WASHINGTON – Meeting March 3 at the National Congress of American Indians Executive Council Winter Session, members of the NCAI Task Force on Violence Against Native Women heard and discussed ambiguous news on issues that have gone somewhat awry after the good feelings that greeted them on first arrival.
Lorraine Edmo, a deputy director in the Justice Department;s Office on Violence Against Women, revealed that a study to establish baseline data on violence rates against Native women, called for within two years by the Violence Against Women Act of 2005, has not been started yet and may not be completed for eight to 10 years, in the estimation of Christine Crossland at the National Institute of Justice, another DoJ branch that is conducting the baseline data project. Crossland did not respond to requests for comment.
Apprised that congressional funding decisions can be expected to take their cue from such studies, Edmo said smaller separate studies may be broken out from the larger one for earlier release. These smaller studies have not been prioritized yet, she added. An advisory committee on the study is close to being announced, she said. Congress has appropriated $940,000 for the study.
More controversial for the two dozen or so task force meeting participants was another $940,000 appropriation, intended for the establishment of a VAWA tribal registry of sex offenders. But since the passage of VAWA, Congress has enacted the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, authorizing the creation of a national sex offender registry. Over the objection of every participant who addressed the issue March 3, the $940,000 appropriation is being routed to the national – not the tribal – registry.
”This was not a good idea,” said Juana Majel, recording secretary of NCAI. She warned that Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., major advocates of funding for the tribal sex offender and order of protection registry in a straitened national budget, will not be happy to see what became of it.
Rosebud Sioux Tribe council member Robert Moore addressed the priority consideration of a myriad of complex issues the routing decision gave rise to: the national registry contemplated in VAWA ”will lose its tribal identity” under Adam Walsh Act auspices, resulting in delays and inaccuracies that could endanger Native women.
As NCAI expressed it in a publication on VAWA, ”The administrative barriers preventing Indian tribes from entering and accessing information are based in the design of the national registries.”
Leslie Hagen, of the DoJ Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking Office, said that once 198 tribes agreed to operate their own programs under the Adam Walsh Act, they became liable to severe penalties for not making deadlines. ”There is a real pressure with time.”
Terri Henry of Clan Star Inc., a Native women leadership project in Cherokee, N.C., argued that most of those 198 tribes were trying to protect their sovereignty, as states would have implemented the Adam Walsh Act registry provisions for them otherwise.
”What I am trying to do is take a horrible situation for everyone and come up with a best solution,” Hagen said. The decision to channel the $940,000 tribal registry appropriation into the Adam Walsh Act national registry was never ”a way to steal money,” she added. It was a matter of maximizing resources.
Hagen said that as matters stand now, $300,000 of the appropriation will go to software, such as a searchable sex offender e-mail database and secure e-mail communications networks. The rest will go for instructional CDs and videotapes.