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The NativeGone Digital Project

Proposal

Description:

Sexual violence against Native American is a part of US history, and is not well reported, is handled inconsistently in the US law and various levels of government from tribal to federal courts. The NativeGone digital project will map and visualize sexually related crimes that have impacted Native American women during the time of the Bakken Oil Boom. During the Bakken Oil Boom from 2006 to 2013, in North Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada. Native American Reservations have a disproportionately higher crime rate and have a disproportionately higher portion of sexually related crimes compared any other racial group within the United States. This project will investigate sexually related crimes committed on or near Native American Reservations and the temporary work camps within the Extraction Industry during the Bakken Boom. This project should help to show how the Extraction Industry might have a correlation with an increase in tribal crime, specifically sexually related crimes associated with Native American women.

Objective:

The main objective of the NativeGone project is to create an online website that displays an interactive map and timeline. The map portion will focus on displaying Native American Reservations within the states of North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, and Minnesota. There will be several interactive layers that show various collections of data.

  1. The geographical location of all federally recognized Native American Reservations within the United States. This layer will show the physical boundaries of all Reservations and Territories within the United States because many reservations cross several state borders.
  2. Extraction projects within the Crude Oil Industry during the Bakken Boom that impact and or overlap on Native American Reservations.
  3. All known locations of Temporary work camps within the state of North Dakota during the peak of the Bakken Boom.
  4. All available tribal crime data the relates to sexually driven crimes that occur on Native American Reservations. These crimes would include missing person reports, rape, sexual assault aggravated assault, etc.
  5. Geodata drawn from primary accounts of anonymized Native American women that have experienced sexual violence

The project will also display a chronological timeline of court cases and legislation that present the complex criminal jurisdiction that surrounds Native Americans within the United States at all federal, state, and tribal levels of government. This project will expose both the available data and the gaps in the data reporting, to reveal how sexual violence remains a problem for Native American women that is worsened by the presence of the Extraction Industry.