Tag: children sex trafficking

The Mystery of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women?

~ Ingrid Oliphant ~ Leave a comment

There is no mystery here

What follows is an element of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women phenomenon. It is the story of those who are intentionally disappeared to be sexually exploited and how I came to be involved in it. At then end, I’m going to ask for your help. On this day of remembrance and recognition, I share this in honor of Ariel Begay, her mother Jackie, Grandfather Edsitty, their surviving family; Tanya Begay, Ashley Collins and Misty Rain Bedonie, and the girl with the pink flower in her hair.

Indigenous women, men and children from across the continent are intentionally disappeared with the purpose of being held and sold as sex slaves in a multinational criminal network. This network, whose primary ‘hive’ is located in the Phoenix metropolitan area, is a multinational one. And it’s hub is located on an Indian Reservation.

Those that are being held in this place, are held underground in a system that uses wells, former mines, and the ancient canal system developed by the Huhugam. They are held–underground!–until the time comes to be auctioned, unless they die while in captivity. Near such time, they are moved to the ISM raceway, force to clean up at mobile showers there. At least one auction a year is held there or near there using good old-fashioned radio technology. Sold to the highest bidder to be fucked to death.

Women, men and children  from indigenous communities are intentionally disappeared, many times from within their communities, to be held in captivity (hundreds literally held under the ground in the desert) bought and sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation by those within indigenous communities–with the full awareness and agreement of tribal leadership— until they cannot be exploited anymore-when they die or are killed (including during the sexual act)!  When they are killed their bodies are buried, sunk or burned but not before someone qualified determines whether their organs are harvestable. Stop here and think about that paragraph. Then breathe and think some more about how many people it takes to pull off an operation like this.

There is no other way to clearly express what these young people are disappeared for. To have paid sex as many times as possible until they have no more use for someone else’s financial benefit. They are then killed or they die in the process. Their journey to the point of auction, includes points of contact with people in their communities and outside the community, like in the case of one recently disappeared Native woman in Montana, two young women from Dulce, New Mexico, and their associate in Montana developed an online ‘friendship’, then met in person at a bar, and the victim was disappeared. In addition to those who select, hunt, trap and broker the victims, there are drug dealers, dentists, doctors, preachers, medicine men and other esteemed community members involved.

Their complicity is aided by many, many others that fuel a partnership between the Sinaloa cartel and Indian Gaming. They include elected officials from the:

  • Gila River Indian Community
  • Tohono O’odham Nation
  • Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara
  • Hia Ced O’odham
  • Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate
  • Salt River Pima-Maricopa
  • San Carlos Chiricahua
  • Mescalero Apache
  • Siksika Nation
  • Cowesses
  • Brokenhead Ojibwe
  • Cherokee Nation
  • Shoshone Bannock
  • Prairie Band Potowatami
  • Acoma Pueblo
  • Jicarilla Apache
  • Jemez Pueblo
  • Kickapoo Nation
  • Caddo Nation
  • Ponca Nation
  • Osage Nation
  • Choctaw Nation
  • Fort Mohave Tribe
  • Kahkewistakew First Nation
  • Cocopah Tribe
  • Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
  • Chiricahua Apache-New Mexico and Oklahoma
  • Eastern Shawnee Tribe
  • Wichita and Afflilated Tribes
  • Spokane Tribe
  • Nooksack
  • Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla
  • Picayune Rancheria Chukchansi
  • Southern Ute
  • Hoopa Valley Tribe
  • Cabazon Band of Mission Indians
  • Pauma Tribe of Luiseno
  • and more

Other active participants in what I’m now calling the enforced disappearance of indigenous women from across the North American continent include:

  • former and sitting judges from the Navajo bench and one sitting on the New Mexico Court of Appeals;
  • state senators from Arizona, Colorado, North Dakota, North Carolina and Ohio; staff of Senators serving in Washington, DC, from Arizona and North Dakota
  • a policy analyst in the State of Washington legislature
  • provincial representatives in Winnipeg and Toronto, and a member of the Parliament of Singapore
  • lawyers from Arizona, West Virginia, Kansas, Wisconsin and South Dakota
  • a Museum of the American Indian Board of Trustees member
  • a nationally recognized Navajo author and educator
  • journalists in the US and abroad
  • CEOs & upper management of international oil, entertainment, property management, hotels and manufacturing companies
      • including those sitting on the Boards of General Electric and Goodwill Industries, the National Hot Rod Association, and Gillette
  • heroin wholesalers
  • an English jeweler
  • Russian, Chinese, Japanese and American Ambassadors
  • rock musicians, a boxer and a Native flautist
  • Nuns and teachers
  • AIM members across the country
  • some people who work the Pow Wow circuit
  • Tribal and local police sprinkled from small towns like Odessa, TX, and Engleman Township, IL,  and big cities like Vancouver, BC, across the continent including:
      • BIA officers at Standing Rock who publicly pimp young women
      • a sheriff’s department in Arizona
      • a former law enforcement commander who is now a state legislator
      • county Sheriff’s deputies in Montana
  • a favorite fashion model of Georgio Armani
  • a custom machining shop in Illinois
  • leadership of an ammunitions manufacturer
  • a sand and gravel company in Montana
  • an Airborne Ranger at the Pentagon
  • an unknown people at the MCAS Cherry Point
  • upper level management of DARPA
  • a manager of a non-profit organization that advertises themselves as a law enforcement trainer and facilitator of family reunification of missing persons
  • professors and directors at Arizona State University
  • real estate agents and developers
  • and more

When they are sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation in the United States and Canada, these ‘disappeared’ young people are moved across the country to be ‘worked’ out of more than 120 Native owned casinos (as well as those owned by provincial governments in Canada) in addition to ‘working’ through webcam and pornography services, and call-out and call-in services.

