The Bureau of Indian Affairs is disputing a Republican-approved report that accompanies H.R.4970, a bill to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

In the report, the House Judiciary Committee claimed that the BIA agreed that non-Indian offenders commit "very small percentage" of domestic violence crimes on reservations. But Michael Black, the agency's director, responded with a letter stating: "This is not true."

"To the contrary, the BIA recognizes that over half of all Indian married women have non-Indian husbands and that Indian women experience some of the highest domestic-violence victimization rates in the country," Black wrote to the committee yesterday. "There can be no doubt that there is a very real problem of non-Indian on Indian domestic violence in Indian Country today."

The Republican report questioned long-accepted statistics that said most perpetrators of domestic violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women are non-Indian. The data has been used to justify the need for tribes to exercise jurisdiction over non-Indians.

The House voted largely along party lines on Wednesday to approve H.R.4970 despite objections from the Obama administration, tribes, women's groups and domestic violence advocates. They say the bill fails to protect American Indian and Alaska Native women.

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