[IPSM] Colonialism and the Sexual Exploitation of Canada's First Nations Women

Tue Apr 5 06:12:28 PDT 2005

http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/colonialism.html

Colonialism and the Sexual Exploitation
of Canada's First Nations Women
by Jackie Lynne

To cite, use: Lynne, Jackie 1998 "Colonialism and the Sexual Exploitation of
Canada's First Nations women," paper presented at the American Psychological
Association 106th Annual Convention, San Francisco, California, August 17,
1998.
Copyright © 1998 Jackie Lynne. All Rights Reserved.

Street prostitution in the lives of Canadian First Nations women is a
fundamental form of sexual oppression whose exploitative roots are located
within earlier colonial relations. Historical patriarchal, capitalist
relations subjugated First Nations women collectively. This collective
sexual oppression, based on gender, created our inferiority as a class of
people to both First Nations men and non-First Nations men. The sexual
domination of First Nations women has remained unabated to present-day due
to patriarchy's stronghold. Thus, it has had, and continues to have
profound, and prolonged injurious consequences in First Nations women's
lives. This article describes some aspects of the historical rootedness of
the sexual exploitation of First Nations women.

First Nations women who have been prostituted are graphic examples of how
deeply patriarchy wounds. When sexual oppression is intersected by racism,
and capitalism, the wounding worsens--this compounded wounding for First
Nations women has occurred for over 500 hundred years.

Several powerful aspects of colonization imposed upon First Nations women
which changed our lives were capitalism (mercantalism)., the church, the
state, and the military. All these forces systematically created women's
subservience to men. For example, European colonizers intended to accumulate
capital through the production and circulation of commodities. Fur was the
main attraction to Canada, and First Nations women were especially essential
to the fur traders. The Europeans used the presence and influence of First
Nations women to penetrate new territories and secure new markets. Thus,
First Nations women were integral to the creation of commodity production.
However, their position in that new society was one of slave. For example,
in 1714, a Hudson's Bay Company officer, as part of an expansionist
strategy, "obtained" a Chipewyan woman whom he referred to as "slave woman".
He "obtained" kept her with him for two years so that she might learn they
system of commodity exchange and the value of British goods and private
property. She was then sent into the interior to recruit Chipewyan people to
come to York Factory and begin trade. Her confinement to the fort was a form
of hostage-taking where she was forced to accept the Western values of
capital and private property.

As First Nations society became transformed through a policy of capitalism,
First Nations women were also sexually commodified (Absolon, Herbert &
MacDonald, 1996). Women were purchased through a system of exchange. For
example, women were bought by alcohol, and other European goods. In Kathleen
Barry's Female Sexual Slavery (1984), she stated:

the traffic in women, like the traffic in drugs or black market babies,
depends upon a market ... the demand for sexual service is most significant
where men congregate in large groups separated from home and family (p. 70).

In the first century of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), European women were
not allowed to travel or to live in Canada known as Rupert's Land at that
time. Neither were mixed family formations allowed in or around the fur
trade posts (Bourgeault, 1989). This further encouraged relations of
domination as European males used First Nations women for sex. Sexual
exploitation became so prevalent around Bayside, an officer at York Factory
reveals in his 1769 journal: "the worst Brothel House in London is not so
common a (stew) as the men's House in this Factory was before I put a stop
to it" (Bourgeault, 1989).

Not all men visited brothels. Some took First Nations women as their
"country wives", lived with them and had children. While on the surface,
this seems a respectable practice, all too often these women and their
children were abandoned by the white men at a later date. The phenomenon of
the "country wife" was a form of sexual exploitation which was used by the
officer class, and was a more subtle form of sexual exploitation. In these
relationships, First Nations women were concubines--secondary wives without
legal sanctions. These relationships, particularly when First Nations women
became dependent on white men, created serious differences between First
Nations women, and their culture. "Country wives" and their children were
not deemed legitimate property of men by English common law. Therefore;
these families were abandoned.

The state-regulated residential school system (an assimilation strategy
designed by the state/carried out by the church) has had grave consequences
for First Nations culture in general, and women in particular. The
residential school system was designed to eradicate Native culture in the
process of cultural genocide (Haig-Brown, 1988). The school system was
modelled after the United States' industrial schools established for First
Nations people known as "aggressive civilization" (Davin, 1879, as, cited in
Haig-Brown, 1988, p. 30). The superiority of European culture was the
underlying belief inherent in this type of assimilationist policy.

As a tool of assimilation, the residential school system failed, but it was
successful in causing irrevocable damage to First Nations culture. Its
damaging impact has had serious consequences. Children were held taken from
their families and communities and held as captives within these schools.
Parental care and guidance were lost and replaced by institutionalized child
care characterized by authoritarianism, often to the point of physical,
psychological, and sexual abuse "bordering on (and often passing into) the
realm of torture, such treatment often being rationalized as discipline by
those inflicting it" (Chrisjohn, 1991, p. 169). The legacy of residential
schools on the children who attended, their parents, and the subsequent
generations, can be described as internalized collective trauma. This type
of trauma is the result of separation from family, cultural denigration,
physical abuse, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse (Absolon, Herbert &
MacDonald, 1996).

Sexual abuse of First Nations children is at crisis proportions. This form
of violence is a legacy of colonialism. As previously mentioned, residential
schools held First Nations children captives. These children were terrorized
sexually with no avenues of escape. When they were allowed to visit their
families during holidays, these children often felt increasing loneliness
and despair due to a widening sense of cultural estrangement, and
abandonment.

Today, there are northern communities in which the entire female population
has been sexually assaulted by males who are living in community with them.
These men are their brothers, cousins, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers.
Some of these abusers hold powerful positions on band councils--most of them
are held unaccountable for their assaults against their female relatives.
Often women feel powerless to effect change, and are threatened with further
violence if they attempt to stop the abuse.

In summary, the afore-mentioned historical impact of the market, the
military, the church, and the state have created the sexual oppression of
First Nations women as a class condition. (Street) prostitution depends upon
this class of devalued women.

REFERENCES
Absolon, K. & Herbert, E. & MacDonald, K. (1996). Aboriginal women and
treaties proiect. Victoria, B.C.: Ministry of Women's Equality.

Barry, K. (1984). Female sexual slavery. NY: University Press.

Bourgeault, R. (1989). Race, class, and gender: colonial domination of
Indian women. In J. Forts et al. (Eds.), Race, class & gender: Bonds and
barriers. (2nd ed). Toronto: Jargoned Press,

Chrisjohn, R. (1991). Faith misplaced: Lasting effects of abuse in a First
Nations Community. Canadian Journal of Native Education. (18), 1, pp.
161-196.

Haig-Brown, Celia. (1988). Resistance and renewal: First Nations people's
experiences of the residential school. Vancouver: U.B.C. Press.

Lynne, Jackie A.M. (1998) "Street prostitution as Sexual Exploitation in
First Nations Women's Lives", essay submitted in partial fulfillment of
Master of Social Work, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, April.

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