In addition, the international nature of this criminal partnership includes the disappearing of young women (and men) from Eastern Europe, the EU, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Peru, many of whom are from indigenous communities. They are brought to the US, bought and sold here and potentially sent on to other places across the globe where they are forced to work along with those from indigenous communities from Germany, North America in Singapore, Seoul, France, Amsterdam, Laos, and at what I call Embassy Row outside of Marrakesh, Morocco.  And elsewhere.

Among those that facilitate the movement, pimping and ‘management’ (and deaths) of these young people are two Native-owned casino development and consultancy companies, a Native American at Goldman Sachs whose career and professional relationships began with work in a California Indian-owned casino, several people connected to the Seminole ownership of the Hard Rock brand and it’s casino and resort expansion across the globe. Some Nations formalized their criminal relationships and partnerships with each other at Standing Rock while the rest of us were there to help protect and heal water and communities.

The Fuckery is what I’ve named this unfolding relationship between disappeared Indigenous women, law enforcement, and organized crime that began last September 2017.  It’s the most apt description and, at this point, I no longer refrain from using it with those who might be offended. Because that’s what this is. There is no way to pretty it up; not only is that like putting lipstick on a mud-covered pig but, in my view, there is no other way to adequately express the institutionalized system that exists solely to pad the pockets through selling sex with children and young people.

In September 2017, a Navajo police officer with whom I’d worked in the past, sent me a missing person’s flyer and asked, ‘What do you feel from this?”. After Old Ones sent me on what I thought was an expensive, exhausting and unproductive trip into Alberta and Saskatchewan the month prior, I had no desire to engage with anything in Diné country. My desire for quiet and rest ended when he said, “She’s in Phoenix.” I had no reason to doubt him. I know well how his own gifted nature works through him. I didn’t have to ask, “So, they want me to go get her?” Because that’s exactly what was being asked.  In fact, not asked; demanded.

Beginning that night, people with whom I have limited (or no) connection outside Facebook, shared with me their dreams and said things like, “I don’t know how I know to tell you this is for or about you.”  They didn’t need to. I knew what the Old Man hollering, “Gallop, Josephine!! Gallop!!”, from the back of a running horse meant. From the night of September 6, the day the Navajo police officer reached out, visions began flooding me with information. Crystal clear, no interpretation needed visual information including who, what, where, when, why and how.  I may have wanted peace and rest but that wasn’t going to happen. Not then, not now.

Within days I was on the road from the mountains of Montana to the desert of Arizona. In my mind, seven to ten days seemed about right. I’d done more in less time before so that’s what I packed for. It made as much sense to me as saying to the missing woman’s mother, when she asked if she needed to give me any money, “No. That’s not what this is about. However, if I bring her home, mutton stew would be pretty amazing!”

I arrived in the Phoenix area on September 14. I was at the local FBI office four days later and, during a nearly two hour interview, I gave what I felt was actionable information, including webcam sites where other missing Native girls and women were being forced to work, an address on the southern border city of Nogales, and more. I watched the skin on the arms of the agent in front of me repeatedly rise as the truth connected with her and then left, never hearing a word. A few hours later I met a man who is key in the disappearance and enslavement of women and children. I shook his hand at the beginning of our conversation and shook my head when I left after he lied to me. It was in that moment, too, I realized I’d been set up in the most spectacular way of spirit.  I wasn’t in the desert to find and bring home one young woman. I was there for many.

The visions and visitations didn’t stop. Information came from the desert herself, blowing sands and stalwart stone like beacons. And, three days after initially reporting to the FBI, I found a place where young people are held in darkened captivity, to be sold into sexual slavery, supervised by the same esteemed member of the local indigenous community who lied to me. And, I attempted to reach out to the FBI again. Several times. There was no response.

One month later, on October 17, the day I learned that Ariel Begay was, in fact, dead,  I made contact with an FBI agent in Tucson who, I initially thought, didn’t pay attention to what I’d shared. One year later, I learned the opposite. In October, I learned that he cared enough to report it to somebody within the criminal network that, in turn, put a $50,000 price on my head.

The details of the underground location were shared with agents at the Phoenix and Tucson FBI offices, (it was the Tucson agent with whom I shared the information who facilitated the price on my head), and a lieutenant in the Gila River Police Department. When we spoke, he did not raise an eyebrow at the names I gave him but looked ready to shake me by the shoulders when I told him where I’d been led to and been making my presence known. “That’s the most dangerous place on the reservation!”. I told him I was well aware of that. It was the place I almost got shot, was told by residents that there was no help to be found there and I better get the fuck out) and there was no action. I was told that would not happen because there would be no way to get a Federal warrant to search the premises; not enough proof. However, “if you were to call 911 from there, we’d come running!”.

