Empowering Indigenous Women And 
Communities Through Self-Defense 

JACKIE CHERNIKOFF: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our 
virtual session today empowering indigenous women and 
communities through self-defense. My name is Jackie Chernikoff, 
with the Center on Victimization and Safety at the Barrett 
Institute of Justice and the National Resource Center for Reaching 
Victims. I'm really glad that you all joined us today for this 
incredibly impactful session led by Shanda Poitra, the founder and 
executive director of Turtle Mountain Empowerment Self-defense, 
and Meg Stone, the executive director of IMPACT Boston. 

I had the great privilege of getting to know the important work 
that Shanda and Meg have done together through their time as a 
National Resource Center for Reaching Victims mini-grantee in 
2019. If you'd like to learn more about their work you can visit 
reachingvictims.org and click on the link for innovation grants. 

Before I turn the floor up to Shanda and Meg, I want to provide a 
content warning for this session. During the presentation, there 
are some images of racism against indigenous people. If you 
would like a copy of the presentation, please go to the 
reachingvictims.org website to access it. With that I want to turn 
things over to Shanda and Meg. Thank you. 


SHANDA POITRA: My name is Shanda Poitra. I am from the 
Turtle Mountain reservation. 

MEG STONE: Meg Stone from IMPACT Boston. I'll be back later. 

SHANDA POITRA: OK. OK, so again, my name is Shanda Poitra. 
My traditional name is [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. That means 
Corn Silk Woman. I am from the Eagle clan and reside in the-- 
was born and raised in the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation 
in Belcourt, North Dakota. So today we are going to share the 
work we've been doing together. Turtle Mountain Empowerment 
Self-defense and IMPACT Boston, and our collaboration, and what 
we have been doing and where we are planning to go. 

So IMPACT is a nationally recognized self-defense and violence 
prevention program. I'm the executive director of Turtle Mountain 
Empowerment Self-defense, but we are training to become our 
own IMPACT chapter for indigenous communities. So we've been 
training together and traveling back and forth and learning new 
material that will-- we're actually using the IMPACT curriculum 
and altering it to become more culturally specific to indigenous 
people. 

So how we got started. I started with IMPACT. I started with 
IMPACT at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. This is 
where I left for college. At the time I was a mother of three, and I 
was a full time college student, and I also worked a part time job. 


And I was in a very abusive unhealthy relationship at the time. 
And being a full time student, we were required to have a 
minimum of 12 credits per semester. And so I had 11 credits, and 
searching for one more to fill my schedule, I came upon an 
IMPACT class taught by a Kay Mendick from the north Dakota 
chapter. And it was a one credit class. It was taking place a 
[INAUDIBLE]. 

JACKIE CHERNIKOFF: This is Jackie. Looks like Shanda is frozen, 
so we're going to give her a moment to come back. In the 
meantime you shouldn't be able to hear anything. This is Jackie. 
We're just still waiting to see if we can get Shanda back online. In 
the meantime Meg, did you want to hop on? 

MEG STONE: Sure, I can hop on. Shan-- I've been texting with 
Shanda. She is having some internet difficulties. And I will do my 
best to step in and then as soon as we can restore Shanda 
hopefully y'all can hear from her, which is absolutely the better 
part of the presentation. So I'm going to talk a little bit about 
feminist empowerment self-defense. 

I worked as a domestic violence and sexual assault advocate for 
many years. Specifically I went to court with survivors that were 
seeking orders of protection, and I was often in situations where I 
was faced with either people who had been abusive to the 
people-- to the survivors that I was working with, or other folks 
in the court systems who would speak to me in a way that I 


found pretty intimidating and pretty concerning. And a part of me 
would just freeze. 

And at some point in my process I actually took an IMPACT class. 
I wanted to feel more powerful in my life. I had friends who had 
done it. And it was a really wonderful experience for me both as 
an advocate and as a survivor. What I got from it was the ability 
to access my voice and my power when I was feeling scared or 
physically vulnerable. 

One of our students in an IMPACT class that we took before, that 
we taught many years ago, really articulated it this way. What 
she said was, part of the abuse was living in my body, and it had 
to be physically released. So there are so many incredible, 
creative ways that survivors heal from the experience of abuse 
and trauma, and the one thing that self-defense has to offer is 
that it really heals the body. It really helps people reclaim or 
claim their power and their agency in the face of fear or in the 
face of threat. And it also is a practical skill and tool that people 
can use to prevent abuse and violence. 

So I worked with IMPACT for close to 20 years now. And what we 
found over the years is oftentimes when we open a class to the 
public, to just anybody who wants to join, anybody who wants to 
learn these skills, the majority of people who take the class are 
seeking us out because of a past experience of abuse and 
trauma. So I'm going to talk about some reasons that abuse 


survivors take self-defense, what motivates survivors to take 
programs like IMPACT. 

For some people who have experienced abuse or violence, there's 
a feeling of not being safe in any number of situations. One of the 
students that took our class in the past experienced an assault, 
and she just stopped going out, stopped seeing her friends, 
stopped doing what she enjoyed. And when she was able to have 
the experience of resisting violence and protecting herself, she 
was able to rejoin her life. 

