TW: This story depicts intimate partner abuse and sexual violence.

Georgina Pierce is a (Diné) Navajo woman living in New Mexico. She documents her life on TikTok, sharing glimpses of life with her six children, her profile displaying her glamorous makeup looks. Her face is done up in an array of colorful eyeshadow combinations and eyelashes, highlighted by arched eyebrows. She says her makeup routine feels a little different now, after a near-fatal attack by her ex-boyfriend and abuser nearly in July 2021 left her with permanent nerve damage in her face.

“It’s hard to move my lips sometimes and then when I’m doing my makeup, I can’t feel that I’m lining my lip on my left side, you know, but I just kind of adapted to it. It just kind of became part of me,” she said.

Pierce’s abuser, a former friend for 19 years, stabbed her in the face when she tried to break off their 3-month-long relationship. As the wound healed, Pierce decided to share details of the incident on social media. Her video posted on Sept. 11, 2021 has since been viewed over 6.3 million times.

This wasn’t her first brush with intimate partner violence. She told Reckon that growing up, domestic abuse of the women around her was the norm, though it was not openly discussed. Later, she found herself in several abusive relationships.

“I was being dragged, I almost got my neck broken and I got my jaw broken. I’ve got my teeth knocked out,” she said, recounting some of her past relationships.

Since going viral, she continues to share her story and encourage other women to break through learned behaviors and cycles of abuse.

“We were taught when we were younger to not talk about it. Don’t worry about it, leave it alone,” she said. “But nowadays, why can’t we talk about it? It makes you uncomfortable? Because you know it’s true. I just want to encourage everybody to reach out and to say something.”

Her story underscores the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women.

According to a 2016 National Institute of Justice report, more than 4 in 5 Native American and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56 percent who have experienced sexual violence and 55 percent who have experienced intimate partner violence. In 2022, Amnesty International called this a failure on the U.S. government’s obligation to uphold the human rights of Indigenous women.

“The U.S. government’s failure to protect Indigenous women from this epidemic of sexual violence is predicated on a shameful legacy of deeply entrenched marginalization, abuse and persecution,” said Tarah Demant, national director of programs at Amnesty International USA “Justice for Indigenous women cannot wait any longer.”

Boundaries to justice

The rates at which Native women face violence are harrowing.

Over 43 percent of Native American women report being raped during their lifetime at a rate 2.5 higher than other groups, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Affairs.

This violence often turns deadly. Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, the murder rate for Native women living on reservations is 10 times higher than the national average and the third-leading cause of death for Native women.

Historic and institutional issues like navigating jurisdictions, lack of resources and poverty all factor into this widely-perpetrated violence.

“We have our laws, but we are incapable of holding non-Native Americans accountable,” Kathy Gibson, the rural project coordinator for the Napuha Kha Nii Programs, the domestic violence and sexual assault programs for the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, told the Nevada Current last year.

According to The Progressive Magazine, an estimated 86 to 96 percent of the sexual abuse of Native women is committed by non-Indigenous perpetrators. The complex jurisdiction process acts as a barrier to obtaining justice for these crimes. Though tribal police can detain non-natives suspected of committing crimes on reservations, state or federal police must arrest them which causes major delays, according to NPR.

“That federal officers might not get there for hours and hours and hours if at all, that state police might not want to get involved, that this whole network is an indefensible morass of complexity and unworkability that creates lawlessness and impunity for criminals,” Elizabeth Reese, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, told NPR in 2021.

In 2022, Amnesty International released a report that cited the complex jurisdiction process Indigenous women face as a lacking on the U.S. government’s end.

“Tribal governments are hampered by a complex set of laws and regulations that undermine their authority and make it difficult, if not impossible, to respond to sexual violence in an effective manner,” The Never-ending Maze: Continued failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA, the Amnesty International report, noted.

According to Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, this result of structural racism carries over into non-tribal lands as well. In 2018, her organization looked into sexual violence against American Indian and Alaskan Native women in Seattle.. They found that, of the women they talked to, 94 percent had been sexually assaulted in their lifetime but only 8 percent of their rapists were convicted in the justice system.

“We see a lack of accountability. We see a lack of an investigation and, again, the systematic issues that place the blame of our victimization on our community, instead of looking at, why are we being targeted and why are we being victimized at such high rates?” she told PBS NewsHour.

Pierce’s stabbing took place in Aztec, New Mexico but after committing the crime, her abuser fled to the Navajo reservation — out of the jurisdiction of local police.

“He went on the run for one whole year by living back on the reservation where they couldn’t get him,” she explained.

Housing and other barriers

Aside from tribal jurisdiction, Indigenous women face other issues that contribute to the violence committed against them. According to census data, about 27 percent of Native Americans live in poverty.

In July 2023 STTARS Indigenous Safe Housing Center hosted a national web series detailing issues with housing in Indigenous communities. Senior housing specialist Gwendolyn Packard said that the decades-long housing crisis on tribal lands has had a major impact on the abuse Indigenous communities face.

Families living on tribal lands face high poverty rates, poor housing conditions and limited infrastructure. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, more than one-third of families on tribal lands are living in overcrowded homes, doubling up to prevent homelessness.

Packard says there’s also a lack of resources for Indigenous survivors of domestic and sexual violence and human trafficking. According to STTARS, there are less than 50 tribal domestic violence shelters in the country, compared to over 2,000 non-native domestic violence shelters. When victims don’t have the funding to leave or support to seek help, they often stay in abusive situations, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

“That’s why we have such high rates of violence in our communities, is that there’s no services, there’s no resources. There’s no place for people to go for safety,” said Packard.

Pierce says that her community normalized not talking about abuse and that being taught to stay silent is discouraging to many abused women. She told Reckon that it’s important for her to share her story as a Navajo woman “because nobody else will share.” She explained that the fear and shame prevent many in her community from speaking out against their abusers and she will continue to advocate for women on social media.

“We’re human beings, we do not deserve to live like this.”