[IPSM] Colonialism and gender violence in the lives of American Indian women

[hhazel at gmail.com]

Colonizers have long tried to crush the spirit of the Indian peoples
and blunt their will to resist colonization. One of the most
devastating weapons of conquest has been sexual violence.

In the eyes of colonizers, Indian bodies are inherently "dirty." White
Californians of the 1860s called Native people "the dirtiest lot of
human beings on earth." They described Indians as dressed in "filthy
rags, with their persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with
vermin." In 1885, a Proctor & Gamble ad used this image to advertize
Ivory Soap:

We were once factious, fierce and wild,
In peaceful arts unreconciled.
Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
>From buffalo meat and settlers' veins.
Through summer's dust and heat content,
>From moon to moon unwashed we went.
But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
Of light across our darkened way
And now we're civil, kind and good
And keep the laws as people should.
We wear our linen, lawn and lace
As well as folks with paler face
And now I take, where'er we go
This cake of IVORY SOAP to show
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see.

In the colonial worldview, only "clean" and "pure" bodies deserve to
be protected from violence. Violence done to "dirty" or "impure"
bodies simply does not count. For example, prostitutes are seldom
believed when they are raped because the dominant society considers
the prostitute's body violable at all times. Because Indian bodies are
also seen as "dirty," they too are considered "rapable." The practice
of mutilating Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear that
colonizers do not think Indian people deserve bodily integrity. This
attitude dates back to the earliest periods of westward conquest:

I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I
heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco-pouch out of them.

At night Dr. Rufus Choate, [and] Lieutenant Wentz C. Miller . . . went
up the ravine, decapitated the dead Qua-ha-das, and placing the heads
in some gunny sacks, brought them back to be boiled out for future
scientific knowledge.

Each of the braves was shot down and scalped by the wild volunteers,
who out with their knives and cutting two parallel gashes down their
backs, would strip the skin from the quivering flesh to make razor
straps of.

One more dexterous than the rest, proceeded to flay the chief's
[Tecumseh's] body; then, cutting the skin in narrow strips . . . at
once, a supply of razor-straps for the more "ferocious" of his
brethren.

Andrew Jackson . . . supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek
Indian corpses -- the bodies of men, women and children that he and
his men massacred -- cutting off their noses to count and preserve a
record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to
tan and turn into bridle reins.

This history of violence has taught many Indian people to hate their
bodies and, because body image is related to self-esteem, to hate
themselves. Thus, it is not a surprise that Indian people who have
survived sexual abuse often say that they no longer wish to be Indian.
The Menominee poet Chrystos writes in such a voice in her poem "Old
Indian Granny:"

You told me about all the Indian women you counsel
who say they don't want to be Indian anymore
because a white man or an Indian one raped them
or killed their brother
or somebody tried to run them over in the street
or insulted them or all of it
our daily bread of hate
Sometimes I don't want to be an Indian either
but I've never said so out loud before
Since I'm so proud & political
I have to deny it now
Far more than being hungry
having no place to live or dance
no decent job no home to offer a Granny
It's knowing with each invisible breath
that if you don't make something pretty
they can hang on their walls or wear around their necks
you might as well be dead.

Although Native men have also been scarred by abuse, Native women have
often been the primary focus of sexual violence because of their
capacity to give birth. Control over reproduction is essential in
destroying a people; if the women of a nation are not
disproportionately killed, the nation's population can always rebound.
For instance, despite the mass destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the population of Japan actually increased by 14 percent between 1940
and 1950 because a disproportionate number of men rather than women
were killed. This is why colonizers such as Andrew Jackson recommended
that, after massacres, troops complete the extermination by
systematically killing Indian women and children. Similarly, Methodist
minister Colonel John Chivington's policy was to "kill and scalp all
little and big" because "nits make lice."

Native women have been targeted for abuse for another reason as well.
Prior to colonization, Indian societies tended not to be
male-dominated. In fact, many societies were matrilineal and
matrilocal,

and Indian women often served as spiritual, political, and military
leaders. When work was divided by gender, both men's and women's
labors were accorded similar status. Violence against women and
children was rare -- in many tribes, unheard of.

The egalitarian nature of Native societies did not escape the notice
of the colonizers. It was a scandal in the colonies that a number of
white people chose to live among Indian people while virtually no
Indians voluntarily chose to live among the colonists. According to J.
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, "Thousands of Europeans are Indians,
and we have no example of even one of these Aborigines having from
choice become Europeans!"

Native societies were also a dangerous example to white women who
wished to live free of patriarchy. Richard Hill has argued that the
equal status accorded to women in Native societies "fueled some
[white] men's hatred towards Indians. After all, they now had to worry
about their prized possession being happier with savage Indians than
with them." Women were seldom accorded high status in European
societies, and were often severely persecuted. Europe's hatred for
women was most fully manifest in the witchhunts. As many as nine
million people were killed during the witchhunts; over 90 percent of
them women. It was not possible for these violent, women-hating
societies, transplanted to the Americas, to exist side-by-side with
egalitarian Native societies. As the letters above demonstrate,
European men could not easily have kept their own women subjugated
without subjugating the women of indigenous nations as well. White
women would have had little incentive to stay in their communities
when they could live among the Natives and receive better treatment.

