This story comes to you from Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. Sign up for Sahan’s free newsletter to receive more stories like this.
Shubhanjana Das
Sahan Journal
This summer, Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (MIWRC) opened a 24-unit Permanent Supportive Housing community on their property in the East Phillips and Ventura Village neighborhood of Minneapolis. Named Oshki-Gakeyaa, which means “New Way” in Ojibwe, its newly renovated apartments were instantly occupied by unhoused Native individuals or families.
Twenty of those units are for high-priority individuals as well as those experiencing long-term homelessness, while four units are reserved for people with disabilities. There is now a waitlist for the apartments, a sign of the deep and persistent demand for housing, especially as temperatures drop and tents reappear in the heart of Minneapolis’ Native community. Currently, a majority of these units are occupied by Native women.
This is the latest effort from the Native community to combat the disproportionate number of individuals and families from its community who are experiencing homelessness.
Minneapolis has been confronting an ongoing homelessness crisis, and Native Americans are overrepresented in the homeless population, despite making just 2 percent of the state’s population. Native women are especially vulnerable, and can face additional risks of being targeted if they are unhoused.
Homelessness and safety concerns of Native women have been two of the top concerns Ruth Buffalo has had to address this year at MIWRC, a nonprofit that offers holistic services to Native women and families that are rooted in American Indian traditions.
Buffalo said in early October, a group of three men and one woman from Oklahoma attempted to traffic Native women from the MIWRC grounds in the pretext of offering addiction treatment and shelter in San Francisco. MIWRC helped the victims report the incident to the Minneapolis Police Department.
This recent incident is only one of the many instances of unhoused Native women being accosted or harmed in some capacity, Buffalo said.
“For a number of reasons, our Native women are more susceptible to being unsheltered, whether [because] they were tricked into believing they were getting in a relationship with someone, or fell into active addiction and are stuck there,” she said.
Native Americans are 30 times more likely than white Minnesotans to experience homelessness. In 2023, they made up 20 percent of the state’s homeless population, according to a Wilder report, a disparity that was even more pronounced in the Twin Cities metro area. The report also found that 44 percent Native adults have been attacked or assaulted while homeless, compared to 33 percent of non-Native adults.
For Native American women, these disparities are even higher.
The Urban Indian Health Institute placed Minnesota among the top 10 U.S. states reporting the highest number of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls.
While specific, up-to-date comparative statistics are limited, existing research strongly indicates that Native women in Minnesota face disproportionately high risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking compared to their share of the population.
Allison Haro was homeless for over 10 years, living in encampments across the Twin Cities. “I was in survival mode,” she said. “Moving from place to place, you know, experiencing a lot of trauma. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get my next meal, or how I would stay warm through the winters, just trying to live for the next day.” During that time, Haro said she regularly saw people trying to prey on Native women and traffic them.
“There would be these random cars; they would try to pick up women in our community by offering them substances, a place to stay, or offering them food,” she said. “A lot of these traffickers know that a lot of these women who are in the streets and who are homeless, they know that they’re vulnerable, so they’re going to take every chance they get to try to pick up our women, especially our younger women.”
Now, she works at MIWRC as a sexual assault advocate. She said she wants to use her lived experience to offer Native women the space to speak up, one she didn’t have when she was homeless. “Our women, we always get put on the back burner,” said Haro. “Because we get treated so differently that we don’t get to express or even talk about how we’re feeling or what we’re going through.”
The high rate of assault that Native women experience is not treated as a crisis, said Travis Earth-Werner, CEO at the American Indian Community Development Corp, which offers sober and multifamily housing, along with a shelter and a drop-in center for unhoused community members. It’s “an afterthought,” he said.
Perpetrators feel a sense of immunity and victims go unacknowledged. “And when that’s the case, individuals feel like they can get away with so much more, and it’s an escalating behavior, which often goes to further violence,” he said.
A policy brief from the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center says that Indigenous survivors of violence face “unique intersection of housing instability and homelessness and domestic and sexual violence.”
