Cade’s Crossing

The Sunrise Travel Center sat where Highway 23 crossed the frontage road outside Cade’s Crossing, North Dakota, close enough to the Standing Elk Reservation that half the cashiers who worked there were tribal members and the other half had grown up beside them. Ruth Colby had worked the counter for six years, long enough to know which truckers tipped and which ones complained about the coffee, and long enough that the overnight shift no longer scared her.

She had taken the training almost by accident. Her church, Cade’s Crossing Fellowship, hosted a Tuesday evening session put on by a regional anti-trafficking coalition, and Ruth had gone mostly because the pastor asked for volunteers and nobody else raised a hand. She remembered the trainer, a soft-spoken woman from Bismarck, saying that trafficking rarely looked like the movies. It looked like a girl who wouldn’t make eye contact. It looked like someone else answering for her. It looked, the trainer said, like something a little bit off, the kind of thing you’d talk yourself out of noticing if you weren’t intentionally looking for it.

Ruth had tucked a laminated card behind the register after that: signs to watch for, the hotline number, nothing more. She had used it twice in four years, both times for nothing; a nervous teenager running from a bad breakup, a woman who just wanted to be left alone. She had begun to think of it the way she thought of the fire extinguisher mounted by the door, a thing you hoped never to need.

On a Thursday in March, a man in a clean canvas jacket came in and bought two coffees and a bag of sunflower seeds, and behind him, hanging back near the door, stood a young woman who did not come any farther inside. Ruth noticed her because she was dressed for warmer weather than March allowed, and because when Ruth called out that the restroom code was written on the receipt, the man answered before the woman had a chance to.

“She’s fine,” he said. “We’re in a hurry.”

The woman’s eyes moved to Ruth for less than a second, and something in them reminded Ruth of the training video, a survivor describing what she’d wished someone had seen. Ruth rang up the coffee with hands that felt clumsier than usual, watched the two of them cross the lot to a pickup with Montana plates, and then went into the back office and called the number from the card, not the police non-emergency line, the hotline, the way she’d been taught.

The advocate on the line asked for a plate number, a direction of travel, a description. Ruth gave what she had. Twenty minutes later a Cade’s Crossing patrol car and a Standing Elk tribal police unit were both parked at the truck stop, and an officer named Ben Whitcombe was writing down everything Ruth remembered, including the small detail she almost hadn’t mentioned — that the young woman’s wrist, when she’d reached for the coffee cup the man handed back to her, had a faint bruise shaped like fingers.

“You did the right thing,” Whitcombe told her. “Calling us, well … we’d have gotten here eventually.  But calling the hotline first, that’s what gets somebody found before it’s too late.”

The truck was stopped forty miles south, near the reservation boundary, by a joint patrol that included a state trooper and an FBI agent from the Indian Country crimes unit out of Bismarck — a coordination that existed only because Standing Elk’s tribal police, understaffed and covering nine hundred square miles, had spent three years building relationships across every jurisdiction that touched their land. The man in the canvas jacket was arrested on state and federal charges before the sun went down. The young woman, whose name was Sasha Little Elk, was not arrested at all. She was taken, at her own frightened insistence that she had nowhere to go, to the Four Directions Indigenous Advocacy Center in Bismarck, a two-hour drive that a tribal victim advocate made with her in near silence, because Sasha did not want to talk yet, and the advocate had been trained not to push her.

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Four Directions

The center occupied a squat brick building that used to be a dental office, and Denise Whitehorse had counseled there for eleven years. She was Standing Elk herself, raised forty miles from where she now worked, and she had built her practice on a conviction she rarely mentioned to clients but that shaped every session; that healing for a Native survivor could not be separated from healing as a Native person, that the trauma of trafficking sat on top of older wounds — boarding schools, broken treaties, children taken by the state — and that pulling one thread without acknowledging the others left the work half finished.

Four Directions worked in partnership with tribal social services, the county victim-witness office, and a federal Office for Victims of Crime grant that funded emergency shelters, and it worked, too, with Cade’s Crossing Fellowship, whose congregation had spent two years quietly raising money for a transitional apartment none of its members ever saw the inside of, but knew it was there. Pastor Alan Reyes had preached a sermon that spring on Isaiah sixty-one, on good news for the poor and freedom for the captives and had told his congregation that they might never know whose freedom their offering paid for, and they were fine with that; it would be there when needed.

Sasha stayed at the apartment eleven days before she was ready for her first real conversation with Denise.

