*** trafficking reaches ?crisis? on*Native American reservation
 

POPLAR, Montana: Life on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in **rthern Montana has all the ingredients for *** trafficking - poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence, topped with an epidemic of crystal meth addiction.

Drug users are selling their babies, daughters and sisters for the potent stimulant that is ravaging Native American communities such as the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes living on the desolate plains of Fort Peck, say community leaders, experts and federal authorities.

"We’re in crisis mode," said Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure.

"We have mothers giving their children away for ***ual favours for *****.

We have teenagers and young girls giving away ***ual favours for *****."

** numbers record specific rates of local *** trafficking, which can often be buried in crimes of ***ual assault, abuse, prostitution, abandonment or kidnapping.

But it is a crime, poorly documented and fuelled by drug abuse, plaguing Indian reservations across the United States.

The rate of meth use among American Indians is the highest of any ethnicity in the country and more than twice as high as any other group, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

The number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report.

On Fort Peck, a reservation of some 10,000 people, six newborn babies tested positive for meth in just two weeks in April and were taken to a hospital 300 miles away, said Howard Bemer, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent for Fort Peck.

Meth use and other crime exploded with the tapping of reserves in the Bakken oil fields to the east and south of the reservation in the last decade.

The boom brought tens of thousands of workers, flush with cash, to the region.

With the drop in world oil prices, many of those workers are gone but the crime has **t, said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

"The boom brought problems that don’t disappear when the boom disappears," she said.

The drug trade helps incite *** trafficking, as people exchange themselves, family members or friends to get high, she said.

"If someone is addicted to meth, they’re **t in their right mind.

It is much easier to get them to do things that they never would have done if they weren’t addicted," she said at a recent anti-trafficking conference in Poplar, the reservation’s tribal headquarters.

Drug debt is a forceful driver of trafficking, and dealers threaten users to pay up by any means, said Sgt.

Grant Snyder, a trafficking investigator with the Minneapolis Police Department.

"Maybe it’s your 12-year-old daughter, maybe it’s your 5-year-old daughter," he said.

A harrowing number of victims are trafficked by their own family members.

"Traffickers are **t just scary men who drive around in Cadillacs in their leather trench coats," said Healey.

"A trafficker can be a parent or guardian. A trafficker can be an aunt or an uncle or it can be a boyfriend or a**ther friend."

The often close relationships between abuser and abused present a web of problems such as forcing victims to leave home for their protection, experts said.

Victims may fear the community and authorities won’t believe them and will instead defend the trafficker, said an Indian Health Service social worker who did **t want to be identified.

"**body wants to go after a family member," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

On the bleak, windswept reservation along the Missouri River just 20 miles from the Canadian border, more than half the children live in poverty and jobs are scarce.

Most people work in ranching, mining and farming, but one in three is unemployed.

The largest communities are Wolf Point and Poplar, rundown hamlets that are little more than crossroads with a smattering of stores, gas stations, bars and fewer than 4,000 residents between them.

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