By November 10, 2017, I realized that I was actively followed and targeted by those involved in the network or the FBI. I thought safeguards were put into place once I realized the how close they were (enough to take photographs of me at night!) and how they found me (nothing is as secure electronically as you think it is!) but that was not as it seemed. As 2018 began to unfold, I was given information that I didn’t put together for three months. Visions of crossword clues and road runners would get my attention but it wasn’t weeks passed before I learned that I was not only under electronic surveillance but I was being physically watched as well, from 200 yards away. In late March that gap was closed when a drone was sent to my bedroom window and I fled a few days later.

In those unfolding seven months, I nearly got shot, someone tried to file a restraining order against me after I asked them for help and another, again when I asked for help said, “You’re not going to get that here! Get the fuck out of here, lady!”, I reached out to countless non-profits, retired DEA agents, tribal, local and federal law enforcement, and people of the medicine way, all to no avail.

When the journey began in September 2017, one of the questions I asked was of the group of Old Ones, “Will I have help?” “On your own”, was the reply. They weren’t kidding. Not that I was entirely alone. I never really am but as friend after friend bailed in fear, loneliness and abandonment became like fuel until the body and mind brought me to the point of deep despair. Each time, though, when I considered walking away, I was brought back when Mother Mary and others visited. Their visitations buoyed my spirits but also reminded me that if I was feeling lonely and abandoned, how could I, in turn, abandon those who had been disappeared, brokered, held in the dark to be turned over to be fucked to death? How could I leave them when I was the only one seeking their freedom and knew where they were? Guilt and shame repeatedly rolled  through (and still do) for not doing enough, not being enough, not trying enough, not being noisy enough, not being smart enough, not being brave enough. Rage came with it; rage that others weren’t doing enough, were making noise but not listening, making noise while actively participating in the disappearing of others, or not doing anything despite knowing the horror faced by these captive children and women.

When I fled the desert for the sanctuary of the mountains, I thought I had enough information to engage federal law enforcement again. I was wrong. I was ignored when I reached out (ultimately hung up on by the FBI before I finally gave up). However, though I felt ignored and alone, I learned that I was not. I learned I’d been under electronic surveillance by the FBI for months. (Yes, it’s legal. Warrantless surveillance is allowed under a couple of circumstances: a) if they believe a life (presumably mine) is in danger, or b) the subject (definitely me) is part of organized crime.)

And the information continued to flow through ways considered spiritual and the more obvious slips of the tongue like a local cop who didn’t expect me to hear someone told him, “Someone is telling Ingrid way too much” and being part of the experience where a person who was responsible for my safety and that of victims chose to make traffickers safe instead.

The last time I attempted contact the FBI was when I received information I believed indicated a body dump in the Phoenix metropolitan area in October 2017. I never heard back from the FBI but I have since been given the locations of many more hidden individual and mass graves across the continent where those who have been killed during transportation, of drug overdose while being held or in the process of being kidnapped, or during the act of sex.

After my conversation with a female legislator from the Blackfeet Nation, nearly a year after this unfolding began, I reached out to women in formal and informal Indigenous leadership, who Ancestors suggested would be helpful, in the Osage, Cherokee, Odawa, and Crow Nations. I was ignored by a former judge, current councilwoman, and environmental activist, just as I was ignored by law enforcement again when I went to them with specific information on the disappearance of Jermain Charlo in Montana, and when I asked a singer for something as simple as a prayer sung for freedom. In addition, I have been ignored when reaching out to the US Attorney’s Office;  Senators Jon Tester, Senator Lisa Murkowski, and former Senators Jeff Flake and Heidi Heitkamp.

I feel the need to repeat a few things that may be lost in the text: Women, men and children  from indigenous communities are intentionally disappeared, many times from within their communities, to be held in captivity (hundreds literally held under the ground in the desert) bought and sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation by those within indigenous communities–with the full awareness and agreement of tribal leadership— until they cannot be exploited anymore-when they die or are killed (including during the sexual act)!  When they are killed their bodies are buried, sunk or burned but not before someone qualified determines whether their organs are harvestable. Stop here and think about that paragraph. Then breathe and think some more about how many people it takes to pull off an operation like this. Not just those above, they are key elements but between each of them are many, many people.

Think about this: active and retired personnel and operational infrastructure of the United States military is used to perpetuate the sexual slavery of women, men and children.

Think about this: the very mechanism fought for thirty years ago to help support the sovereignty and economic stability for First Nations and Native communities are primary locales where indigenous women, men, and children are enslaved for sexual exploitation. To be more clear, Indian women, men and children are disappeared, bought and sold by those in and working with Indian communities, to be fucked (literally and figuratively) in Indian casinos (and non-Indian casinos in the US and abroad), and other venues until they have lost their value. 

Despite the fact that a Blackfeet legislator suggested I write a novel–“It’ll read like a thriller!”–there is nothing fiction here. This is real. This is every day. This is recorded on security cameras in every casino, from the friendly relationships between on-site tribal police and pimps, to underage girls being led by older men through the lobby in the wee hours, to security facilitating prostitution in restricted-to-guests spaces. Security, bar staff, housekeeping, other floor staff and managers–everyone knows. Guests share openly, telling strangers of their liaisons with victims of trafficking in casino resorts.

