"The mother tries to be strong, looking at the photos of her dead daughter’s beaten and bruised face. She tries not to cry, but eventually the images prove too much.

“That’s what they did to her,” the mother says to her interviewer, lifting a handkerchief to her face.

Marquita Marie Walking Eagle died Nov. 1, 2009, the victim of violent sexual assault. The 19-year-old Rosebud Sioux woman’s alleged killer: a 17-year-old classmate from St. Francis High School in South Dakota.

In a June 2 episode of “Vanguard,” a documentary series on Current TV, correspondent Mariana van Zeller told Walking Eagle’s story, as well as the story of the lawlessness on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation of South Dakota.

The documentary, “Rape on the Reservation,” offered a sobering, shocking look at sexual assault on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. In South Dakota, Native people make up just nine percent of the population but 40 percent of sexual assault cases.

But while “Rape on the Reservation” focused on one reservation, its message was relevant for many reservations, considering one in three Native women will be raped in their lifetime."

Get the Story:
Editorial: Rape on the rez (Indian Country Today 6/18)

Related Stories:
NativeBiz TV: The rape crisis on Rosebud Sioux Reservation (6/10)