Where No One Is Watching

Man camps, vanished women, and the unfinished frontier of violence in North Dakota.

These temporary encampments, called “man camps,” emerged during the oil boom in North Dakota and Montana, when thousands of transient workers arrived to extract crude from the Bakken shale. They’re still there, and Indigenous women are still disappearing with grim, unremarkable regularity.

Curious to understand how such a system could exist almost unnoticed, I went looking for anyone who had tried to map its contours. I found it buried on the Northwestern Law website, tucked among symposium papers and tidy reflections on jurisdiction. Man Camps and Bad Men, it was called – just another PDF in an archive nobody reads. But when I opened it, the document unfurled like a ledger of predation, the polite language straining to contain what it described. Footnotes and citations could not disguise the truth: that here was the anatomy of a violence older than the state, older than the law, older than any of the men who believed it their right to take whatever they pleased.

Before dawn in North Dakota, the man camps are already humming – rows of trailers lined up like a temporary city on the prairie. White pickup trucks idle in gravel lots, their headlights slicing through the dark. The smell of diesel clings to the cold air. Inside the camps, men are waking up for another day laying pipeline, repairing rigs, hauling gravel – thousands of workers who came for the boom.

For the women living on the nearby reservations, the presence of these camps is something else entirely. It is a reminder that violence is never far away. As one Southern Cheyenne advocate described, the men here don’t even bother to hide their intentions. She recalled overhearing them say, almost casually:

“In North Dakota you can take whatever pretty little Indian girl you like… police don’t give a fuck.”

It wasn’t an idle boast. In these man camps, many workers arrive with histories of violence – some with convictions for sexual assault. They come and go with little accountability, shielded by jurisdictional gaps that mean tribal police have no authority to arrest non-Natives. And so, rape, domestic violence, and sex trafficking follow the pipelines, like a shadow that lengthens over the land.

Tribal officers have found unregistered sex offenders living in these camps. Indigenous women report harassment, assault, and the constant threat of disappearance. As Faith Spotted Eagle, a respected elder, put it plainly: “We have seen our women suffer.”

Boomtowns of Violence

The Bakken oil fields have often been described as an economic miracle – an improbable prosperity rising from the shale and scrub of North Dakota. But alongside the promises of employment and revitalization came something more quietly corrosive: the swift erection of temporary housing settlements, known locally as “man camps.”

These are not communities in any meaningful sense. They are assemblages of trailers and pre-fab bunkhouses, thrown up to accommodate a workforce almost entirely composed of men from other states. They arrive by the hundreds, with little connection to the surrounding reservations whose boundaries they skirt. Some bring only their desperation to find work. Others bring criminal records, including histories of sexual violence.

The data, fragmentary as it is, yields a grim clarity: when these camps materialize, rates of violent crime surge. Tribal law enforcement officers, already starved of funding and jurisdiction, report sudden spikes in domestic assaults and rapes. In some cases, they discover that individuals housed in the camps are unregistered sex offenders, effectively hiding in plain sight, immune to meaningful oversight.

It would be comforting to believe that such predation is an aberration, an occasional horror at the margins of a boomtown. But the evidence suggests something far more ordinary: that when men are severed from accountability and women are left unprotected, violence is not the exception – it is the predictable outcome.

Local Indigenous women have described overhearing pipeline workers talk openly about taking what they wanted from the nearby reservations, their voices casual as if discussing a night out. In these conversations, rape was not framed as a crime but as a convenience, an entitlement that no one around them would bother to contest.

There is no myth here, no exaggeration of risk. There is only the steady convergence of opportunity and impunity. And in that convergence, Indigenous women – already the most vulnerable population in the region – find themselves regarded not as neighbors or citizens, but as bodies to be used and discarded, their suffering a collateral cost of the oil beneath the ground.

The Legal Vacuum Where Violence Thrives

It is difficult to overstate how completely jurisdictional chaos has hollowed out the idea of justice for Indigenous women. When an assault occurs, there is no single authority responsible for responding. Tribal governments, stripped of power by Oliphant v. Suquamish in 1978, have no authority to prosecute non-Native offenders – even when the crime happens on their own land. Federal prosecutors, nominally entrusted with these cases, decline the majority of them, citing limited resources or ambiguous evidence. State police often defer to federal agencies or claim they lack jurisdiction. The result is an elaborate bureaucratic ritual in which survivors recount their trauma again and again, only to watch their cases evaporate.

For many, this dysfunction is not an abstraction but a daily calculation: if you report, you may be retraumatized with no resolution; if you remain silent, your safety – and your children’s – stays precarious. In the shadow of man camps, this knowledge spreads quickly: that in the Bakken oil fields, there are men who understand they can rape Indigenous women with near impunity. It is a system that does not merely fail victims – it teaches them, over time, not to expect protection at all.

The Violence We Inherited

In the Bakken oil fields, history is not past tense. It is present in every trailer that rises overnight on leased prairie land, in every unlit road where women do not walk alone. From the first fur traders who carried disease and whiskey into tribal villages to the contractors who now drill through ancestral ground, there has been a single, unbroken understanding: that Indigenous women are collateral, that their suffering is the cost of whatever wealth the land will yield. No one says this aloud, but it is inscribed in the absence of consequence, in the way these stories fail to appear on the evening news.

It is tempting, from a distance, to see these disappearances as a modern failure of regulation or oversight – an unfortunate side effect of industrial haste. But the truth is older and simpler. A culture that began by extracting value from Native land has always extracted from Native bodies as well. To look away from this continuity is to pretend the past was settled, the treaties honored, the debts paid. And so the man camps stand as proof of the opposite: that the frontier never closed, it simply reconstituted itself in another form, with the same consequences for those who were here first.

In the end there is no mystery here. Only a ledger kept long and open, each entry another name uncounted, another body unsearched for, another promise left to rot in the dark. What is happening in these camps is not an accident. It is the consummation of a covenant made generations ago, when the land was taken and the women with it. And if there is any justice yet to be claimed, it will not arrive by accident. It will come because people demand it without apology, because they will not permit these women to be consigned to silence any longer.

Note: Much of the legal and historical analysis in this piece draws on Ana Condes’ article “Man Camps and Bad Men: Litigating Violence Against American Indian Women,” published in the Northwestern University Law Review.