The journey these young people are thrust into is one that no human should have to experience. Yet, they do by the thousands. Every day.  The phrase ‘someone knows something’ is used a lot by the online community that helps spread the word about missing Indigenous women and children.  In this case, ‘someone’ means many, many, many people know and do nothing. Of those many is Federal law enforcement officers; figured into the gaming industry is organized crime so the Departments of Treasury and the FBI are regularly in Indian casinos and certainly a fixture in those around the Phoenix Metro area.

It’s been suggested more than once to me that “Of course, the FBI knows right? They must, right?:  Yes, they must. They know enough to put me under electronic surveillance and tell a Montana cop, “Someone is telling Ingrid way too much.”  Yet, they and the US Attorney’s Office have refused to engage. Why? Is it because I’ve been labeled ‘the crazy psychic lady’? Perhaps, but if that’s the case, why did a supervisor (assuming there was no warrant) or a judge (because maybe a warrant was signed) sign off on, at the very least, electronic surveillance.

That births a few more questions: If, indeed, the FBI and/or other federal law enforcement officers are aware of this network then why has it not acted? Is it because victims are brown-skinned or foreign? Is it because “they’re just whores”? That they have no value?  Is it because victims are not terrorists or the perpetrators are not (although they fit the definition if one considers that fifty percent of the population of Indigenous communities is, in fact, terrorized by a criminal network)? Perhaps, federal law enforcement is enamored with to catch the Big Cat, a leader of the cartel who is more ‘valued’? Is this network is too large to intervene? Is it because agencies operate within silos and with inherent racial and ethnic biases? Is it because, somehow, they benefit from the victimization of these young people? I don’t think any one of these things or a combination of them is too far a reach.

We know why the cartels do it. Money. There’s lots of money in sex on demand.  We have a pretty good idea that some of those involved in the pipeline, because that’s what it is–the movement of ‘goods’ along an enclosed yet visible infrastructure to another location–do it for a lot less money, or, perhaps, threats against their life; “the bullet or the bribe” is real. We can also make educated guesses about the motivations behind casino development and management companies actively supporting sexual trafficking: protection from the cartel and an additional revenue stream, for instance.  However, there are those within the above lists I would really like to ask a simple, “Why? What motivates you to participate in the continued decimation of your relatives?”

I’ve said before that this won’t be legislated or enforced away. It is an institutionalized phenomenon that exists, in part, because of legislation and enforcement. It is part of a larger culture in which the fruits of multiple billions of dollars are enjoyed by those of power and privilege. It’s up to us and the industry that supports it.

I cannot do it alone. Who will stand with me? Who of you attending the 2019 South Sound Human Trafficking in Indian Country Conference, held this week at the Emerald Queen casino, will openly challenge casino management about the practice of supporting the prostitution of trafficked women in their casino?  Who will have the courage that the young women who try to claw their way out of imprisonment walls to help me? Who will stand, not just with me and the Old Ones, but with those who suffer because ‘someone knows something’ and has done nothing.  Because many someones know something and do nothing. Who has the courage to meet the fear, the power structures, and greed-machine with me?

Please help me.

Please help the little girls with the pink flowers in their hair. Please help me help the young women who cry for freedom. Their prayers have been heard. Will you help me answer them?

And, yes, of course I’m aware you’ve read this.  Where does your courage and your heart lie? Why?  Can you say that out loud to your grandmother, and her mother? She knows. They know. I know. Have you told your own mother? Why not? Think about that, too.

Here is who tells me too much. More of the crowd is here.

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The Ties that Bind Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

~ Ingrid Oliphant ~ 1 Comment

artist: Nicholas Galanin

What is it that can bring together a diverse crowd that includes:

  • judges from the Navajo bench and the New Mexico Court of Appeals;
  • state senators from Arizona, Colorado, North Dakota, North Carolina and Ohio
  • provincial representatives in Winnipeg and Toronto
  • lawyers from Arizona, West Virginia, Kansas, Wisconsin and South Dakota
  • a Museum of the American Indian Board of Trustees member
  • a nationally recognized Navajo author and educator
  • 37 elected Native American and First Nations officials, including governors and chiefs
  • journalists
  • CEOs & upper management of international oil, entertainment, and manufacturing companies
  • heroin wholesalers
  • an English jeweler
  • a few Ambassadors
  • rock musicians, a boxer and a flautist
  • some nuns
  • some teachers
  • AIM members across the country
  • police sprinkled from small towns like Odessa, TX and big cities across the continent
  • a favorite fashion model of Georgio Armani
  • a custom machining shop in Illinois
  • a sand and gravel company in Montana

What do military bases in the US and mass graves in the US have in common?

What has scared regional chiefs, environmental activists, educators and allies into silence?

What would bring a young car wash attendant from Northern New Mexico and a Proud Christian in Montana together to cause a third woman’s death before she could be tamed and turned out?

What would lead an FBI agent associated with the Southern Arizona Anti-Trafficking Unified Response Network to tell someone in organized crime, “this lady knows too much”?

What inspires people to intentionally breed children to be sold into sexual slavery?

What has brought together Ancestors from over 400 First Nations and 400 Native American tribes–going as far back as those who inspired their creation stories–and one woman?