Some people come to us looking for a body based healing 
program. Others do so for far more practical reasons. A lot of the 
survivors we work with are dealing with shared custody or court 
dates or other situations that require them to have to interact 
with people who've been abusive to them in the past. So taking 
self-defense really helps them regain a sense of their own 
capacity to stay safe in an unsafe or potentially unsafe situation. 
There was a-- 

JACKIE CHERNIKOFF: Jackie. Sorry, this is Jackie. I'm just going 
to ask for a pause so we can do an interpreter switch. 

MEG STONE: All right, thank you. Let's do an interpreter switch. 
Thank you. So I was talking about a survivor who we worked 
with. She was dealing with a really difficult custody case, a really 
difficult court situation. And she had a series of court dates and 


before each one of them she would come to us and take a self-
defense class, just a private lesson, just for herself. 

For the first part of the lesson she would practice physical skills, 
she would feel strong in her body, she would practice hitting and 
striking and kicking and yelling, and doing everything that made 
her feel physically powerful. After that our instructors would 
actually portray the role of the people that she was concerned 
about or fearful about interacting with in court. Her abusive ex, 
the judge, the lawyers. 

People who treated her in a way that was intimidating or 
disrespectful. And she practiced verbally advocating for herself. 
And the experience of connecting to her body helped her connect 
to her voice. And that is really part of why survivors are drawn to 
self-defense, and what helps in terms of healing. 

But of course, when we think about self-defense, if you were to 
Google self-defense right now, what you would find is nothing like 
what I'm talking about. A lot of the images that we see when we 
think of self-defense are pretty fear based. They oftentimes focus 
on strangers and sort of rare but very sensational acts of 
violence. A lot of self-defense advice is very prescriptive. 

Don't wear a ponytail. Don't go at night. Don't use your earbuds. 
Pretend you're talking to your boyfriend when you walk down the 
street. If you live alone and you're a woman, put a pair of men's 


shoes on your porch so everyone thinks you live with a man. I am 
not making any of this up. This is all sort of what passes for self-
defense. And oftentimes the message underlying the specific 
messages is to make your life smaller in order to be safe, and to 
follow prescriptive and specific advice as a way to keep yourself 
safe. 

But what feminist empowerment self-defense does is very 
different. From the start and from the core, empowerment self-
defense sees sexual assault, gender based violence, and all types 
of violence as a societal problem. This is not an individual 
problem. This is nothing that we bring on ourselves, but we live 
in a society in which violence and abuse is a reality. 

So what empowerment self-defense does is give people individual 
skills to be able to navigate and find power and find capacity for 
collective resistance in the midst of this individual problem. So 
empowerment self-defense addresses the realities of gender 
based violence. It is relevant to sexual assault and intimate 
partner violence perpetrated by people we know. It's also 
relevant to other types of harm, like sexual harassment, and 
other types of boundary violations. 

Empowerment self-defense emphasizes choice. We teach people 
a variety of skills and tools and we do not presume that we know 
better than anybody else what's right for their lives. So they 
experience safety skills, they experience protecting their bodies, 


using their voices. And then we support each person to make 
choices that are right for them. 

That also means that when we teach self-defense, we teach a 
wide range of skills. So it is everything from communicating 
assertively to leaving a situation to de-escalating a situation, 
trying to calm a volatile situation, to physically and verbally 
resisting using our bodies to protect ourselves. The other 
principle about empowerment self-defense is it's not designed to 
be the most exciting action movie fight sequence you've ever 
seen in your life. It is designed to be accessible to people 
regardless of their fitness level, accessible to all bodies, and to be 
able to be learned by people of many different ways of life. 

Some important growth edges that empowerment self-defense 
has. Empowerment self-defense has a lot more work to do in 
terms of addressing racism and race based violence and how it 
intersects with gender based violence. When we work in North 
Dakota with the Turtle Mountain tribe, the experience of 
racialized violence, the experience of hate speech, really can't be 
separated from people's experience of gender based violence. 

The other need that we have in empowerment self-defense is to 
shift and transform the historically white leadership, and 
specifically to address safety and harm reduction strategies when 
the perpetrators of violence are in law enforcement, and have a 
lot more power than an everyday person who is committing 


violence or harm. The other group edge of empowerment self-
defense is making it accessible to rural communities and tribal 
communities. The vast majority of empowerment self-defense 
programs are in more urban areas, so one of the things that 
IMPACT Boston is really committed to is making this program 
accessible outside of urban areas. 

And as I said in the previous slide, there's a lot of types of self-
defense out there. And there are many different empowerment 
approaches to self-defense, and if you're in your community and 
you're trying to assess somebody who teaches self-defense, here 
are some principles about what can make a self-defense class 
trauma informed. 

The first is confidentiality and physical safety. Instructors who 
place a lot of emphasis on ensuring that participants are 
physically safe, ensuring that the space is confidential, that 
people have the support. That people's stories are not shared 
without their permission. 

Other things are check ins and circles and other reflective parts of 
the class where people can speak about how it felt, about their 
experience, about how they're doing. Another aspect is that when 
we teach a physical or verbal skill in a trauma informed space, 
there's always a gradual progression from something that is less 
charged or challenging to something that is more charged or 


challenging. And in that progression every participant makes a 
choice that is right for them, and every choice is self-defense. 

Saying no to a teacher is a great self-defense skill. Practicing in 
real time saying no to someone who's in a position of authority is 
really key to what we are trying to teach. So if a student or 
participant doesn't want to do something, we absolutely support 
that. 