Many Native American women experiencing homelessness become victims of violence and exploitation before and during their time without housing. A 2020 study by multiple Native organizations stated that 98 percent of the women interviewed that had been prostituted and sex trafficked were either currently experiencing or had experienced homelessness. Over half the Native women experiencing homelessness said that they stayed in an abusive situation because they had no other housing options, the same Wilder report found.
These numbers confirm a persistent crisis, both in Minnesota and nationally: that violence, in its many shapes and forms, against Native women is extremely common, and homelessness is often both a cause and effect of that.
“[Homelessness] creates a perfect storm for missing and murdered women,” said Guadalupe Lopez, director of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives office. “This is something that we have to keep within our scope at all times and within this office, because we know that that is a high indicator that that is where harm is caused.”
“It’s a huge risk factor in not only being sexually exploited and used in trafficking, but also going missing or being murdered,” she said.
Nicole Matthews, CEO at the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition said that homelessness is “a huge risk factor” and “critical” to the work that MIWSAC does in addressing sexual violence and sex trafficking of Native women.
‘Enmeshed in intergenerational trauma’
For the Native community, homelessness and violence are rooted in a long history of discrimination and unjust policies that produced this heightened vulnerability.
“We often talk about colonization as if it happened, you know, hundreds of years ago, and it’s kind of over now, and so everything is fine, but the impact is still very relevant today,” said Matthews.
Decades of federal policy that deliberately disrupted Native communities, through removal from their land, forced assimilation through boarding schools, relocation from reservations to cities, and even the forced sterilization of Native women, still reverberates today.
Amy Arndt was raised by a mother who was trafficked and raised in 16 different white foster homes. When she found herself in south Minneapolis surrounded by the Native community, she was around people grappling with addiction and became addicted herself. Arndt’s mother was raised by grandparents who were forced to go to American boarding schools.
“We’re still enmeshed in this intergenerational trauma,” said Arndt. “They came out [of boarding schools and foster homes]. They couldn’t handle it, they didn’t feel like they belonged to the family anymore. There’s sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional, mental abuse … They had so much trauma that they self-medicated.” This generational as well as historical trauma of the Native community causes a breakdown of family units, separating people from their relatives, Arndt said. “Our youth are so incredibly vulnerable.”
Now, as the director of Youth and Family Services at Ain Dah Yung Center, which offers shelter and housing for Native youth from ages 5 to 24, Arndt’s work is informed by her lived experiences. She said that over half the residents across its shelters are female presenting.
Culturally aware interventions
Apart from poverty, income disparity and lack of affordable housing, Native leaders in the community also point to ongoing systemic racism, discrimination, and institutional apathy as factors that have led to Native women developing deep-seated mistrust in non-Native governing bodies.
Native leaders in the community think a systemic change is required to address this issue at its roots: from culturally aware interventions to coordinated response systems.
Earth-Werner said that for social systems to respond better to unhoused Native women’s concerns, there needs to be accountability by identifying and punishing perpetrators of violence against Native women. He also stressed the importance of building a long-term approach through helping unhoused Native women develop skills, coping mechanisms and offering dedicated housing as they rebuild their lives.
And that needs to be a consolidated effort, which is missing, according to Lopez, of the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives office.
“The services don’t always talk to each other,” she said. “There’s big, huge cracks within the ways that systems might work or not work together. We don’t ask that we don’t always make a space and clear sacred, special space for the most impacted, and really listen and say, ‘What can we do?’”
Ain Dah Yung offers an example of what traditionally rooted interventions could look like. From sweat lodges to traditional healing and medicine, Arndt said that it helps bring the community together with “support and unconditional love.”
“We’re seeing increasing homelessness and an increase in the violence and exploitation,” said Matthews. “And sometimes I wonder, is it that we’re seeing more violence, or is it that we’re paying more attention? And I’m not sure. Maybe it’s both.”
Even as MIWRC supports the women living in Oshki-Gakeyaa through recovery, Buffalo says “it is only the beginning.”
“There’s a huge transition period that takes place and additional support is needed to assist their solid road to recovery and building a stronger path forward,” she said.