 

 

Those Who Tell Too Much; Ancestors and Missing, Murdered Women and Children

~ Ingrid Oliphant ~ 1 Comment
artist: R Blackwater

In the introduction to this series on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children, I mentioned that this unfolding of the Fuckery and I

 requires discussion of history and the repercussion arisen out of it, trauma experienced and held by peoples and the natural world, realities of misogyny, sexuality, institutionalized racism, the reemergence of what I call ‘the medicine way’ and where all those things converge in our current era.

I think the thing that frightens people the most is the reemergence of the ‘medicine way’. It means recognizing that beliefs and ways of the world are more than theoretical or ceremonial, beyond the scope of encultured ‘sacred space’, and are neither ours nor out there. It creates an inescapable ‘in your face’ expression of truth that makes beliefs true or untrue, redefines things of spirit held as personal or tribal into universal, and cuts the commodified crap connected to the aforementioned in a breath. It means that death isn’t what we’ve thought it is, that everyone really is connected beyond super-simplified popsychospiritmeme-ified oneness. It means we have responsibilities beyond what we’ve presumed revealed within sweat lodges, by the one-liners of protest signs and attention-grabbing headlines. It means prophecy can be true, cosmologies can crumble, and we really may not who or how (or why) we think we are.

It frightens lawmen, lawyers, politicians, medicine men, journalists, folks who once called me friend, and those who operate the Fuckery. It’s why a tribal historical preservation officer nearly scorched his shorts when I asked about an eagle.  Because it can’t be true but what if it is.  If it is, we have to kill her. If it’s not we have to see who is really giving her all this information, then kill her.

I was once asked by one of the more lazy cops I’ve ever met, “So, is it like talking to God?” when I went to talk to him about Jermaine Charlo. His syrupy derision was no different than the “Why are my ancestors coming to you?”  Sadly, I’m not one skilled with witty repartee and it didn’t occur to me until much later to say, “No, conversations with God are much more direct.”  They are but for all the church-going, Bible shaking, and God-loving, to tell people there are active conversations with God is a nullifying as explaining those with Ancestors.

Whether those who would like to put an additional hole in my head (or anyone else) believe this or not, these are those who ‘tell Ingrid way too much’

They are Coushatta, Cree, Muscogee, Maidu, Diné, Dene.

They are Lakota, Dakota, Comanche, Choctaw, and Apache.

They are Kickapoo, Meskwaki, Mi’maq, Tongva, and Gros Ventre.

They are Ojib, Ohkay Owingeh, Mewuk, Osage, Missouria, Potowatami, Quapaw, Quinault.

They are Rappahannock, Paiute, Pascato, Seminole, Shawnee and Chickahominey.

They are Sappony, Seneca, Waccamaw, Natchez, Niitsitapi, Cherokee, Mohawk, and Miccosuckee.

Onandagan, Cheyenne, Crow, Unitah, Calusa, Colusa, Appalachee.

Fox, Saux, Winnebago, Miami, Illini, Ioway and Omaha.

Arapaho, Otoe, Kiowa, Caddo, Coahuiltecan, Kutenai, and Pend d’Oreilles.

Nakoda, Yurok, Chumash, Yokuts and Yana.

Nahuatl, Mixtec, Mayo, Massai, and Huichol, O’odham and Tepehuan.

Guaraní, Cocopah, Dogon, Delaware, Sara, Salish, Tatar, Bua and Bantu.

Samí, Bedu, Yoruba, Ibibio, Damara, Pueblan. Altai, Mapuche and Quechua.

Abenaki, Mohigan, Wawenock, Acholi, Madu, Evenki.

Salish, Kumeyaay, Ohlone, Pomo, Skykomish, Yakama.

And more.

The sand speaks, clouds halt, rain and stag protect, horses signal, ground and eagles pull, bees direct, water leads, raven weaves with spider, snake and worm connect threads where others can’t go. Wings whisper, trunks kiss my face, Nagas sing, devas dance. Creation twins create anew.

They know. They see.

Hundreds more who trust me with their living kin whose prayers they have heard, whose cries for freedom they echo across the universe and pound through my dreams– insistent, repetitive beats of love. They give me medical advice, tell me when to run and when to be still, wait. They tell me to ‘stop with the questions’, ‘sit down and shut up’, ‘Speak, child. Speak.”

They ride the wind, thunder through clouds, beat my heart, sing my soul, cry my tears, soothe and sear my skin. They guide, they tattle on the twisted medicine men, they show the limbless torsos.

And we live and breathe and move as one.

My secret is safe with your secret….

~ Ingrid Oliphant ~ Leave a comment

I’ve shared before the confusion and despair felt when ignored by tribal leadership I’ve reached out to across the continent. Whether the attempted connection is with Osage, Crow, or Anishinaabe (or Blackfoot or Cree or Shoshone or Cheyenne or Pima or….), the silence I’ve been met with has been as deafening and deadening as the ‘keep your mouth shut’ repeatedly heard from the Cree contingent.

I’ve wondered out loud more than once if there is a M. Night Shyamalan-esque agreement within continental indigenous communities in which it’s been decided that a percentage of the population is expendable and sacrificed so that the larger community might be safe; where those sacrificed vanish into ether, with something resembling a tolerable amount of noise, and are never talked about again.

