By BROOKLYN BROWN
One Feather Reporter
CHEROKEE, N.C.— In recognition of January as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, representatives from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Program, Office of the Tribal Prosecutor, Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority S.A.F.E. (Sexual Assault and Forensic Examiners) Nurse Program, Office of the Principal Chief, and the Cherokee One Feather, met Jan. 25 in the Large Conference Room of the Ginger Lynn Welch Building to discuss community-centered intervention and prevention for the issue of human trafficking on the Qualla Boundary.
Individuals in attendance at the Jan. 25 meeting were Shelli Buckner, EBCI senior tribal prosecutor from the Office of the Tribal Prosecutor; Driver Blythe, public relations assistant from the Office of the Principal Chief; Marsha Jackson, Domestic Violence Program manager; Kayla Bigmeat, intervention project coordinator; Lisa Ivey, RN, BSN, Forensic Nurse coordinator; Brooklyn Brown, Cherokee One Feather reporter; and Robert Jumper, Cherokee One Feather editor.
Additionally, those invited but not in attendance were: Sheyahshe Littledave, Public Relations Officer from the Office of the Principal Chief, who had a conflicting meeting; Cherokee Indian Police Department (CIPD) Chief of Police Carla Neadeau and CIPD associate attorney general Cody White who also had conflicting schedules; Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Special Agent Bianca Pearson and FBI Special Agent Kaley Kowalsky who were out of office; and Brooks Robinson, regional senior vice president and general manager of Harrah’s Cherokee Casinos and Juan Owle, director of surveillance for Harrah’s Cherokee Casinos, who declined the in-person interview and provided a statement via email. Police Chief Neadeau, White, Special Agents Pearson and Kowalsky requested to schedule an interview with the One Feather at another date.
Representatives from Harrah’s Cherokee Casinos were provided via email a precursory series of questions that were posed at the meeting. Kelci Coker, regional communications manager at Harrah’s Cherokee Casinos, declined the in-person meeting on behalf of Robinson and Owle, providing a response to one of the eight interview questions, stating via email, “The majority of these questions seem to be better suited for the other participants. We are going to politely decline in-person interview opportunity but would still like to provide response from Brooks Robinson, Regional Senior Vice President & General Manager, to the highlighted question below:
“What are the best actions for combatting this issue? What are some current trainings or steps you are taking in your specific program to address the issue?”
At Harrah’s Cherokee Casinos, we have a long-standing commitment to upholding the human rights of all individuals and bring awareness to the global issue of human trafficking. Human trafficking does not discriminate and can unfortunately be present in every community. To combat human trafficking in our local communities, we have many ongoing training opportunities and initiatives.”
The statement went on to list a series of mission statements indicating their commitment to inform and educate their employees, clearly display their stance against human trafficking, conduct trainings, promptly investigate, and collaborate with tribal programs and entities. The statement also included a list of their human trafficking trainings and initiatives since 2017.
The meeting began with the simple but important question of, “Does human trafficking exist on the Qualla Boundary?” The group answered with a unanimous and quick “Yes.”
There are zero arrests, convictions, or court cases associated with human trafficking on the Qualla Boundary. There are zero federal arrests, cases or convictions associated with the crime of human trafficking on the Qualla Boundary. Still, representatives from EBCI tribal programs at the Jan. 25 meeting answered with a resounding “yes” that human trafficking appears on the Qualla Boundary.
Jackson went on to define the term. “Human trafficking is exploiting a person through force fraud or coercion, and it can include some type of labor or commercial sex act. It can include forced labor, domestic servitude, and sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is forced fraud or coercion to induce another person to sell sex.”
Jackson added that age of consent is a critical aspect of sex trafficking. “I want to make sure that this is really clear. If someone is under the age of 18, they cannot consent to sex on tribal property, period. If someone is under 18 and any of these things are happening, they’re not being prostituted, they are being trafficked. Commercial sex acts mean any sex acts on an account of which anything of value is given or received by any person. It can be forcing intimate partner relationships to have sex with someone in exchange for money or drugs, utility bills, rent, gas money, any of those things.”
Buckner quoted Cherokee Code Section 14-30.12. Sex trafficking, “The code assigns culpability to anyone who recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides obtains, advertises, maintains patronizes or solicits any of these activities,’ So, it’s not just a person who is attempting to have sexual relations with somebody; it’s all these people who may have some relationship to that transaction.”
The punishment for the offense listed in Cherokee Code is $15,000 and maximum term of imprisonment of three years.
The discussion centered on sex trafficking, which is documented to exist on the Qualla Boundary in programmatic reports, but the group also agreed that labor trafficking is probably present on the Qualla Boundary as well.
“I think it probably started with agriculture, because agriculture is so big in this area, but now I think that there are a lot of people who come here for employment opportunities, and they are working for less than minimum wage, and that’s labor trafficking,” Jackson said. “In housing, if I’m providing you a house, but the house doesn’t have electricity, or there’s twenty people in one bedroom and they’re working 12-14 hours a day or two or three different jobs, that’s labor trafficking.”