We also-- one important thing that trauma informed self-defense 
instructors can do is to realize that for anybody, but particularly 
for those who have past experiences of abuse and trauma, 
learning to protect your body, even just yelling the word no, can 
be very emotional and can bring up a lot of feelings and a lot of 
struggles and past trauma. So trauma informed self-defense 
programs instructors have the skills to help people ground 
themselves, heal their bodies, calm their bodies, when they get 
adrenalized or stress. So again, there are many different types of 
self-defense out there. And these are some ways of assessing 
whether a self-defense program is a good fit for a survivor who's 
looking for something trauma informed. 

There are many different types of empowerment self-defense. 
The one that I'm going to speak about today is IMPACT. The 
IMPACT methodology is one that teaches safety skills and self-
defense skills through realistic scenarios, through realistically 
simulating an attempted assault or harassment or boundary 


violation situation. So most of us who know how to swim learn 
how to swim by getting in the water. Most of us who learn how to 
ride a bicycle actually got on a bicycle and did it. 

So similarly in the IMPACT methodology we believe in teaching 
people how to defend themselves by actually defending 
themselves. So you'll see in this photo, for those who are viewing 
the photos, there is a man who is wearing a gigantic silver helmet 
and football pads and various other protective padding. That 
protective gear is designed to enable instructors to actually 
simulate an assault that a person who is perpetrating violence 
would engage in. And the student actually gets to resist that 
assault by striking a person in a way that would end the threat 
against them in many assault situations. 

So to say it more simply, you get to hit as hard as you can. And 
for many survivors that can be an incredibly healing experience. 
The person who is trained to portray the role of the aggressor not 
only teaches physical skills, but they also can engage in some of 
the verbal behaviors that an assailant would engage in. So 
coercion, intimidation, minimizing, threatening. So people can 
actually practice and experience advocating for themselves when 
somebody is trying to harm them or trying to undermine them. 

This is of course done in a very supportive environment, with a 
lot of lead up to these particular simulations. As you'll see, the 
woman in the red t-shirt who is standing between the two, that's 


actually Angie who is also from the Turtle Mountain tribe. She's in 
the role of a coach. So her job is to focus on the student, to 
support the student, to offer words of encouragement and help, 
and also to maintain physical safety. So even in a simulated 
situation, nobody is left alone. 

It is a healing experience for many survivors because it provides 
a connection and an ability to access the power of our bodies. 
And to find that power even when we feel fear. And being able to 
do that can really shift a lot for a lot of survivors, both in terms of 
the emotional and psychological healing, and in terms of practical 
safety skills. Being able to have a skill set that helps you 
advocate for yourself when you're feeling stressed, or when 
you're feeling fear, or when someone's trying to undermine you 
can help you in many different life circumstances. 

So there's been some really solid research on the effectiveness of 
empowerment self-defense. This study presented in this 
particular slide was conducted by Dr. Jocelyn Hollander at the 
University of Oregon. She did a research study that followed 
students who took a 30 hour empowerment self-defense class, 
and also another group of students who took another college 
class. And what she found is overall 30% of the comparison 
group experienced some form of sexual assault as compared to 
only 12% of the self-defense group. So what the self-defense 


group experienced less than half the rate of sexual assault as the 
intervention group. 

Charlene Senn of the University of Windsor in Canada was able to 
do a much larger randomized study, and she found that women 
who took a 12 hour empowerment self-defense program were 
63% less likely to experience attempted rape, and 46% less likely 
to experience completed rape. So again I want to go back to what 
I said earlier about feminist empowerment self-defense. Sexual 
assault is a societal problem and it is the responsibility of those 
who cause or perpetrate sexual assault. 

But what we are finding with empowerment self-defense is that 
when women-- and to date the studies have only been done on 
women, so there is more need for inclusive research-- when 
women are taught the skills to resist sexual violence in a 
curriculum that addresses coercion, that addresses gender 
socialization, that addresses all of the ways that women are 
taught to be compliant in ways that don't serve their own agency 
and their own safety, than their experience of sexual violence can 
be reduced. 

There's also research that specifically focuses on IMPACT and 
other empowerment self-defense programs in terms of their 
effect on trauma and healing from trauma. Two researchers who 
studied therapy populations, so IMPACT students who received 
this training as part of group therapy, found reductions in post-


traumatic stress disorder and reductions in shame as a result of 
learning to physically protect their bodies. 

The other outcomes that sort of more therapeutic and healing 
impact programs have shown is that for a lot of survivors who 
have experienced trauma and abuse, there is a lasting 
disconnection from their bodies. Oftentimes the natural fight or 
flight that us as humans want to engage in in response to an 
unsafe situation gets blocked. It's not safe to fight back. It's not 
possible to flee. So that block becomes unblocked for some 
survivors when they experience empowerment self-defense. It's 
also an experience of increased-- the therapy term for it is 
integrated body or body integration. What it basically means is 
people are more connected to and aware of their bodies. 

So what we are working to do with all that is available through 
empowerment self-defense as well as our growing edges is to 
work with Shanda and the Turtle Mountain team around creating 
a culturally specific empowerment self-defense program. So can I 
check in with the viewer folks and see if we have reconnected 
with Shanda, if we've been able to get Shanda back on? Oh I see 
Shanda. Awesome, OK. 