I’m keenly aware of the role that racism plays, the fear a white woman who works with Ancestors and Others inspires, and how spirit coming to life outside of select safe spaces threatens. However, there is something much more deep that I have tried to articulate but haven’t been adequately able to put words to.

This past weekend, though, I read an opinion piece by Garry Wills in the Washington Post about the Catholic Church. In it he expresses so well what I’ve been trying to wind words around:

The trouble with any culture that maintains layer upon layer of deflected inspections is that, when so many people are guarding their own secrets, the deep examination of an institution becomes nearly impossible. The secrecies are too interdependent. Truly opening one realm of secrecy and addressing it may lead to an implosion of the entire system.

His words, especially in the context of institutionalized sexual abuse and the attempts at covering it up, rang true to me.

The effects of colonizers ripping people from their land, the rape of women  also ‘theirs for the taking’, the forced ripping of children from their families into institutions made to ‘kill the Indian, save the man’, combined with the individual experiences of child rape within communities have created this weaving of secrets.

Layer interlaced with layer of secrets and fear; communal and individual, sexual and spiritual (they cannot be separated in the case of the Fuckery any more than they can any religious institution and its abusers), and threaded through entire lineages.

We cannot talk about the disappearances of indigenous children and women without honestly addressing these incredibly painful things. For those  unaware of the legacies wrought by the plundering of the continent’s first peoples, these things may seem like the distant past, far removed from any modern view or experience of the world. They are not. They are right here, right now and must be faced because the intentional disappearing of indigenous women and children are inextricably entwined within these layers.

Corruption on the Southern Border and Missing, Murdered Women and Children

~ Ingrid Oliphant ~ 1 Comment

Riding the tail of the El Chapo trial, the New York Times just published a story on the corruption of police along the US southern border linking the now well-known bribery schemes of the Sinaloa cartel leader in Mexico to similar machinations in the US. I was hoping to read more about the connection between bribery schemes and the political theater surrounding the ‘national emergency’ and The Wall. However, the article didn’t go there and I’m only going to touch on it in one sentence. Common sense, data, history and experts have made it clear that a wall isn’t going to stop the flow of migrants, drugs, weapons, cash or sex slaves. And while President Trump has mentioned sex trafficking as a way to engage his audience and paint a picture of horror, he’s missed the mark by a long shot and, beyond mischaracterization, is part of the problem

This movement, across the continent, of children and women who have been or will be sold for commercial sex, doesn’t just involve a few cops along the southern border. And, though it most definitely involves Customs and Border agents who prefer the bribe over the bullet, the wheels of the system are greased at the Northern and Southern borders, at airports, sea ports, and all of places in between the initial place of disappearance and the final resting place.

The mechanics of it all aren’t complex. Built on existing infrastructures of human behavior, trade routes, emerging technologies, and old-fashioned greed, the Fuckery is pretty darn simple.

Nearly every non-profit based in the United States that claims its focus is the direct interdiction of sex trafficking or rescuing of victims actually operates somewhere else on the globe in places like South Asia and Central America. Mission statements and explanations often state that the organization operates outside of the US because law enforcement agencies here have resources those in developing countries don’t, are not subject to the vagaries of despotic or poorly funded governments, including the standard operational normality of criminal collusion.

That is far from the reality. Our nearly nine thousand miles of perimeter and mental disconnect may lend to a false sense of moral superiority however it doesn’t isolate any citizen, officer of the peace or the court, from the human condition.

There is no corner of the globe that doesn’t influence or isn’t influenced by the collusion between law enforcement and sexual slavery of children and women. In the US, there isn’t an aspect of the disappearance of indigenous children and women that isn’t influenced by global economies. While a girl in the heart of Navajo country is being groomed on social media by a ‘friend’ or recruited directly by a boyfriend or teacher, the drugs used to subdue her originated in another part of the world, the broker may be an Apache who came into the business while flying Apaches in Afghanistan, and the ultimate buyer may be someone close to home-grown, but connected to global criminal networks.

The relationships between corrupted law enforcement, non-corrupted law enforcement and the organized crime that bridges the two are symbiotic, cross state and international boundaries. As are those relationships between this organized criminal network and tribal, local, and state politicians and jurists from thirteen Southern and Northern border states, eight border states for which there are no national boundaries, and eleven states in the interior; governors, mayors, chiefs, representatives in state houses, local judges and those on court of appeals benches, councilmen and women all working in partnership to perpetuate sexual slavery and murder of children, young men, and women. Sexual slavery doesn’t offer a way out. Very few get out of the system alive. There are mass graves sprinkled across the country filled with bodies of children and adults who could not be sold, who died of drug overdoses or reactions to drugs they were subdued with, suicide, some literally fucked to death over time, some killed during the act of fucking itself, and some, dumped and buried only after sellable organs have been removed.

There is no wall to stop it, no law to stop it, no border to stop it, no moral boundary that hasn’t been crossed to keep it going and help it prosper.

Think about that for a minute when you read stories about law enforcement and other officials who explain that more data, more awareness, and more timely reporting of disappearances will stop it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Law enforcement corruption and missing, murdered Indigenous women

~ Ingrid Oliphant ~ 2 Comments

This is the second in a multi-part series that will chronicle my journey into the world of sex-trafficking and murder in Indian Country and beyond. The first can be read here. If you’ve already read it, scroll until the font change. 

