The Bakken Oil Fields in Western North Dakota and Northeastern Montana have emerged as one of the most prolific sources for new oil production in the United States. The "North Dakota oil boom" refers to the period of rapidly expanding oil extraction from the Bakken fields that roughly lasted from 2006 to 2012.
A study from the Western Criminology Review provides relevant contextual data exploring the relationship between resource-based booms and crime rates. Although the study, citing missing data, did not produce enough statistical evidence to confidently prove a link, it did uncover some staggering statistics — violent crime in boom counties rose 18.5 percent between 2006 and 2012, while decreasing 25.6 percent in counties that had no oil or gas production. It also showed that by 2011, there were more than 1.6 single young men for every single young woman in the Bakken region counties most affected by the oil boom.
Anecdotally, the New York Times ran a story claiming that the biggest city in the area, Williston, was particularly lucrative for sex workers and single women in the area are constantly “hounded” because of the gender imbalance brought on by man camps.
But Williston is a developed city. Many of the man camps are set up in ‘oil rich’ areas, which are almost always rural and don’t have the infrastructure to support population growth. This article refers to them as temporary ‘cities’ that can bring as many as 1,400 new workers to the area. Oil companies like TransCanada have offered to improve road conditions to handle increased truck traffic from industrial projects. Arguably more important than infrastructure, though, is that these regions don’t have the law enforcement numbers to account for such a large increase in population.
In 2009, McKenzie County in North Dakota of the Bakken region had just four deputies and four police officers, according to this article appearing in Inforum. In 2015, the county had 25 deputies and 19 police officers, after seeing a rapid increase in crime, funded in part by a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to help prosecute crimes against women. The grant funded counselors, shelters and a new jail. It also allowed the region to hire two special prosecutors — one on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana and another on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the heart of North Dakota’s oil patch.
Fort Berthold, like most reservations in the U.S., has a history of crimes slipping through jurisdictional cracks. Prior to 2010, few sexual assault cases in Fort Berthold were prosecuted. In 2011, a U.S. attorney was appointed to boost prosecution rates in Fort Berthold after the Tribal Law and Order Act passed in 2010. Between 2009 and 2011, federal case filings on North Dakota reservations rose 70 percent. In 2012, the tribal police department reported more murders, fatal accidents, sexual assaults, domestic disputes, drug busts, gun threats, and human trafficking cases than in any year before.
On the Canadian side of the border, similar phenomena have been seen to take effect. A 2017 report from the Firelight Group raised warnings about “hyper-masculine” culture in man camps, highlighting that the Fort St. James area experienced a 38 percent increase in RCMP-reported sexual assaults in one industrial project’s first year. The Lake Babine and Nak’azdli Whut’en nations — the two tribes closest to the Fort St. James Area — ensured all health stations were stocked with rape kits for the duration of the project, according to this article in Maclean’s Magazine. The Nak'azdli nation had just 1,972 members living both on and off reserves, and the camp brought about 4,500 workers, most of whom were male, to the area. The nearest city, Prince George, is 100 miles (160 km) away.
New methods like horizontal drilling and fracking have made it possible for locations once thought to have been exhausted to be revisited for further resource extraction. Beyond Bakken and Athabascan, the Permian basin in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico is a site for recent pipeline construction.
There aren’t nearly as many reservations in this region as there are near the Northern border, but the Permian basin is worth noting because it's where we'll likely see man camps pop up in the near future. Indigenous activists have been speaking about the issue of man camps for decades, but it's only recently covered in national outlets. As man camps are brought in to less-populated, less-resourced areas, there’s a need to listen to Indigenous activists, monitor the situation in the Permian Basin and hold oil and man camp companies accountable for what transpires in these camps.
Most of the quantitative and academic literature surrounding this issue explains how man camps affect overall trends of crime rates and violence against indigenous women — very few of the studies, reports and articles called out individual cases. This documentarian recalled being hit on by obviously drunk oil workers in Bakken while she was researching the issue, which perhaps speaks to the dynamic of man camps. Anecdotally, several Reddit users who have worked in or near man camps indicated that these sites can be hotbeds for alcoholism and rowdy behavior.
Distrust in law enforcement and the rural nature of these areas plays a part in how few stories are heard. Verna Power, the Lake Babine nation councillor who pushed for rape kits to be readily available, said that her sense of caution stems from an experience two decades ago, when she was one of four women at a 200-person camp outside Fort Nelson, British Columbia. She did not go into detail, but offered the following — “Nobody should be subjected to the way some of us had to live.”
One last disconnected, albeit poignant, note. Indigenous activist Roxanne White said “the first man camp was in 1492” — this country, she continued, has a history of treating Indigenous women as “disposable” and that today’s “man camps” are the latest iteration of colonial resource extraction. Such extraction relies on destroying land and constructing power dynamics, and few things reinforce such dynamics more than sexual exploitation.