JACKIE TURNIKOFF: This is Jackie. Meg, we're going to have you 
continue to share your screen, so that Shanda isn't-- can share 
her video with us and hopefully that will work. 


MEG STONE: Sure. OK so I will go back to the Our Beginning slide 
and share my screen from there. 

JACKIE CHERNIKOFF: This is Jackie, we're also going to pause for 
an interpreter switch while you're doing that. 

SHANDA POITRA: This is Shanda. Hi, I apologize for the technical 
difficulties. Of course that had to happen right away. But I am 
back. So I will continue where I left off. I was discussing my 
experience with the University of North Dakota, and picking up 
that one credit IMPACT class. When I took that class it was 
completely life changing for me in ways that I did not know that-- 
it showed me strength in ways I didn't know I had. And one of 
the most powerful self-defense tools that I had was my voice. 

And I had never used it to defend myself, because being born and 
raised on the reservation, the mentality was, all couples fight. It's 
a normal thing. And so I was raised with having that acceptance 
for abuse. And so taking this class really changed my way of 
thinking when it comes to relationships. And I have carried 
myself differently ever since. And I was able to finally have the 
courage and healing to be able to leave my abuser after 11 years. 

And I just became my own person after that. And I was so 
empowered. And I joined Roller Derby and I started going on 
medical mission trips to other countries. And I lived more freely 


and I felt more confident and safe. Which also created more 
healing for me. 

So once I had learned all these skills and started living my life in 
a whole new way, I ended up moving back to the reservation in 
2015, and I knew that I would want our people to have the same 
empowerment. And when I moved back I quickly noticed that it 
was the same mentality as it was when I had left over a decade 
earlier. And so I decided to reach out to my IMPACT instructor 
and see what would I have to do to create an IMPACT chapter for 
my community for indigenous women. And reaching out to her, 
her advice was get a team together and come back here and take 
our basic class, which was another 20 hours like Friday, 
Saturday, and Sunday. And then we'll go from there. 

And so it took me a little while, but I managed to get a team 
together. And so we went to UND, and we took the basics class, 
and just like I had healed and become empowered, my 
teammates had. This was their first experience with IMPACT, and 
they were carrying trauma on their own, which they thought was 
a normal part of life. And they were healing and it was such a 
beautiful experience for us. And so we all agreed that we were 
going to work to bring this to Indian country. Not just our 
community, but like as many native communities as we can in 
the upper Midwest and Canada. 


And so that's what we are working to do. However, since then the 
program at UMD had closed because of lack of funding. So we 
were kind of back at square one until we met with Meg, and got 
to talking about our goals, and she shared with us that she 
wanted to-- well that she teaches IMPACT Ability, which is for 
people with disabilities. And that was one thing that was very 
passionate for us and that's what we wanted to do. 

So my reservation, Turtle Mountain reservation, we have over 
32,000 enrolled tribal members. We are like 13 miles from the 
Canadian border. We're at the upper central part of North Dakota. 

Our reservation is 6 by 12 miles. However we have many little 
small towns in the county where our people have kind of spread 
out, and so on 32,000 enrolled members doesn't necessarily 
mean on our little 6 by 12 mile reservation. It is a very small 
area. 

So one thing that we wanted to do right away when we created 
Turtle Mountain Empowerment Self-defense is we wanted to bring 
in our culture and our traditions, and we wanted to keep it 
relevant to the people in our community. And so one of the 
traditions on the Turtle Mountain Reservation with many different 
tribal programs and the school systems, the colleges, are the 
seven grandfathers of the Anishinaabe. Anishinaabe means First 
People. And the seven grandfathers are also the seven teachings. 


And this is incorporated into everything that we do here on our 
reservation, and it's and it's just how we want ourselves and our 
family and friends to lead a more respectful lives, and this is how 
we want to treat people. And so the seven teachings are wisdom, 
love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth. And I always 
resonated with bravery when we started this program, because to 
face the foe with integrity, that's what we want to teach. That's 
what we want to instill into our participants, to have that 
confidence and know self-respect. And strength to stand up for 
themselves. 

And so the reasons why we felt that we needed self-defense in 
our community, we sat down together, our team, and kind of 
went over different reasons why or how this could benefit us, and 
why is it important for people to have some kind of violence 
prevention program. We have many victims services, which is 
wonderful. But we wanted to join the fight. And we wanted to 
help in any way that we could. And we decided empowerment 
self-defense was how we wanted to do that. 

So the reasons that were colonialism and things of that nature. 
So this is me. This is me flipping off a statue of Christopher 
Columbus in Boston. And this picture was actually like-- I saw 
him from a distance, and just as if it was the real person there, I 
was like, is that Christopher? And you know marched straight up 
there, because growing up I learned the truth from my elders. 


And so we're one thing in the school system in our history books. 
We're taught the good Thanksgiving story, and how we're all 
friends, and we sat at the same table, and we taught them how 
to grow corn and all these wonderful things. But that was not the 
reality of what happened to our people. And so we learned the 
truth from our grandparents and our elders in the community. 

And so growing up with that little chip on our shoulders. So when 
I see Christopher Columbus, I don't see-- and I'm sure I speak 
for many Native Americans-- we don't see this guy who 
discovered a free world. We didn't see this great navigator. We 
see a murderer and a rapist. Because that was the reality of what 
happened to our people. 