Headlines, hashtags, and public service announcements don’t provide a way to explore the nuances, relationships and historical responsibilities involved in the discussion and eradication of the trafficking of vulnerable Native American children and women for sexual exploitation. I hope this series does that and more. 

I became consciously involved with the subject in September 2017 when I was called by Ancestors to find a young Navajo woman who had been disappeared from the reservation and was believed by a Navajo cop to be in the Phoenix Metro area. I didn’t know it at the time but finding a body dump on the same reservation in 2014 and my presence at Standing Rock in 2016 laid the groundwork for me to walk into a multinational sex-trafficking operation with connections that span 45 countries. Telling how this story unfolds requires discussion of history and the repercussion arisen out of it, trauma experienced and held by peoples and the natural world, realities of misogyny, sexuality, institutionalized racism, the reemergence of what I call ‘the medicine way’ and where all those things converge in our current era. There will be no naming and shaming here but there will be solutions offered.

 

So, one cop said to another, “Someone is telling Ingrid way too much.”

I was left alive last winter because folks were trying to figure out who was telling me what. How was it that I knew what I knew when I wasn’t supposed to know anything? Two sets of folks, law enforcement and not-law enforcement, who may or may not have known their watching was a mutual effort. The kicker of it all, is that for all the Facebook-cloning, electronic surveillance and geo-locating, physically threatening, and the flying-clone at the bedroom window, it appears that no one has considered that my information comes from exactly the place and in the manner I say it does.

Perhaps, though, two people do. I landed in Phoenix on September 14, 2017. By the morning of September 18, I was at the local FBI office with what I thought was actionable information (and I the time I knew nothing of what I do now). After being interviewed for nearly two hours, I went on my way. My way was south, following the pull of the eagle from two days prior.

On the sixteenth, I drove into a village that visions had been insisting I get to. It’s a relatively small place and I drove each street looking, listening, asking wide open for clarity. Birds had nothing to say. The few cottonwoods were quiet in the light desert breeze and the sand kept it’s secrets so I decided to leave.  Driving back, thinking of lunch, a set of eagle talons grabbed my left arm and pulled back hard. “Come back!!” Unmistakably asking for me to return.

For those few readers who do not understand my relationship with things of the invisible world, I feel the need to clarify that the eagle wasn’t visible. However, it’s identity, strength, power and plea were undeniably solid. If you ever have the opportunity to have a large raptor park itself on your arm, you’ll learn exactly how I knew. When I have confounding experiences with the spirit world in an indigenous context, particularly when specifically localized, it’s a proper and often necessary to elicit the help of a local expert. So I did.

I left the Phoenix-FBI office and went to find a local person of the medicine way. And, everyone I talked to sent me to one man; “he knows everybody”, “you’ll love him”, “he’s been around forever and works with everyone”, “he’s amazing”, “he’s so nice”, “you should hear him tell the Old stories”, “He’ll know exactly who to connect you with. Here’s his number”. So I called.

And with the help of two other Elders, including a lovely woman who said, “This is definitely beyond my level, he’s the one for you to talk to”, I was introduced to the man whose community loves and reveres him. And I told him the story. The whole story…why I was in the desert to begin with and my experience with his community’s Ancestors, their visions directing me to the same, and my experience with the eagle. As I sat across the table from he and his assistant, asking for help connecting me with an appropriate person and an education on local protocol for such things he looked me straight in the face and said, “I don’t know anyone like that.”  I didn’t need his assistant’s head whip to tell him me he lied. I also didn’t need anyone to tell me why he lied or that I’d walked into a perfectly laid set up just as I was supposed to and that what I thought I knew, what I’d reported to the FBI hours earlier, was merely the tip of a desert iceberg.

And I tried to report that. And before I gave up entirely on attempting to report anything, I had a conversation with another FBI agent, three weeks after I’d initiated contact via a non-profit and governmental consortium. After he said, “We won’t do anything without a victim” and I wondered if I might well become one soon just to help the agency out, I sent the obligatory email and forgot about another fucking FBI agent.

I forgot about that FBI agent until I learned I was under electronic surveillance by the FBI and those definitely not the FBI.  It’s an odd experience to be confronted with a) your own ignorance of things that might get you killed, and b) a solid thing, a stalwart symbol of safety and justice in your mind that suddenly isn’t safe or a representative of equitableness at all. It’s even more odd to understand prior neat dividing lines of good guys and bad guys are no longer useful tools.

I’d had hints of things sort of odd with my computer but I chalked it up to it’s age and an unfortunate incident with a car tire a year prior at Standing Rock. I didn’t understand that my computer and phone had been hacked until I was met in the dark by someone making a point that I had been seen and that I ought to be scared, ought to be scared off. The message was hard to miss when an SUV driver turned off his headlights as he approached slowly, then stopped to take flash photographs of me at 11:00 at night. A few minutes before that sphincter-tightening experience, while trying to find my car in a very, very large parking lot, I noticed that my Google maps was showing me forty-five miles away in a place I wasn’t and had not been.  That GPS had either imbibed the drink I was craving or my phone was trying to tell me something. The fat photographer in the Suburban? He told me very clearly what the GPS message was. We’re following you. We’ve been following you. We know exactly where you’ve been, where you are down to the very path you’re walking in the dark. Alone.

