Powerful floodwaters had destroyed a culvert running under the road, washing a 30-foot section of the highway away. Peterson, 60, drove straight into the ravine and was killed — one of two people to lose their lives there that night. Two other motorists were injured.

“We have other culverts like that that are going to be blown out if we get a bunch of rain,” warned Elliott Ward, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s emergency manager, from his office in Fort Yates. “(R)oads, bridges, culverts, lagoons, housing. Our infrastructure is shot,” said Ward. “A lot of our roads were built back in the ‘50s and ‘60s; they’re dilapidated and need replacing.”

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Tribe administrators on Standing Rock Reservation say having an array of departments and authorities — state, federal, and tribal — in charge of roads and transport infrastructure means that accessing funds to maintain highways and culverts is complicated and riven with bureaucracy. Most federal funding for roads and highways on reservation lands is provided through the Tribal Transportation Program (TTP), which authorized $505 million for 2020 and is co-administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal Highway Administration.

But reservations across the U.S. have a backlog of infrastructure projects, a delay referred to as “deferred maintenance.” Repairs were estimated at $390 million for 2018.

Indigenous communities are some of the poorest in the country. The per capita income in Standing Rock’s Sioux County stands at less than $16,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while in Emmons County on the other side of the Missouri River, the figure is almost double that.

In Navajo Nation, home to around 175,000 people spread across New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, three-quarters of the roads on the reservation are either dirt or gravel. In an area larger than the state of West Virginia, drainage systems are easily clogged by expanding and migrating sand dunes, making roads impassable during times of heavy rain or thawing. In 2015, ten days of school in the reservation’s San Juan County were canceled because road conditions made it unsafe to ferry students to and from their classrooms.

In South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, not far from Standing Rock, federal funding for the community’s 310 miles of roads was just $2.2 million in 2019, one tenth of the estimated minimum needed to bring the roads into good repair. Road ploughing alone cost $600,000 that same year, when a combination of failing infrastructure and extreme weather led to a state of emergency being issued by tribal authorities on two occasions.

Dirt roads in poor condition are a growing problem in the era of climate change, with record-breaking late summer and early winter storms and snowfall that have made it even more difficult for residents to get around. In March 2019, a “bomb cyclone” storm flooded homes and businesses on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home to some of the lowest life expectancy rates in the Western Hemisphere. With the ground underneath still frozen solid, rapidly rising temperatures that followed the snowstorm fueled a thaw and several-feet-high floodwaters left whole communities stranded for days.

For vulnerable minorities such as Native communities, the threat presented by the coronavirus has added to the worry. With Covid-19 cases rising in states across the Plains region, being able to safely drive to healthcare and emergency facilities is more critical than ever. Those drives can be long. In Navajo Nation, for example, 12 health care facilities cover 25,000 square miles of land. Early last summer, Navajo Nation reported a higher per capita number of Covid-19 cases than New York state, ground zero for the outbreak last spring. Meanwhile, lost with the passing of 1,152 members of Navajo Nation are generations of the same families and coveted oral histories.

The culvert under Highway 1806 into which Trudy Peterson’s car dived in the summer of 2019 wasn’t repaired because it fell into the “long-range projects and costs list” in the Tribe’s Long Range Transportation Plan for Standing Rock document, published in December 2018. It meant there wasn’t funding set aside to repair the culvert, estimated at costing $1.5 million, or it wasn’t considered high priority at the time. The shortfall facing Standing Rock, according to the Tribe’s director of transportation and planning, Ron His Horse Is Thunder, is down to Congress and the Federal Highway Administration not releasing enough funds. “We go to Congress every year,” he told the Associated Press in August 2019. “They just don’t give us enough money to take care of the issues.”

Nor could the tribe, says Elliott Ward, avail itself of funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to repair the highway, as it comes under BIA jurisdiction. The culvert that killed Trudy Peterson had been identified for replacement seven years before it was washed out, according to an internal document.

Recent months saw some efforts in Washington DC to help ease the crisis. In August 2020, then-Representative Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), now Secretary of the Interior Department — and the first Native American to hold a cabinet position — spoke of how the Invest in America and Moving Forward Acts would result in funding increases for the TTP. In November 2020, four senators including Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation that would send funds toward infrastructure improvement efforts, including traffic calming and pedestrian facilities on reservation lands. The bill would have seen the opening of a new program within the Department for Transportation with an annual budget of $25 million. It has not been reintroduced in the 117^th Congress.

