the police, but says they let him out of jail after a short time. Boushie says it was because people were afraid of him.
She reported her first husband to the police, too. They told her it was none of their business.
"Even if I was all beat up, it didn't matter. His uncle was a judge, and his brothers and cousins were all policemen," Boushie says. "I felt I could never get any kind of help."
After so much abuse, Boushie decided it wasn't worth it anymore, and repeatedly tried to kill herself. She took two boxes of rat poison, cut her arm open and overdosed on sleeping pills.
"Being a victim, you don't really care about your life," she says.
It's a perspective she learned early on. Boushie says she was 3 years old when a preacher abused her for the first time.
"He never raped me, but it almost happened at 14," she says. "That was the last time I'd let myself near him."
Boushie never told anybody about the sexual abuse because it wasn't something people talked about. It was filthy to speak of, dirty to put into words.
In 1992, at the age of 45, Boushie couldn't stand it any longer. She left her third husband and hasn't seen him since.
Sitting in her chair, she's finished her story. Her small dark eyes look out from sunken sockets slightly misshapen from the beatings.
But no tears blur her vision. She's married to her fourth husband now, a man she says has never mistreated her.