And that brings us to colonization. So when in the time that 
Christopher Columbus had come here, genocide was committed 
against our people which eradicated 98% of our population. After 
that President Andrew Jackson initiated the Indian Removal Act in 
1830, which started the Trail of Tears. They were moving Native 
Americans, moving them from their lands and forcing them to 
different locations in the country, and forcing them onto 
reservations. And during that Trail of Tears we had lost so many 
of our people through exposure through disease and things of 
that nature. 

And so after-- so we lost that much more people. The law 
authorized the president to negotiate with southern native tribes 


for their removal to federal American territory west of the 
Mississippi River in exchange for white settlement of their 
ancestral lands. It was strongly enforced by Andrew Jackson's 
administration. So the native tribes at that time had quickly 
opposed the act, but were unsuccessful and forcibly removed. So 
that became known as the Trail of Tears. And losing many, many 
of our people to exposure, diseases, and starvation. 

After that there were different parts of-- or different ways that 
they would assimilate our people. And one of the most 
traumatizing ways was the Indian boarding school. They were 
taking native children from their families and placing them in 
boarding schools, and their logo for this was to kill the Indian and 
save the man. And so these children were taken by force and 
brought to these schools. 

And many times they never got to see their families again. There 
were so many of them that didn't survive the boarding schools. 
There are mass graves of children at boarding schools. And the 
picture here is an example of how they wanted to kill the Indian 
and save the man. They wanted to assimilate them and bring 
them into the European culture. 

We also have Indian Health Service, which the IHS hospital. And 
there were throughout the years there were women going in for 
common colds and coming out sterilized, and they had no idea. 
They weren't aware. They weren't educated about the medical 


terminology and things, so they were signing papers or even not 
even seeing a paper in most cases, and were sterilized. And so 
that was happening. 

This created a lot of historical trauma. There is a lot of 
generational trauma there. So children were forced to speak 
English, they were raised with no love, respect, or human 
contact. And they were raised to be a very strict Christian. So 
once the children were turning 18, they were kind of turned away 
from the boarding schools and forced out into the world on their 
own, not really experiencing any love or affection throughout 
their upbringing. 

So they would find their way home and continue that ripple effect 
of abuse and trauma into their own families. And so this really 
embedded some generational trauma with our people. And it's 
still a very big factor to this day. 

Racism and stereotyping here in North Dakota, what that's 
looking like is we have at the UND, there was a controversial 
name for all their sports teams. It was the Fighting Sioux logo. It 
has now changed to the Fighting Hawks after years of 
controversy and legal in and out of courts and things like that. 
And the name was used from 1999 to 2012, and it was cited as 
hostile and abusive toward Native Americans. The word Sioux 
itself is a discriminatory word. 


And so but now like after the logo was changed to the Fighting 
Hawks there are still so many people in North Dakota, like the 
majority of the fans that attend these sporting events are still 
wearing their Sioux jerseys, and chanting racial slurs. And so 
there was a lot of racism brought down on Native American 
people in that area because of the names switch. Native 
Americans were blamed for because they protested and they 
fought to have it changed, because of lack of respect. 

So here is a few pictures of different colleges in North Dakota. 
And these are very recent. We have people dressing up as Native 
Americans, and they're holding up signs, just clearly making fun 
of Native Americans and the Black Lives Matter movement. They 
make their own t-shirts, they have been vandalizing the native 
centers at the universities. 

And it's just been-- it's been really difficult for our native students 
because we often leave the reservation to go to these 
universities. Because there isn't much of an option going to 
college on the reservation. We have our colleges, but we only go 
so far with them before we transfer to universities to further our 
degrees. And so we are subjected to this kind of racism on a daily 
basis. And there are so many, so many stories that of violence 
against our native children that don't even make the news. So it's 
very much swept under the rug and not addressed. 


So we also have NODAPL. So that's the Dakota Access Pipeline 
protests. This was in Standing Rock, North Dakota. And so this 
began in 2016 when a major pipeline was being built. The 
construction continued, and since there have been numerous 
leaks in the pipeline spilling oil into the water, destroying the 
environment. There are protesters who are still in prison. 

But what was happening to our people out there during the 
peaceful protests is they were met with police brutality. There 
were firing rubber bullets, they had attack dogs, tear gas. They 
were spraying freezing water and in that one-- this was during 
Native American heritage month-- they were pushing back the 
protest line into the freezing waters. It was very cold during that 
time, and also spraying them with tear gas and more freezing 
water. 

And the construction continued. Since then our native people had 
become known as the water protectors. And they continued 
through all of the seasonal changes and all of the exposure to 
different elements, and they continued their protest for a very 
long time. And still yet the construction continued, and it had-- 
they had bulldozed through a sacred burial grounds and things of 
that nature. And arresting a lot of the protesters. And so it was 
very devastating to a lot of our people. And so this was just in 
2016. And so this brings on a lot of racism in the Bismarck area 
as well, because it was it was close to that area. 


There is the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. So the 
internet and social media really helped gain attention to this 
epidemic. Our indigenous women were being murdered or going 
missing at 10 times the national average. And so while the 
#MeToo movement was really growing, it wasn't quite reaching 
indigenous communities because of the differences there of the 
generational trauma, things of that nature, and racism against 
our people. It wasn't really inclusive to our kind of trauma. 