But throwing money at the problem isn’t a catch-all solution. Interjurisdictional cooperation is key to determining how roads and road safety are managed in many reservations, says Kathy Quick, a co-author with Guillermo Narváez of a University of Minnesota study about improving roadway safety on reservations. “Matters of responsibility and authority — who has it and who may exercise it — are frequently in question and contested in most reservations,” she said.

“The boundaries of reservations and of tribes’ jurisdictions to formulate, implement, and enforce safety-related policies and plans are frequently questioned and contested by federal, state and local government authorities.”

For Trudy Peterson’s daughter, Jade Mound, those issues don’t compare to the raw pain of losing someone to poor road conditions. “I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what my family has gone through,” she told the Bismarck Tribune in September 2020, when Peterson’s and other families filed a claim against the BIA seeking monetary damages and better maintenance of roads.

“There is absolutely no reason that the BIA roads should be in the condition they’re in.”

On August 4, 2019, he and his father Derrick Fudge were at a bar in Dayton’s Oregon District. They were taking a break after weeks of reconstruction work on Green’s house, which had been damaged by a severe tornado two months prior. When a gunman appeared out of an alleyway and started shooting, Green and his father got as close to the ground as they could.

“I kept telling him to get up, we got to go,” he recalled. But Mr. Fudge died in his son’s arms that night, one of nine people murdered by a gunman who managed to fire off more than 40 shots in less than 30 seconds.

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Green says he lost more than his father; he lost a dear friend. On top of that came the financial cost of both burying his father, which ran into thousands of dollars.

All U.S. states and territories have a crime victim compensation program that reimburses victims of crime for related costs, funded by a mix of fines, forfeited bail, and other fees. The funds help with funeral costs, counseling, loss of work earnings, and other expenses. However, each state maintains its own eligibility criteria. In Ohio, Fudge was not deemed a “qualifying victim.”

In March 2011, eight-and-a-half years before his death, Fudge pled guilty to a drug trafficking offense and was sentenced to a three-month home monitoring period and three years of probation. Ohio’s victim compensation program denies aid for individuals who’ve been involved in certain felony offenses within ten years, essentially barring people who have paid for the victim compensation program from benefitting from it.

When Green’s application for his father was denied, he was livid.

“It’s like [the shooter] is winning both ways — he’s taken our family members and then you’ve got to worry about how to pay for burying them,” he says. “My dad shouldn’t be held accountable for his own death.”

Six other states — Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Rhode Island — also have laws denying compensation to victims of crimes who are involved in prior or ongoing felony offenses, or are engaged in felonious activity at the time of their victimization. An average of 36 percent of claims in those states are denied as a result, leaving victims or their surviving family members to pay out of pocket. Green says in his case some costs were partly offset by donations and his own health insurance, but much of it he paid himself.

Green isn’t the only one facing this issue.

Alayna Young was shot in her left leg in the same attack that killed Green’s father in Dayton last year. She was in the hospital when she found out her health insurance had lapsed four days before. “I immediately heard the cash registers in my head,” she said, and left the hospital the same day. After missing almost six weeks of work due to her injury, she was also denied compensation from the state. Young had been taking prescription Adderall, and her claim was refused due to a blood test showing the presence of amphetamines in her system.

More than a year later, with fragments of the bullet still in her leg, Young still owes close to $80,000 in medical fees. “I might have to file bankruptcy; that’s not something I want to do but I don’t see any other way,” she said.

“When people are victimized, we should aim to provide them with the services they need to heal and be safe, period,” said John Maki, the author of a 2019 paper detailing Illinois’ experience with crime victim compensation issues. Across the country, there are a wide variety of barriers preventing victims from receiving the support they need, ranging from denials due to drug tests to issues with the aid application process. The result is a patchwork of aid that varies by state: In Montana, nine in ten victims receive aid in an average of 60 days, but in West Virginia, only three in ten applicants get support and decisions can take as long as 210 days.

Maki said recent times have seen a push for possible change. “A growing number of states have begun to reexamine their crime victim compensation program, looking for ways to remove barriers to services. That’s not only the right thing to do for victims, but it’s also smart and cost-effective public safety policy.” Ohio is among them, and in November the state senate approved a bill reducing the disqualification period for those with a prior conviction, increasing compensation to survivors who require counseling, and no longer punishing victims in possession of drugs at the time of the crime.

But for some survivors, the exhaustion and trauma of the last year is still exacting a major toll.

“A letter came and said I could appeal (the compensation denial),” said Green, “but who’s really thinking about that? I’m still in the process of grieving. I said, ‘to hell with it.’”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Young. “There was a lot of back and forth and I already wasn’t in a great state of mind to really deal with any of this,” she said. “It’s like getting kicked while you’re down.”