Six weeks after that, in a different intake room down the hall, a woman named Marlene Ducheneaux sat across from Denise for the first time, having walked into Four Directions on her own after a cousin gave her the address on a scrap of paper. Their stories, when each finally told them, were very different.

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Sasha’s Experience

“He didn’t grab me off the street. I want you to understand that, because everybody pictures it that way and it makes it harder to explain what actually happened.

“I met Cole online, through a friend of a friend, right after I aged out of the foster system. I’d been in five placements by the time I was sixteen, none of them on the reservation, none of them anywhere near my grandmother, and by eighteen I was basically lost. Cole found me at exactly that point. He didn’t come on strong. He asked about my day. He remembered things I told him: my grandmother’s name, that I wanted to go to cosmetology school, that I hated being cold. Nobody had listened like a friend in years.

“It took him four months before he asked me to move to Billings with him. By then I would have gone anywhere he asked. He said he had a friend who managed a salon and could get me an apprenticeship, and I believed him, because why wouldn’t I? He’d never lied to me that I knew of.

“The first month wasn’t bad. We stayed with people he called his cousins, and I helped around the house. There wasn’t any salon yet, but he said it was coming. Then he said we needed money to get our own place and there was a man who’d pay to spend time with me, it would just be dinner, just company. It sounded weird so I said no. He didn’t hit me that first time. He cried. He said he was ashamed, that he was in debt to people who scared him, that if I loved him, I’d understand he had no other way out. I stayed with him because I thought I was the one holding us together.

“After that it stopped being a request. He took my ID so I couldn’t rent anything myself. He moved us three times in four months, always somewhere I didn’t know anybody. He told me my grandmother had said she didn’t want to hear from me — I found out later that wasn’t true. I think that’s the part outsiders understand least. It wasn’t only the fear. It was that he had made himself the only safe thing in a world he’d emptied out for me on purpose. I didn’t run because I loved him and hated him at the same time, and because I genuinely did not know, some days, whether I’d survive an escape.

“What finally got me out wasn’t my own courage. It was a woman behind a gas station counter who looked at me like I was a person and not part of the fixtures. I think about her more than I think about almost anyone. I’m so thankful.”

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Marlene’s Experience

“People ask why I didn’t just leave, and I always want to ask them — leave to where? I grew up in a house where my uncle drank and hit my mother. I loved my mother, and I loved being Lakota, but that didn’t protect me. I left home at fifteen because staying was worse. There wasn’t a program waiting for me. There was a bus station in Rapid City and a woman named Connie who bought me a sandwich and told me she knew a place I could stay.

“Connie was a recruiter. I didn’t know what that was yet. She was kind to me for exactly as long as it took to get me somewhere I couldn’t leave, and then the debt started — she said I owed her for the sandwich, the bus fare, a phone, rent on a room she chose, and every week the amount got bigger instead of smaller no matter what I did. That’s the part I want people to understand about debt bondage. It isn’t a real number. It’s a leash made out of shame, and shame is the one thing traffickers can always manufacture more of.

“They moved me around powwow circuits and oil camps for almost three years. I want to say something about that, about why it worked on someone like me and might not have worked the same way on a girl from somewhere else. I already believed, before Connie ever found me, that I wasn’t worth protecting. Not only was I abused by my uncle, I’d absorbed worthlessness from every system that had failed my family going back generations, and traffickers can smell a person who’s already been taught to expect abandonment. They don’t have to build that belief. They just have to use it.

“I got out because I got arrested for solicitation in a town in Wyoming, and the officer who processed me had been through a training that taught him to ask different questions than the ones officers usually ask. He didn’t charge me. He called an advocate instead. I remember sitting in that holding room thinking it was another trap, because every kind hand I’d been offered up to that point had turned out to have a hook in it. It took Denise almost a year to convince me she didn’t.”

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What Grew There

Sasha finished her cosmetology certificate the following spring, in Bismarck instead of Billings, and cut hair two days a week at a salon whose owner had heard her story secondhand through Four Directions and asked no questions Sasha didn’t offer to answer. Marlene moved back onto the reservation, into a tribal housing unit near her grandmother’s old allotment and began sitting in on the same support circle that had once seemed like a trap to her, except now she sat on the side of the room that welcomed new arrivals.

Ruth Colby kept working the counter at the Sunrise Travel Center. She never learned Sasha’s name and never requested it; the advocate who’d taken her call had explained, gently, that this wasn’t how it worked, that Ruth’s part had been to notice and to call, and that the rest belonged to people trained to carry it further. She kept the laminated card behind the register, a little more worn now, and she thought sometimes about the trainer from Bismarck saying that trafficking looked like something a little bit off, easy to talk yourself out of. She had stopped talking herself out of her observations.