Blythe shared his experience as a former Family Safety program employee who worked the first documented instance of sex trafficking on the Qualla Boundary. “I am speaking from my experience as a child maltreatment investigator. This isn’t something that I’m saying for the record on behalf of Office of the Principal Chief, but this is something that I dealt with in 2022 during a Family Safety case, and due to confidentiality, I cannot say the name of the child or any of the perpetrators, but it was something that we were not prepared for when it happened. It seemed like a runaway case at first, but we just happened to find out that there was more to it than that. The victim was very quiet, and when we got her to a medical facility, she expressed that she had been trafficked for some months,” Blythe shared. “What stood out most to me at the time was my point of contact said we didn’t have anything in policy about this. We’d never dealt with this before. Now, that’s not to say sex trafficking hadn’t happened before then, but it showed us that we needed procedures for this now.”
Ivey agreed that the 2022 Family Safety case also set a precedent for CIHA. “I think that case that Driver talked about started opening eyes for different departments within the tribe that yes, sex trafficking is here. I know for us at the hospital, that’s when we started building on that aspect of the S.A.F.E Nurse program,” she said.
Jackson shared information she learned from FBI Special Agent Bianca Pearson’s presentation on familial trafficking at a recent human trafficking training held during the AWAKE Child Advocacy Center’s Champions for Children conference at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort. Familial trafficking is a form of sex trafficking by family members, of which children are the most common victim.
“The grooming process is very quick. I’ve heard clients who used the DVSA program make statements like, well, it happened to me. It’s generational and it’s normalized, and now with gaming and internet and social media, a child is subject to being groomed within three minutes of an online conversation,” Jackson said. “It is a business. These people, these children, that are being trafficked are just money to traffickers. That’s all they are. They are a means of financial gain, and recruiters are generally someone who’s been trafficked before. So, they know what to say, they know what to do, and they know how to get those new victims in.”
Bigmeat shared that the psychology of sex trafficking victims is complex to navigate, “Trafficking is a newly discussed topic for our community. We just started tracking it. And human trafficking is so different from any other abuse because a lot of the time they don’t know that they’re victims. They don’t see themselves as a victim at all,” she said. “If I have a black eye, I know I’m a victim, or the whole community knows I’m a victim, but it’s so different with human trafficking. It’s a lifestyle. That’s how they grew up. That’s the grooming process and the normalization of it.”
Jackson agreed, adding the complex nature of the power dynamic between traffickers and their victims, “It’s very insidious because your victims do not see their traffickers as traffickers. They see these people as the people who are helping take care of them. Most of the time, if we’re dealing with a victim of trafficking, we don’t refer to their trafficker as a pimp. We have to refer to them as what they refer to them as, which is usually ‘my boyfriend’, ‘my daddy’, ‘my mommy’. Because to them, that person is an intimate person that is caring for them.”
Ivey shared that her process for detecting sex trafficking in the S.A.F.E Nurse program is also complex. “Some of the signs to detect in the medical aspect is if someone is consistently coming in with sexually transmitted diseases. That’s part of the education that we’ve been doing for our providers and our nurses, especially through the emergency room and outpatient settings. We also look for branding, which can be like branding cattle, but it can also be a tattoo, a haircut, or a type of clothing.”
Ivey also warns that trafficking can happen anywhere, to anyone by anyone, but there are more vulnerable populations, including Indigenous populations. “It happens everywhere, in all socioeconomic, gender, sex, race, age groups. It’s happening at your neighbor’s house possibly, or at the church. But perhaps the most vulnerable population is our substance use population, our homeless population, people in need.”
Jackson spoke to the fetishization and victimization of Indigenous peoples, “We’re a vulnerable population already because of our history and our generational traumas, but we’re also kind of like a token. A fetish to exploit.”
Buckner added that there are overwhelming statistical differences for Indigenous victims of sexual violence.
The group agreed that the best community action for combating the issue of human trafficking on the Qualla Boundary is education for detection and denormalization of child sex abuse. “It’s all of our jobs to educate each other on these matters, to discuss it, to talk about it. It’s not a nice subject, but it’s each of our jobs. Make sure your child knows the medical name of their body parts, make sure they know safe touches and healthy relationships,” Jackson said.
“Intimate partner violence has been normalized. Seeing molestation throughout generations has been normalized. We must start with our babies. We’ve got to start with our little ones and let them know that this is not okay. This is not normal. But when you’ve grown up with it for generation after generation, it is very much normal to you,” Ivey said.
Buckner advocated for program collaboration on preventing and intervening human trafficking. “Interagency cooperation and multidisciplinary collaboration is really critical because victims will present to us differently in different settings. We need to work on this together,” she added.
Ivey metaphorized the issue of human trafficking and our responsibility as a community in terms of dark and light, a metaphor shared by U.S. Attorney Dena J. King in her remarks at a human trafficking awareness event in Charlotte on Friday, Jan. 26: “It is important to bring this sinister crime out of the shadows – where it thrives – and into the forefront – where it belongs – where we can learn about it, understand it, and educate others, so together we can fight against it,” U.S. Attorney King said.
“We have to be the ones to say we’re not doing this anymore and shine that light out there so that those dark corners aren’t there anymore, and those people can’t have a place to hide,” Ivey said.
Blythe added that the time to shine that light is now. “One thing I’ve always heard is ‘This ain’t the time to talk about it. This ain’t the place to talk about it. This ain’t good to talk about it.’ But it will never be the right place or the right time or the fun thing to talk about, but it needs to be addressed and needs to be talked about now,” he said.
Bigmeat ended the meeting with a call to action. “We need to talk about it. We need to discuss it openly. Bring it into the light.”
The One Feather plans to hold a public form in the Spring to discuss the issue of human trafficking with the community and form community-based actions for making a difference. The representatives from the Jan. 25 meeting plan to be there. Details are forthcoming.
