History fuels high rates of Native American death at hands of police, experts say (2024)

Recent findings that Native Americans are more likely than any other racial group to die in encounters with law enforcement have deep roots, experts say.

“I think first you have to put it in historic context, and the reason we’re near the top if not atop the list of both police encounters and fatalities must be understood in the context of colonization and, essentially, centuries-old efforts to force Indigenous people away from their homelands, away from their communities, into urban settings where they don’t have a safety net or they don’t have much of a safety net,” said Gabriel Galanda.

Galanda belongs to the Round Valley Indian Tribes of California and is a Seattle-based Indigenous rights attorney who has represented the families of more than half a dozen Native Americans killed by the police.

Over the centuries, Native Americans were pushed against their will onto reservations. Once there, Galanda notes, many young Native Americans were forced to move again into far-flung boarding schools that further stripped them of their culture and language while subjecting them, in some cases, to abuse, neglect and even death.

“Which is to say that if somebody’s great-grandparents or grandparents or mom anddad were sent to boarding school or have suffered from some addiction or affliction as a result, that likely contributes to the moment that an Indigenous person finds themself encountering the police,” Galanda said. “So that’s unique to Indigenous America — that entire history of colonization and displacement.”

Municipal and state police departments have jurisdiction outside of reservations. But the federal government plays a major role on tribal land, where the BIA’s Office of Justice Services largely funds law enforcement.

In some cases, personnel from the Office of Justice Services police tribal citizens directly, at a tribe’s request. But on most reservations, tribes contract with the BIA to operate their own law enforcement departments. The power of tribal and OJS police is limited, however. When major crimes occur, such as homicide and sexual assault, the federal government takes over. And while tribal police can detain people who are not Native, they cannot arrest or prosecute them.

When tribal police or BIA officers shoot a person on tribal lands, the FBI investigates “to determine if there has been a violation of federal law,” including “potential breaches of civil rights or color of law,” FBI Public Affairs Specialist Diana Freedman wrote in an email response to questions.

All “findings are turned over to the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO), which decides whether to pursue charges,” Freedman added. “If no charges are filed, the responsibility for further action shifts to the relevant agency’s internal processes to address any policy violations.”

Attempts to access information for this investigation about broader patterns of the use of force on tribal land and violations of BIA use-of-force policies proved difficult.

Robyn Broyles, a Bureau of Indian Affairs spokesperson, said the bureau reported 51 use-of-force incidents to the FBI between January and August 2023, but she declined a request to interview someone from the department and did not provide more in-depth information about such incidents over time.

The Office of Justice Services’ handbook states that an “annual summary report of use of force incidents will be prepared.” But in response to a public records request for those reports, the Internal Affairs division said that it “did not locate records responsive to your request.”

In February 2023, Lee Enterprises made another open records request for six years of individual or group use-of-force reports as well as reviews, summaries, “findings of policy violations or training deficiencies,” disciplinary actions and criminal investigative reports of incidents of use of force. Lee’s request remained pending as of press time.

‘Set up to fail’ because of addiction or affliction

Galanda believes that officers on and off reservations do not always consciously target Native people. But he argues that police are “not set up to succeed” when they encounter an Indigenous person who may be “suffering from addiction or affliction,” who “may not have a safety net” and who, by virtue of “intergenerational trauma” and a lack of resources, “may be sort of set up to fail and be killed.”

“And that moment, where their (police) biases overcome them and they may be more implicitly than overtly racial and they see a large, brown man in a bad mental state acting in a way that is perceived as violent,” Galanda continued, “they don’t know what else to do in that moment, other than shoot to kill or choke and kill, rather than de-escalate.

“I believe that’s even more the case in tribal country. Because there’s even less resources and less training and, candidly, the cops that are being hired in Indian Country may not be qualified to work in cities, towns and counties.”

Broyles, however, said that “BIA police officers are trained to use the appropriate amount of force necessary to make a lawful arrest.”