Photos by
Hugh Carey
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Information
Name: Urban
Tribe: Various
American Indian
population:
67,991 (statewide)
Percent of MT
population: 6.2%
Percent living
off reservations: 35%
Beyond Reach
The Crow Reservation's lack of an extradition agreement with the state turns its invisible border into a concrete issue.
Written by Nate Rott
Lucas Deputee stepped out of the car into the warm July night. He shut the passenger side door and stood alone in the moonlit silver sage bordering the road as the roar of the car engine faded into the distance.
A few feet behind him, silhouetted by the stars, was a large rectangular sign: "Welcome to Crow Country."
For Deputee, the sign read: "Safe."
As he waited for another car to pick him up and take him further south, further into his sanctuary, he thought about what had happened.
He remembered the beer-fueled argument. He remembered snapping, acting, he says, "out of built-in anger and depression." He remembered threatening the kids and hitting his girlfriend—over and over. He remembered being shaken, scared and drunk.
He also remembered knowing immediately what to do.
"I didn't think, I just reacted," he says. "The first thing that came to my mind was 'hit the reservation.' As soon as I hit it, I knew I was safe."
Deputee, 28, quickly fled a Hardin trailer park and called one of his friends, who gave him a ride. He was dropped off just beyond the sign delineating the reservation.
He had made it inside the border of his home, his heritage, but also what would be his self-imposed prison for the next nine months – the Crow Reservation of southcentral Montana.
Deputee, an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke Nation (mistranslated by settlers to become the Crow Tribe), knew that by crossing the physically invisible, but legally impermeable line between Big Horn County and the Crow Reservation, Montana state law enforcement couldn't touch him. On the reservation, that jurisdictional distinction is common knowledge.
As David Sibley, Big Horn County's chief deputy attorney, puts it, "It's like a game, and everyone knows what the rules are."
Each of the seven Indian reservations in Montana has limited sovereignty and partial governing powers agreed to by treaty with the federal government. The Crow and Blackfeet reservations are the only two without state extradition agreements, so on those reservations, state-issued arrest warrants for misdemeanors or felonies aren't enforced.
For alleged criminals—both Indian and non-Indian—this provides a vehicle to effectively escape the law. "It's like a bubble, like you got a shield around you," Deputee says.
Within 36 hours of the beating, on July 16, 2007, Big Horn County issued a warrant for Deputee's arrest based on statements gathered from witnesses and the victim, who spent a week in the hospital. Deputee was accused of aggravated assault, a felony under state and federal laws. But he was untouchable on the reservation. The state's warrant was useless until Deputee crossed that line. All Montana authorities can do is issue a warrant and wait for the accused to enter their jurisdiction.
"The result is that we have any given number of warrants at any given time," Sibley says. "We know where they are, we know we can't get them, and they certainly know we can't. They are bulletproof.
"If you're a federally recognized tribal member on the Crow Reservation, you may as well—for our practical purposes—be in Brazil."
Diane Cabrera, a Crow tribal prosecutor, resents that idea.
"We don't want to be perceived as a safe harbor for any type of criminal," Cabrera says from behind a paper-laden desk. Just outside of her office a ceiling-high wall of file cabinets testifies to the extensive jurisdictional and legal resources Cabrera and her fellow legal counselors need to complete their daily work.
The issue of extradition is one that Cabrera tried to address at the beginning of her tenure as a prosecutor, in December 2007. During the Crow Legislature's 2008 session, she proposed what she calls a "carefully drafted" bill, which would establish an extradition agreement with the state while maintaining tribal sovereignty.