How to tackle crime in Indian Country? Empower tribal justice, ex-Justice Department official says
Public safety statistics reflect the serious challenges. Native Americans and Alaska Natives are more than twice as likely to be victims of a violent crime, and Native American women are at least two times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted compared with others.
For Toulou, a descendant of the Washington state-based Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, part of addressing those grim realities is expanding the power of tribal justice systems.
Tribes had been barred, for example, from prosecuting non-Natives under a 1978 Supreme Court decision, even if the crime happened on reservations, making it harder to seek justice in many cases. That changed somewhat in 2013 with a federal law that allows tribes to prosecute non-Natives in a limited set of domestic violence cases. The authority was expanded in 2022 to include cases such as violence against children and stalking.
