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Through a new tribal program and researcher partnership, this study aimed to answer the questions: what does violence look like to Native youth, and how do Native youth experience resilience and how can that resilience be strengthened? Through the use of two theoretical frameworks, Galtung's Basic Human Needs and the Socio-Ecological model, these questions were explored.

The work from this project was threefold, first this was a capacity-building grant. Therefore, the central goal was to establish a new tribal program partnership between Native Women's Society of the Great Plains (NWS), led by researchers from the University of South Dakota (USD) and researchers from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). Together they worked to identify additional members who would be part of the study design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination. Project partners ranged in age and geographic location. Participants from NWS, USD, and UCCS worked collaboratively to meet the additional goals of this project.

The second goal was to explore an issue of concern to NWS across the Great Plains Region using the community based participatory research approach. From previous discussions between the researchers and NWS team, vulnerability to violence begins in youth, and therefore was of particular interest to Native people of the Great Plains Region. Thus, USD, NSW, and UCCS developed and applied for the Tribal-Research Capacity-Building Grant together.

The third goal was to identify a priority matter from the data collected on this project and collaborate on a subsequent grant application.

To meet these three overarching goals, five objectives were mapped out for this project. These included the following:

• Objective 1: Develop a communication strategy among the partnership agency members to advance capacity and enable meaningful conversations about difficult topics.
• Objective 2: Develop an answer to the question "what is violence?" for this population.
• Objective 3: To understand how these different sources of violence interact with the human needs identified under objective 2 to create patterned vulnerabilities (or susceptibilities).
• Objective 4: To address how resilience works within the developed model.
• Objective 5: To extend capacity building in the broader Indigenous communities of the Great Plains through bidirectional communication and information sharing.

The Census of Tribal Law Enforcement Agencies (CTLEA) is the first complete enumeration of tribal law enforcement agencies authorized to issue citations and make arrests for crime committed in Indian country. The CTLEA gathers administrative and operational information from tribally operated police departments, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police, and the Alaska Village Public Safety Officer's (VPSO) program operating in the United States during 2018. The CTLEA helps fulfill the Bureau of Justice Statistics' legislative mandate under the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 (TLOA; P.L. 111-211, 124 Stat. 2258 Section 251(b)) to establish and implement a tribal crime data collection system.

Data for the CTLEA were collected by NORC, at the University of Chicago, in collaboration with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Indian Country section. The CTLEA consists of two surveys specific to tribally operated law enforcement agencies and the BIA police departments. The Alaska VPSO program is sponsored and funded by the Alaska State Troopers, which completed the tribally operated law enforcement agency questionnaire on behalf of all the VPSOs. Due to the unique territorial and criminal jurisdiction in Alaska Native Villages, only two tribally operated law enforcement agencies (the Chickaloon and Metlakatla Indian Community) met the eligibility criteria to be included in the CTLEA. Data for the 2019 CTLEA were collected through mail, email, and telephone nonresponse follow-up. Data on the number and type of tribally operated law enforcement and BIA agencies were obtained from all eligible federally recognized tribes. The final universe of eligible respondents included 234 tribally operated law enforcement agencies and the Alaska VPSO program, of which 215 (91.9%) participated in the survey. The 23 BIA police departments operating in the United States completed the survey.

In 1953, Congress enacted Public Law 280, transferring federal criminal jurisdiction in Indian country to the state government in six states, allowing other states to join in at a later date. This study was designed to gain a better understanding of law enforcement under Public Law 280. Specifically, amid federal concerns about rising crime rates in Indian country and rising victimization rates among Indians, the National Institute of Justice funded this study to advance understanding of this law and its impact, from the point of view of tribal members as well as state and local officials.

The research team gathered data from 17 confidential reservation sites, which were selected to ensure a range of features such as region and whether the communities were in Public Law 280 jurisdictions under mandatory, optional, excluded, straggler, or retroceded status. Confidential interviews were conducted with a total of 354 reservation residents, law enforcement officials, and criminal justice personnel. To assess the quality or effectiveness of law enforcement and criminal justice systems under Public Law 280, the research team collected quantitative data pertaining to the responsiveness, availability, quality, and sensitivity of law enforcement, and personal knowledge of Public Law 280.

The purpose of this project was to develop a culturally relevant crime seriousness index specific to the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate (SWO) tribe while working closely with community partners. Informal background interviews with key stakeholders provided a foundation on traditional crime management by the community. These interviews informed the creation of an SWO-specific adaptation of the Sellin-Wolfgang crime seriousness index following an online survey conducted in 2022 with SWO community members (n=44 completed surveys).

Aggregated survey data have been released as a zipped package as it was received by ICPSR. Please refer to the study documentation for details on the index items and instructions on how to obtain the raw research data. The Final Report released by NIJ contains the full SRO crime seriousness index as Appendix D.

This study examines the prevalence of violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women and men, using a large nationally representative sample from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). More specifically, it provides estimates of sexual violence, physical violence by intimate partners, stalking, and psychological aggression by intimate partners. It also provides estimates of interracial and intraracial victimizations and briefly examines the impact of violence.

This study is based on two of the NISVS samples that were included in the 2010 data collection effort --the general population sample and the American Indian and Alaska Native oversample. This American Indian and Alaska Native oversample was collected from geographical areas (telephone exchanges) where at least 50% of the population identifies themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native.

To increase the generalizability of the American Indian and Alaska Native sample (and to add interviews conducted by cell phone), a new "combined" sample was created by including (a) all respondents in the American Indian and Alaska Native oversample and (b) 677 respondents in the general population sample who identified themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native. By combining these samples, a new sample was obtained that is large enough to produce reliable and valid estimates for all women and men in the United States who identify themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native. For a more exact discussion of the sample, see the NIJ Technical Report.

The combined sample includes 2,473 women and 1,505 men who identified themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native. Results from the combined American Indian and Alaska Native sample were compared to results from the sample of respondents in the general population sample who identified themselves as non-Hispanic White alone. The comparison sample includes 7,646 women and 6,050 men who identified themselves as non-Hispanic White alone.

There are 5 data files included with this study. Dataset 1 (General Population Raw Data) contains 18,957 cases and 26,114 variables. Dataset 2 (American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) Oversample Raw Data) contains 3,612 cases and 22,932 variables. Dataset 3 (Respondent-level Data) contains 21,378 cases and 493 variables. Dataset 4 (Perpetrator-level Data) contains 51,535 cases and 446 variables. Dataset 5 (Weights File) contains 3,978 cases and 9 variables.