But there's over 500 chapters of MMIW in our nation alone. 
They're collecting data and trying to find out how many have 
gone missing, how many were found, who-- they're collecting 
names and stories and things of this nature. But the numbers are 
still uncertain. Because there have just been so many cases that 
have went on without justice. 

We had an oil boom in North Dakota where it brought on-- 
workers would come from all over the country to come up and 
work on the oil fields. And with that grew into Man Camps, they 
were called. And so in small towns like Williston, North Dakota-- 
can you go back one slide? OK, yeah. So the oil booms which 
created the Man Camps causing the small town of Williston, North 
Dakota to grow from a population of 12,000, to 30,000 in just a 
short period of time. 

So it was quickly recognized that when this-- when the Man 
Camps were created, a lot of crime and violence were happening 


in the area. The women's shelters were in triage mode. And they-
- it was happening so fast it was difficult to target what exactly 
was happening. They put an FBI station there in Williston. The 
calls to police departments, like more than quadrupled. It was a 
very, very large change in a very short time. OK. 

So May 5th is nationally recognized as a memorial to MMIW. And 
so every year on May 5th we have awareness events, one of 
which is the ReDress project. So using red dresses or attire are 
laid out with the stories of women who have gone missing, so 
that we can remember them. And choosing the color red was told 
to us through our ancestors that red it is said to be the only color 
that spirits can see, and so it's kind of a calling to these women 
that we remember you, we're here to honor you, and we're not 
going to let that spirit in the memory go unrecognized. 

We have we have these projects that happen in our colleges and 
in the school systems all over in our event centers and stuff so. 
On May 5th we wear red to take part in the awareness of the 
MMIW. 

This is Savanna Greywind. She was one of our missing women. 
This was in 2018, I believe. Savanna was at home in Fargo, North 
Dakota. She lived in this apartment building. She lived with her 
parents and she was sitting at home. She was eight months 
pregnant. She ordered a pizza. She had things to do when there 
was a knock at the door from one of her neighbors asking her if 


she would come upstairs to model some dresses for her. And 
Savanna was reluctant to do so, but she didn't want to be rude. 
So in trying to be nice she agreed to go upstairs. And that was 
the last time that Savanna was seen alive. 

The people had taken her baby from her womb, and her body 
was found several days later in the Red River. Her baby was 
found with the murderers about a week later. They heard the 
baby crying in the building. And this was after many, many 
search warrants that went on in that building. And investigators 
were in those apartments over and over, and it was just-- there 
were details missed, and so. 

This all initiated this Savanna's Act which was brought on by 
Senator Heidi Heitkamp. And in an attempt to make law 
enforcement pay more attention and put more emphasis on 
MMIW instead of letting so much time go by before they begin 
their investigations. Because that's been a continued problem. 

And that's why we want to teach women to use their voices and 
to resist violence. There is domestic violence, there's sexual 
assault. 56% of our native women experience sexual violence in 
their lifetime. And in the Turtle Mountains alone, when I move 
back in 2015, I mean I was hearing so many stories of friends of 
mine who were being beaten and left for dead by their partners. 


And it was then that I decided like something has to be done. We 
have to teach our people how to heal from our trauma and how 
to use your voices and speak up. And so let me think. Why self-
defense? Why are we bringing that to the table with victim 
services? For many, many reasons. We have our own personal 
and generational trauma. As native women, as growing up in a 
poverty stricken area, there are many reasons why we teach this 
individually. 

And so we wanted to go with IMPACT because when, like I said, 
when I took IMPACT and when my team took IMPACT, it was so 
life changing. The way that it's taught. It's taught trauma first aid 
because you're really triggering the trauma that you have inside 
of you with raising your voice or hearing a voice being raised at 
you, and so you come out of it feeling very empowered. Like you 
took back what was taken from me. 

And so I felt that IMPACT had a real grit to it that our native 
women would really benefit from. Because we were raised with a 
very tough exterior, because of the trauma in our blood. And so 
the verbal and physical techniques we wanted to create more 
culturally relevant. And so we sort of different ways that our 
women are affected by violence in our community, or in Indian 
country as a whole, and we started incorporating those scenarios 
into our curriculum. 


IMPACT also brings a safe and supportive atmosphere. Like I 
said, it's very trauma informed. So we have intro and closing 
circles, and we also check in with participants during the 
workshops. And so it just kind of has that emotional connection 
between participants and between the instructors and the 
participants. It has that solidarity there. 

And it creates an atmosphere where women are more likely to 
share their stories of their trauma, which will have this ripple 
effect throughout the group where more and more will share. And 
although the sharing is completely voluntary, we noticed that 
there's a lot of healing that comes with that when discussing your 
trauma with other people. And so it's just been so moving to do 
this work, and we're all very passionate about it. And so we're 
working hard to continue. 

And so now we are looking at making IMPACT more culturally 
specific. So we have been brainstorming about scenarios that-- or 
situations that affect our women. And not just the language and 
the situations, but the logistics of it. Where you're at. So we're 
creating scenarios that are more realistic to our location and the 
things that we are dealing with. 