Nevertheless, the constant depiction of Native men as savages
prevented white women from seeing that the real enemy was not Native
people, but the patriarchy of their own culture. Even in war, European
women were often surprised to find that they went unmolested by their
Indian captors. Mary Rowlandson said of her own captivity: "I have
been in the midst of roaring Lions, and Savage Bears, that feared
neither God, nor Man, nor the Devil . . . and yet not one of them ever
offered the least abuse of unchastity to me in word or action."
William Apess (Pequot) asked in the 1800s, "Where, in the records of
Indian barbarity, can we point to a violated female"? Even Brigadier
General James Clinton of the Continental Army said to his soldiers in
1779, as he sent them off to destroy the Iroquois nation, "Bad as the
savages are, they never violate the chastity of any women, their
prisoners."

The same could not be said of white men, who raped Native women at
epidemic rates. Between 1851 and 1852, California spent over one
million dollars hiring soldiers to exterminate Natives. In one typical
expedition, a group of invading soldiers demanded that all the young
women be given to them for sexual service. When they discovered that
the young women had already managed to escape, the soldiers raped the
old women instead. Other accounts of colonial sexual abuse include the
following:

When I was in the boat I captured a beautiful Carib woman. . .I
conceived desire to take pleasure. . . .I took a rope and thrashed her
well, for which she raised such unheard screams that you would not
have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such a
manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in
a school of harlots.

Two of the best looking of the squaws were lying in such a position,
and from the appearance of the genital organs and of their wounds,
there can be no doubt that they were first ravished and then shot
dead. Nearly all of the dead were mutilated.

One woman, big with child, rushed into the church, clasping the alter
and crying for mercy for herself and unborn babe. She was followed,
and fell pierced with a dozen lances. . . [T]he child was torn alive
from the yet palpitating body of its mother, first plunged into the
holy water to be baptized, and immediately its brains were dashed out
against a wall.

The Christians attacked them with buffets and beatings. . . . Then
they behaved with such temerity and shamelessness that the most
powerful ruler of the island had to see his own wife raped by a
Christian officer.

I heard one man say that he had cut a woman's private parts out, and
had them for exhibition on a stick. . . . I also heard of numerous
instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females, and
stretched them over their saddle-bows and some of them over their
hats.

The attitudes on display in the examples above have changed very
little over the centuries. In 1982, a white man named Stuart Kasten
marketed a video game called Custer's Revenge, in which players score
points each time they, as Custer, rape an Indian woman. The game's
slogan is, "When you score, you score." Kasten has deceptively
described the game as "a fun sequence where the woman is enjoying a
sexual act willingly."

In the Indian boarding schools of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, founded by the US government to prevent Indian women from
passing on their language and culture to their children, physical and
sexual abuse was rampant. Irene Mack Pyawasit recalls her days as a
boarding school resident from the Menominee reservation:

The government employees that they put into the schools had families
but still there were an awful lot of Indian girls turning up pregnant.
Because the employees were having a lot of fun, and they would force a
girl into a situation, and the girl wouldn't always be believed. Then,
because she came up pregnant, she would be sent home in disgrace. Some
boy would be blamed for it, never the government employee. He was
always scot-free. And no matter what the girl said, she was never
believed.

The high rates of alcoholism, violence, and suicide in Indian
communities today can, in large part, be traced to the brutality of
Indian boarding schools. Although the boarding schools have been a
positive experience for some, they have also introduced violent,
self-destructive behaviors into Native society. Recently, the
International Human Rights Association of American Minorities has
issued a report which documents the involvement of mainline churches
and the federal government in the murder of over 50,000 Native
children through the Canadian residential school system. The list of
offenses committed by church officials include murder by beating,
poisoning, hanging, starvation, strangulation, and medical
experimentation. Torture was used to punish children for speaking
Aboriginal languages. Children were involuntarily sterilized. In
addition, the report found that church clergy, police, and business
and government officials were involved in maintaining pedophile rings
using children from residential schools. The grounds of several
schools are also charged with containing unmarked graveyards of
children who were murdered, particular children killed after being
born as a result of rapes of Native girls by priests and other church
officials in the school. The United Church of Canada is currently
threatened with bankruptcy in light of the class action suits it
currently faces for its role in residential school abuse. While some
churches in Canada have taken some minimal steps towards addressing
its involvement in this genocidal policy, churches in the U.S. have
not. And it is largely through boarding schools that Native
communities have internalized the process of genocide so that we
destroy ourselves.

As a spiritual leader once said, "The number one issue we have to deal
with is violence against women and children, because as long as we
destroy ourselves from within, we don't have to worry about anyone
else." Sexual violence is difficult to address, however, because it
causes so much shame for survivors and communities. Shame is, in fact,
the intended effect of sexual violence. Nevertheless, because sexual
violence has been one of the most successful avenues of colonization,
Native communities cannot prosper until we find a way to eradicate
sexual violence and heal from the shame and self-hatred it has
instilled in us We no longer have to carry this shame. Our communities
can heal from sexual violence.

 

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
incite_national at yahoo.com