Nathan Chasing Horse verdict sends signal on abuse of Indigenous women

A jury in Las Vegas has convicted Nathan Chasing Horse, the former child actor from Dances With Wolves, on 13 of 21 sexual‑offence charges involving Indigenous women and girls, in a case closely watched across Indian Country.

Prosecutors told the court that Chasing Horse, now 49, used his reputation as a Lakota medicine man to groom and abuse young women over nearly two decades. Most of the guilty counts relate to one survivor he first assaulted when she was 14, after claiming that spiritual visions required her to have sex with him to save her sick mother.

Chasing Horse faces a minimum of 25 years in prison, with sentencing set for 11 March. Jurors acquitted him on some charges linked to an adult woman who later lived with him in a household with other partners. He also faces sex‑crime charges in other U.S. states and Canada, though prosecutors in British Columbia suspended their case in 2023 because of the Nevada proceedings.

Over three weeks of evidence, three women testified that Chasing Horse assaulted them, some while they were underage. In closing arguments, prosecutor Bianca Pucci said he had “spun a web of abuse” around vulnerable girls and women over almost 20 years, using spiritual authority to silence them. Defence lawyer Craig Mueller argued there were no eyewitnesses and described the main accuser as a “scorned woman”, promising to seek a new trial.

Clark County chief deputy district attorney William Rowles thanked the women who came forward, saying he hoped “the people who came forward … can find some peace”.

Advocates stress that the verdict sits within a much wider crisis. A 2016 study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetimes, and over half have experienced sexual violence. Federal agencies have since launched initiatives on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, but Indigenous women’s organisations say under‑reporting, overlapping jurisdictions and racism in policing still block justice.

Here in Rosebud Reservation (where Chasing Horse was born) and in Indigenous communities globally, the case is being read less as the fall of a former actor and more as a rare example of a system taking the abuse of Indigenous women seriously.