Pastor Reyes, who had heard some of Ruth’s story, never preached that Isaiah passage the same way again. He’d meant it, the first time, as an image — good news for the poor, freedom for the captives, comfort for those who mourn. After Cade’s Crossing Fellowship learned that its money had helped hold open a door for someone who needed it and would be there for others down the road, his words stopped being an image for him. He kept preaching them, because he believed that a congregation needed to hear that promise of freedom long before it ever found out whether it had fulfilled it.

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Author’s Note: What the Numbers Show

Because human trafficking knows no borders, geographically or demographically, and the reports by survivors are few, available data is sparce. Nepali NGOs tracking rescued trafficking survivors, found that 70% came from Indigenous communities. Indonesia, Uganda, Colombia, and Hawaii provide no trafficking data but are noted only as places where indigenous displacement is severe.

Eyes to See draws on documented patterns in the trafficking of Indigenous women and girls in the United States and Canada. Some figures in this field are well supported; others are widely repeated online without a verifiable source, and readers deserve to know which is which.

Disproportionate Risk

Indigenous women and girls are trafficked at rates far higher than their share of the population and above those of most other demographics. In Minnesota’s Garden of Truth Study, roughly forty percent of trafficking and prostitution survivors interviewed across four U.S. and Canadian sites, were identified as Native American or First Nations, though Native people made up a small fraction of the overall population in those areas. South Dakota data shows a similar pattern: Native women accounted for about forty percent of reported sex trafficking victims while representing roughly eight percent of the state’s population. In Canada, research cited by Public Safety Canada found Indigenous women and girls made up about four percent of the population but close to half of trafficking victims.

Age

Figures placing the “average age of entry” into trafficking at twelve to fourteen are widely cited but rest on thin, decades-old research; fact-checkers have found the underlying data too limited to support a precise national average. What is better documented is that a large share of Native survivors enter as minors — the Garden of Truth study found thirty-nine percent of participants had entered prostitution before age eighteen.

Life Expectancy

A claim that trafficking victims have an average life expectancy of seven years after entry varies widely, including in government materials, but independent fact-checking organizations and researchers who study trafficking have found no credible study behind it. The FBI itself has walked the figure back after being asked for its source. This story does not repeat that number, and readers should treat it skeptically wherever they encounter it.

Escape and identification

Exiting trafficking is rarely a single decision. A Canadian Department of Justice study of survivors found that half had made more than five attempts to leave before finally succeeding, with some reporting well over a hundred attempts; participants who received help exiting and those who exited alone were about equally represented. Separately, advocacy organizations estimate that fewer than one percent of trafficking victims in the United States are ever formally identified by authorities — a figure that reflects how rarely cases like Sasha’s and Marlene’s come to light.

Why Prosecutions Fail

Advocates and legal researchers point to several recurring barriers: jurisdictional gaps between tribal, state, and federal authorities that historically left crimes by non-Native offenders on tribal land unprosecuted by tribal courts; chronic underfunding and understaffing of tribal police departments covering vast rural areas; victims’ well-founded distrust of law enforcement rooted in generations of mistreatment; the practice of arresting trafficked women on prostitution or drug charges rather than identifying them as victims; and traffickers’ frequent practice of moving victims across jurisdictional lines faster than any single agency can build a case. The 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act expanded tribal courts’ authority to prosecute non-Native offenders for trafficking-related crimes on tribal land, a significant legal change — but implementation still depends on resources most tribal justice systems do not yet have.

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If You or Someone You Know Needs Help

United States

• National Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-373-7888, or text 233733 — found at humantraffickinghotline.org
• Strong Hearts Native Helpline (for Native survivors of domestic, dating, and sexual violence, including trafficking): 1-844-7NATIVE (1-844-762-8483) found at strongheartshelpline.org
• National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center: niwrc.org
• To report suspected trafficking to federal authorities (Department of Homeland Security): 1-888-347-2423

Canada

• Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-833-900-1010 — found at canadianhumantraffickinghotline.ca
• Ontario Native Women’s Association, Indigenous Anti-Human Trafficking Liaison Program: onwa.ca
• Crime Stoppers (anonymous tips): 1-800-222-8477

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911 or your local police.

Relevant Scripture

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
    because the Lord has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
    to proclaim freedom for the captives
    and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
    and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
   and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
    instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
    instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
    instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
    a planting of the Lord
    for the display of his splendor. (Isaiah 61:1-3)