We cover hate speech, which can cover either somebody being 
derogatory toward you because of your gender, or because of 
your nationality. Especially with all of the protests going on in 
North Dakota, and the backlash that native people had to suffer, 


we do a lot of scenarios where people are being confronted by, 
oh, you're one of those protesters. And, so and it's actually what 
a lot of our people are going through in the bigger cities in North 
Dakota. 

We also cover a scenario. We created this one after-- so I moved 
home and my full time job is in a hospital. I'm a surgical 
technologist. And one thing that I have noticed throughout the 
years is that there's a lot of abuse of power inside of those kinds 
of institutions. And so we have women coming in for sore throats, 
or they want a skin tag removed. And they're being coerced into 
more invasive procedures like-- like for female hygiene. And in an 
area where a family practice doctor has no business doing pelvic 
exams, they're coercing these young women into doing it with no 
reason whatsoever. 

And so we decided to create a scenario where a participant is in 
the doctor's office, and she's there for a sore throat. And the 
doctor is telling her-- he's reviewing her chart, he's being 
charming. He's being very nice and likable. But he's telling her I 
see that you haven't had a pelvic exam in a while. I think we 
should just get that out of the way. And he's using his power to 
really talk her into believing that it's a much needed procedure, 
and things of that nature. 

And so we are teaching the women how to really trust your 
instincts with that, and educating them about how to advocate for 


themselves against somebody in power, how to say no. And how 
to recognize when saying no is not being heard or respected. And 
which furthers the scenario into is this going to go physical. And 
recognizing the body language and how do you use your voice 
and your body and how to get out of that situation. 

And when we first taught this scenario, was it was a workshop of 
10 women who took this scenario, and it was our very first time 
teaching it. Eight of those 10 women during our closing circle had 
admitted that that exact scenario had happened to them. And 
then six of these women admitted that they went through with 
the pelvic exam, because they trusted this physician. They had no 
they felt they had no reason not to. And so they went along with 
the pelvic exam. 

One of these women, during her pelvic exam, heard the click of a 
cell phone camera. And when she immediately heard that sound 
she sat up and asked what was that, and he told her it's no big 
deal. I do it for my research and my dictations. You're fine. And 
so with every alarm going off inside of her she still knew that 
something was very wrong, but she never reported it because of 
fear that either nobody would believe her, or that this man had so 
much power that nothing was going to happen anyway. 

So we're trying to teach women how to speak up for themselves 
and how to say no. So we're going to do a quick pause for our 
interpreters to switch. Oh, we're good? OK. OK. 


So IMPACT and the sweat lodge tradition. So when we took 
IMPACT, all of our first experiences. I took it in college, I brought 
a team there years later. And then we had our suit instructors, 
two men who joined our team, to wear the suits. And so they 
come along with us to Boston to take their first IMPACT class. 
And what they did was they observed the whole class, and they 
got to see the empowerment of the women taking it. And they 
got to see how the coaches interacted with the participants. And 
they got to see the whole picture. 

And so after that we got to talking, and we noticed why IMPACT 
works for our people. There are so many similarities between 
IMPACT and our sweat lodge traditions. So in our sweat lodge, we 
sit in our circles, and it's to represent the medicine wheel and the 
four directions. Sitting in that circle represents the alignment and 
continuous interaction of the physical emotional, mental, and 
spiritual realities. And so having that same sense of prayer and 
attachment to those practices were felt during the circles, the 
closing circles in IMPACT. 

And so and also knowing that it's a very safe and supportive 
atmosphere. In a sweat lodge you go from person to person, 
each praying. And some pray to themselves, some pray out loud. 
And if you're praying out loud, other people are praying with you 
at the same time. And sitting in that closing circle, sharing your 
story, is similar to saying your prayer, and you're coming out the 


other side of that healed and feeling empowered and feeling 
supported and loved, and it's very, very powerful. And so we 
experience that with IMPACT. And so teaching it to our native 
people is very-- we can see them adjusting to the curriculum very 
smoothly, even with trauma, because they know that they have 
that support and that-- it can be a religious experience. 

And also bringing tradition to our circles. During closing circles 
our suit instructors are very traditional men. And so they really 
bring a lot of tradition, because they know a lot of our traditional 
music. And so James Dakota our student instructor, he sings the 
traditional song at the end of closing circle. And the song is a 
song that is an honor of all of our missing and murdered 
indigenous women. And the words translate to, "We will always 
remember you, warrior women, and leader women. You are in 
our hearts and in our minds." 

And it's so-- I guess I don't know how to describe how much 
more powerful it is for our women, because it has that similarity 
to our ceremony. Our traditional ceremony. And it just makes it 
that much more powerful. And so we taught a workshop at the 
University of North Dakota. It was an InMed program, which is 
Indians into Medicine, a summer camp for young native high 
schoolers to come from all over the country to come to the UND 
to take this summer program. And they allowed us to come and 
do a workshop with these students. 


And during one of the workshops there was about 22 participants 
involved there. And teaching that class I kind of felt like I wasn't 
sure if the participants were really resonating with the material. 
And I felt like there was like this disconnect between the 
instructors and the participants. And I just wasn't sure if they 
were getting it, because they were so stoic throughout the 
scenarios that it didn't really seem effective. And then when it 
comes to the closing circle, I mean one by one these young 
women totally opened up. 

