Why were so many Indigenous women wrongly convicted?

In the morning on February 18, 2022, Cassandra Black Elk, a 26-year-old Native woman in South Dakota, woke up to find her three-week-old daughter, Starlight, unresponsive in bed next to her. It was every mother's nightmare, but for Black Elk, that was just the beginning.

Within 10 minutes of arriving at the Black Elk home, the police began questioning her, asking her to tell them how she had harmed her baby. No one had hurt the baby, he told them. She had put the older two in her bed, fed the youngest a bottle, and then placed her next to her to sleep. He said when he woke up around six the next morning, Starlight was stiff and cold.

Not satisfied, the officers took Black Elk to the Bismark Police Department. The first interrogation there lasted a grueling three hours. Black Elk says police he bullies her, claiming that someone had done something to harm the star. They said there were bruises and injuries on the baby's body, even though the responding officers were not trained medical professionals and her body had not yet been examined.

Black Elk did not believe them and asked to see the autopsy report, but faced increasing pressure from the police. They threatened to take her other two other children away unless she confessed to harming Baby Starlight. She was eventually encouraged by her lawyer to plead guilty to felony child neglect so she could keep her children. He took the plea and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Despite her repeated requests, Black Elk still hadn't seen Starlight's autopsy. Her lawyer ignored her requests to obtain the report on why her baby had died. According to subsequent court documents, he told her, “We'll deal with it later.”

Through her grief, Black Elk says that this mistreatment by the authorities and her own attorney made her feel like no one cared that she was in pain. “I don't think it mattered to anyone how Starlight died,” he says.

It was only after Black Elk was convicted and behind bars that the final autopsy report on the baby was released to her. He determined what he had told everyone: that the cause of death was not abuse or neglect. Starlight had died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

For Indigenous women dealing with the systemic racism and sexism embedded in our social and legal systems, the results are often devastating. It is a crisis that I have encountered repeatedly in my work as a journalist, as well as a host for Lava for Good's Wrongful conviction podcast, that's how I came across Black Elk's story. In the United States, Indigenous women and girls are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than anyone else other ethnicities. A National Institute of Justice report found that more than four out of five Native Americans have experienced violence. According to the National Congress of American Indians, Native women are twice as likely to experience rape or sexual assault.

Despite being a minority of the overall population, indigenous women are also overrepresented in incarcerated population in the USand in Canada, they constitute almost half the female prison population. And further, approx 71 percent of women are exempt For the past three decades he's been in prison for crimes that never happened – just like Black Elk.

It is part of the overall system that has set up generations of Indigenous people for abuse and struggle. In the US and Canada, race-based segregation still remains in the form of “Indian reservations”.

Reservations were created when colonial governments forcibly removed indigenous people from their property and forced them to live within the confines of smaller government plots. But indigenous people were denied the right to own the land they lived on – an asset that could mean money and independence. This monetary exemption has led to the higher poverty rate of any racial group (Almost double the national average).

But this “foreignness” of the natives is not limited to reservations. For more than a century, Indigenous youth were removed from their families and sent to “residential schools.” The goal of these schools was forced to assimilate, with children – some as young as four – often stripped of their names, their long hair, their mother tongue and their culture.

Many children in these boarding schools experienced physical and sexual abuse. The last of the facilities closed in the late 1990s, and in the years since, mass graves of indigenous children have been discovered near residential school districts in US and Canada.

Odelia and Nerissa Quewezance, sisters from the Keeseekoose First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, were both forced to attend residential schools as children in the 70s and 80s. Psychological scars from childhood led them to seek relief through drugs and alcohol. For Nerissa, the scars are also physical – she has scoliosis of the spine due to severe beatings as a child at her home school.

The Quewezance sisters share Black Elk's experience of being wrongly accused and convicted of a crime they say they did not commit. In February 1993, they were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 70-year-old Anthony Dolff.

Odelia and Nerissa Quewezance were convicted, despite police saying who was the real attacker. They had a recorded confession from the women's cousin, Jason Keshane, who was 14 at the time. He even repeated the story on the witness stand. He said he and the sisters had been hanging out drinking with Dolff at the older man's house when Dolff propositioned the two young women.

