Cruel U.S. budget cuts (sequester) will result in increased homelessness, devastating lack of educational opportunities and jobs, and increased prostitution of Native American young women.
Byron Dorgan’s eloquent appeal for holding “a series of investigative hearings on our unfulfilled treaties with American Indians. Add up the broken promises, make an accounting of the underfunding, all of it, and then work with tribes to develop a plan to make it right. In the meantime, we must exempt Indian country from sequestration — right now” is absolutely correct.
As Dorgan also wrote, “I met a 12-year-old homeless girl at the [Pine Ridge Reservation’s] emergency youth shelter. Her mother is dead. She doesn’t know the identity of her father. She’s been in multiple foster homes and been repeatedly sexually abused. She found safety in the shelter, but its funding is being cut because of sequestration — an indiscriminate budget ax, I might add, that was thought of as so unconscionable when I was in the Senate that it would never have been seriously considered.” Read Dorgan’s op-ed here.
Those of us at Prostitution Research & Education would add that the harmful effects of colonization, broken treaties, lack of land, attacks on cultures and attempted genocide – all of these contribute today to the extremely high rates of Native young women trafficked into prostitution today. Read a three-year research study about the prostitution and trafficking of 105 Native Women in Minnesota here.
Agencies offering support, resources, and shelter for Native American women in Minnesota prostitution