And every single one of those women were personally affected by 
MMIW. Whether it was a mother or an aunt or a cousin or some 
relative or friend of the family or their friend who had gone 
missing or had been murdered. And being personally affected by 
that, they all shared their stories with one another one by one. 
And then followed by the traditional song memorializing those 
women and honoring them, there was not a dry eye in the room. 
We were all very moved. And it was an incredibly powerful circle. 

But we didn't want to leave with everybody doing our workshop 
and then walking out the door crying. We didn't want everybody 
to leave like that. And so we decided to get all them up on their 
feet, and one last thing before they left the workshop was we 
started-- we stood up together and we stayed in our circle and we 
started chanting, "No more stolen sisters." And so louder and 
louder the chants grew, and it was so incredible and powerful, 


and it's-- we're raising a whole generation of radicals. And it's so 
beautiful. 

And it's so wonderful to see them growing up during a time where 
people are protesting against police brutality or racism and sexual 
violence. And this whole era. And so we are very honored to be a 
part of that. 

We have heard success stories from some of our participants who 
have taken our workshops. One of which-- she was a domestic 
violence survivor, and she was going to court for custody of her 
child and against her abuser. And during the court he had a habit 
of trying to get into a contest with her and trying to pull her into 
this argument of going back and forth. But she admitted to us 
that when she took our class, she had learned how to stay calm 
during a very intense situation. She learned how to de-escalate, 
and she was able to focus on the facts and keep it-- keep the 
room focused on the problem at hand and what they were 
addressing instead of getting into that contest with him. And so 
she was very grateful for that skill and we were very happy to 
hear it. And it did turn out good for her. 

Another woman, we actually got a call from her mother thanking 
us for our services, because she said her daughter was in a 
situation where she was in an area where she was around an 
abusive family member. This person had sexually assaulted her at 


one time before. And he was making a sexual advance again, and 
this was after she had taken our workshop. 

And she said without thinking, it was just embedded in her 
muscle memory that she got in the strong stance. She put her 
hands up, and she said, no! Very loud and strong with her voice. 
And it brought attention from other people in the room. And of 
course he backed off and tried to gaslight her making her look 
like, well, you're overreacting. I don't know what you're talking 
about. But the outcome was in her favor because she used her 
voice and she used that powerful strength and he never had-- 
since then had bothered her again. 

And then we had another woman who was working late hours in 
this, in an office building. She was cleaning office buildings. And 
there was a supervisor there who would just give her this really 
uneasy feeling, and he would come around her when she was by 
herself, and kind of cornered her into these rooms. And tried to 
be charming and things of that nature, but she was very-- it was 
very alarming for her. 

And she was able to recognize her instincts and really follow them 
and get out of that situation. So she was able to leave as soon as 
she felt that uncomfortable feeling instead of staying there and 
just brushing it off, like, it'll be fine. Nothing's happening. Or 
trying to be nice to this person. Like she was able to recognize 
that she doesn't have to be nice to somebody who's making her 


feel uncomfortable. And that was that was a beautiful thing to 
hear. 

So the next steps for us. We really want to continue teaching 
women and girls. We want to continue brainstorming and coming 
up with scenarios that native women are going through. We do 
realize that some of the scenarios can be different, considering 
location and things of that nature. We want to really keep on 
teaching our doctor scenario and teaching women how to 
advocate for themselves against somebody in a powerful position. 

One detail that I missed was during that doctor scenario, when 
we taught all these women and all these women admitted to 
being in that situation, afterwards we taught a class for teen girls. 
And not one single teen girl had heard of this even being an 
issue. And that was really alarming to us, because we have all 
these women who have gone through it, and all these young 
women who are about to go into these clinics to see these 
doctors on their own for the first time, without their guardians. 
And so-- and they're not aware that these things are happening 
behind those closed doors. And so we really want to teach, bring 
awareness to such a horrible situation. And so it's very important. 

We also want to come up with programs and workshops for 
people with disabilities, workshops for children, LGBTQ people. 
And hopefully in the future we can have classes for men on 


healthy masculinity and healthy relationship programs, teaching 
about consent and things of that nature. And so questions? 

MEG STONE: Hi, it's Meg again. I just want to make one quick 
plug. Angelina is going to put a survey in the chat box. This is a 
survey that we were conducting of victim service providers, 
survivor support advocates, other people on this webinar, of your 
experience with ideas about and opinions about self-defense. It's 
really important. It really helps us get a sense of what people's 
experiences are around the country and outside of the country. 
And it can be-- it will be incredibly helpful to us. 

So it's the link that says surveymonkey.com 
/r/selfdefenseexperiences. So please do take the time to take it. 
It'll give us-- it'll be just incredibly helpful to us. And now Jackie. 

JACKIE CHERNIKOFF: This is Jackie. Thanks Meg and Shanda and 
everyone for participating today. As you leave the session, we 
just ask you to complete a brief evaluation, which will pop up 
automatically. We'd love to hear your feedback so we can 
continue to grow and improve our sessions and make them most 
valuable for everyone. 

And in addition, we didn't have a chance to get to everybody's 
questions, so we will pull those from the chat and get those to 
Shanda and Meg. If you have other questions that you'd like to 
get to them you can send us an email at 


reachingvictims@vera.org, and we'll be sure to get those to 
Shanda and Meg also. Thank you.