I tried to review everywhere I’d stayed, where I’d moved, with whom I spoken, and always came back to September 18, 2017, and the two separate conversations I had–one with the presumed good guys and one with an otherwise-revered not-so-good guy.

Nearly one year later, I was again reminded those who I’d spent years working with, trusting, and loving as brothers and lovers and partners, toe that blue line of ‘protect and serve’ while serving those who commit the most heinous acts upon children and women, all while in uniform. Someone who was responsible for my safety and that of victims chose to make traffickers safe instead.

State troopers, county deputies, tribal police; blue, brown and green uniforms and those with a pantyhose or tie. Safety, security, justice, trust us, my ass.

I’ve watched cops chat it up with pimps, I’ve cut contact with someone I love and respect because I was afraid his tribal colleagues would create a convenient line of duty death, I know an entire department that will need to be taken over by the federal government when it comes out how many officers and command are involved in harboring of hostages, as well as producing and selling child pornography. I’ve been ignored except when I was being surveilled (odd, no?), and the one who facilitated the price on my head? None other than the federal agent to whom I considered sarcastically offering myself as a victim to get someone to listen to me. My thought at the time was maybe the death or disappearance of a middle-aged white woman will inspire someone to care about the death and disappearance of some brown skin girls. Little did I know. 

This winter, I’m alive despite the fact the good guys and not-so-good guys have decided it doesn’t matter how I’m getting my information and someone within one of those blurry-lined camps thinks the reward for my head would make a nice chunk of change. Someone is telling Ingrid way too much.

Even now, nearly a year and a half since this unfolding began, it’s not clear who is who, who fits into what camp, and how often they hurriedly blur across the lines. What is clear is that there is enough money moving into the hands of law enforcement officials and respected elders across the country that the trafficking of children and adults will not be enforced away.  

 

Is porn or child rape the public health crisis?

~ Ingrid Oliphant ~ Leave a comment

Arizona wants to call porn an public health crisis. According to CNN,

Arizona state Rep. Michelle Udall, R-Mesa, introduced a resolution declaring “pornography is a crisis leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts.”
The resolution says pornography “perpetuates a sexually toxic environment that damages all areas of our society.”
Arizona would be the thirteenth states to officially deemed the consumption of porn a crisis.
Let’s contrast that with this, from CNN this past Friday:
Sierra Leone’s president has declared a national emergency over rape and sexual violence…With immediate effect, sexual penetration of minors is punishable by life imprisonment,” President Julius Maada Bio said in a keynote address on Thursday
Let that sink in for a hot minute. Thirteen states in the United States have deemed the consumption of pornography a public health crisis while the leadership of a third-world country has declared rape and sexual violence–particularly of children–the crisis.
It doesn’t take much research to find the common language of ‘objectification’, ‘damages families and relationships’, ‘increased domestic violence’, and the standard ‘link to trafficking’ used in legislation here.
Yet, no state (or city or tribe) in the United States has declared the rape of children a public health crisis. We, as a collective, continue dance around the rape of children as if it doesn’t exist except when it publicly smacks us in the face or our own private, scary sexual beginnings begin seeking the light of truth through our mind and body.
Or, perhaps another way of looking at it, particularly in some communities, is that it is so common that it’s not a public health crisis; it’s just a not-so-new normal.

The link above, leading to a story about two Florida men sharing plans via text to rape a three year old is but one example. On the same day, a joint report released investigated and written by thee Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, shared this headline: Abuse of Faith, 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.

Also in Texas, ten days earlier the New York Times reported that the Roman Catholic diocese of the state released 300 names of priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse of children. This, coming after the August 2018 report from a Pennsylvania grand jury, identifying over 1000 child sexual abuse victims at the hands of 300 Catholic priests.

This is not an American problem. Asian monasteries are part of the pipeline that moves stolen or sold boys and girls for the sexual pleasure of monks. Taliban soldiers obtain dancing boys for the same purpose. Child rape in India regularly makes international headlines. Irish, African, Russian, European, Chinese, Thai, Laotian, Saudi, Bengali, Australian, Bolivian, Chilean;  priests, monks, medicine men, doctors, dentists, teachers, grocers, electricians, soldiers, chefs, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, athletes, politicians, plumbers, artists, otherwise average or stellar citizens, regularly rape children.  And our response is a muted one. A celebrity driven #Metoo doesn’t exist for those who cannot yet find the words to express their secret pain.

The problem isn’t porn. The problem, the crisis,  is the repeated and systemically supported rape of children at places of sanctuary, home, at school, at church, at sporting events, offices and camps where they are led to believe they will be safe.  The repeated and systemically supported rape of children that is domestic violence, that embodies objectification, that shatters not just family and relationships but the sense of self and safety and the meaning of Love from the first conscious act of grooming and touch.

This is not to say that porn exists in a vacuum separate from child rape. There are thousands upon thousands of adults around the globe who buy, sell and trade child pornography. There are industries built to support and hide it, all the while expanding it.  This is not the pornography that politicians want to call a public health crisis. Why?

Let Sierra Leone lead the way.

It’d also help if we’d Stop Fucking Children.