An argument then broke out over some missing money, and Keshane confessed to murdering Dolff. His cousins ​​had played no part in the murder, he said.

Despite the police having this recorded statement, they interrogated the sisters under the lie that Keshane was also involved. According to court documents, the two young girls were held in police cells for five days in violation of a court order stating they could only be legally detained for 24 hours. They were challenged by a group of white, all male police officers without any lawyers. Despite recording equipment being readily available, the police failed – or chose not to – record any of the interviews. Feeling the heat, the sisters reportedly wrote confessions in the murder of Anthony Dolff. False confessions are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in homicide cases.

“These were big, burly, white men who were constantly being taken out of the cells and interrogated, put back in and interrogated again, day in and day out,” said Sister James Lockyer, Innocence's founding director, after the sentencing attorney. Canada. “The police knew what they wanted. They knew what they were doing. They had to get two girls to say things that somehow linked them to Mr. Dolph's murder … there's no doubt that scare tactics were used.”

Based on statements police claimed they made during those interviews, Odelia and Nerissa were convicted by an all-white jury a year later. Positioned to submit to authority, the Quewezance sisters are afraid to testify against the police at their trial. They were just 21 and 18, respectively, at the time of their convictions. For nearly 30 years, the two maintained their innocence.

Black Elk also refused to give up the fight for her freedom. Backed by two new lawyers and the North Innocence Project, Black Elk filed for post-conviction relief citing ineffective counsel and the findings of the autopsy report. A judge ordered her released pending a new trial.

On January 30, 2023, Judge Borgen granted Black Elk's motion to withdraw her plea, and nearly ten months later, the state moved to dismiss the charge on October 19, 2023, vacating her conviction. He was released from jail the next day. (In an emailed comment to Rolling Stone, Bismarck police noted that it's just their job to question suspects, but it's up to the court system to decide how that information is used. “What ultimately happens depends on criminal justice system In this case, it resulted in the charges being dismissed,” they wrote.

The Quewezance sisters are now out of prison, but their case is far from over. After nearly 30 years in custody, they were released on parole in March 2023. In ruling on his release, the judge cited time spent in residential schools and Gladue factors (challenges faced by Indigenous people, including discrimination, physical abuse, separation from culture or family, or drug and alcohol abuse).

As stories like these highlight the individual losses and tragedies created by systemic racism against Indigenous peoples, there is momentum for change. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland made history in 2021 when she became the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. That same year, he took immediate action—banning the derogatory word “squaw” from all federally owned lands and creating the Federal Indian Initiative to investigate abuse at former Native American residential schools.

Representative Sharice Davids, who was one of the first Native American women elected to the US Congress, championed the transformative legislation. In 2020, Davids, Haaland, Tom Cole and Markwayne Mullin (all members of federally recognized tribes), introduced and helped pass the No Invisible Act, a law to increase the focus on missing and murdered women—cases that often go beyond .

Haaland coordinated with Attorney General Merrick Garland to establish the Invisible Acts Commission, a unit that increases resources for survivors and victim's families and combats the epidemic of missing, murdered and human trafficking in Indian and Alaska.

It's this kind of incremental progress made by advocates and lawmakers that weaves a thread of hope through stories like that of Cassandra Black Elk and the Quewezance sisters. He promised that the journey of these women and countless others, while filled with pain and injustice, will not be in vain. Their experiences underscore the urgency of systemic reform.

Every single act of progress, whether it's a policy change, a legislative victory, or a wrongful conviction overturned, is a step toward a future where tragedies like these are historical footnotes, not present-day realities. It is incumbent upon all of us to be aware of these issues and support lawmakers and activists dedicated to dismantling the systemic barriers and cultural biases that perpetuate such injustices against Indigenous peoples. In this way, we contribute to a collective effort that seeks not only to prevent similar tragedies, but to build a society that supports justice and equality for all, especially the most marginalized.