Psychology/2-3 Page Paper
Introduction
In this paper complete all the required activities and answer the reflection questions. This assignment will help extend your understanding of the unit topics and concepts to applications in everyday life. Please respond to all of the questions in paragraph form with the question numbers labeled. You should incorporate concepts from the readings into your answers and cite the readings as needed. The paper should be 2-3 pages.
Question 1
Watch the clip linked below that retells an account of an experience in a grocery store.
· How is privilege present within this story?
· How does this one personal experience connect to the larger history of oppression in the US?
· How does this clip portray ways to harness privilege to promote social change?
· What do you think about the effectiveness of this strategy?
Question 2
Personal Reflection on Social Class: Answer the following questions about your class identity and reflect on how your identity is located within systems of privilege and oppression. Share to your comfort level and reflect on your experience as one example of understanding the connection between biography and history.
· What is your social class position?
· How have you learned about your class position?
· How do you express your social class (ex: dress, communication, accessories, music, etc)?
· What advantages and/or disadvantages, if any, do you experience based upon your social class?
· Do you know of any stereotypes about your social class? If so, list them.
· How does your class position intersect with other identities?
After reading the article about indigenous women and sexual violence, answer the following questions. How does the article exemplify the importance of historical context in defining and understanding social problems? Identify examples from the reading.
Hypatia vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring 2003) © by Andrea Smith
Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual
Colonization of Native Peoples
ANDREA SMITH
This paper analyzes the connections between sexual violence and colonialism in the
lives and histories of Native peoples in the United States. This paper argues that
sexual violence does not simply just occur within the process of colonialism, but
that colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence. Furthermore, this
logic of sexual violence continues to structure U. S. policies toward Native peoples
today. Consequently, anti-sexual violence and anti-colonial struggles cannot be
separated.
[Rape] is nothing more or less than a
conscious process of intimidation by which
all men keep all women in a state of fear
—Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will
Rape as “nothing more or less” than a tool of patriarchal control undergirds the
philosophy of the white-dominated anti-violence against women movement.
Anti-violence activists generally understand rape solely as gender violence.
This philosophy has been critiqued by many women of color, including critical
racist theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, for its lack of attention to racism and clas-
sism. Crenshaw analyzes how male-dominated conceptions of race and white-
dominated conceptions of gender stand in the way of a clear understanding
of violence against women of color. It is inadequate, she argues, to investigate
the oppression of women of color by examining race and gender oppressions
separately and then putting the two analyses together because the overlap of
racism and sexism transforms the dynamics of both. Instead, Crenshaw advo-
public.press.jhu.edu
Andrea Smith 71
cates replacing the “additive” approach with an “intersectional” approach that
accounts for the overlap. “The problem is not simply that both discourses fail
women of color by not acknowledging the “additional” issue of race or of patri-
archy, but rather, that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete
tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism” (1996, 360).
Despite her intersectional approach, however, Crenshaw falls short of
describing how a politics of intersectionality might fundamentally shift how
we analyze sexual/domestic violence. If sexual violence is not simply a tool of
patriarchy, but is also a tool of colonialism and racism, then entire communities
of color are the victims of sexual violence. As Neferti Tadiar argues, colonial
relationships are themselves gendered and sexualized. “[T]he economies and
political relations of nations are libidinally con> gured, that is, they are grasped
and effected in terms of sexuality. This global and regional fantasy is not, how-
ever, only metaphorical, but real insofar as it grasps a system of political and
economic practices already at work among these nations.” Within this context,
according to Tadiar, “the question to be asked . . . is, Who is getting off on this?
Who is getting screwed and by whom?” (1993, 183). Haunani Kay Trask draws
similar analysis about U. S.-Hawai’i relationships, which she frames in terms
of “cultural prostitution:”
“Prostitution” in this context refers to the entire institution
which de> nes a woman (and by extension the “female”) as
an object of degraded and victimized sexual value for use and
exchange through the medium of money . . . My purpose is not
to exact detail or fashion a model but to convey the utter deg-
radation of our culture and our people under corporate tourism
by employing “prostitution” as an analytical category . . . The
point, of course, is that everything in Hawai’i can be yours,
that is, you the tourist, the non-native, the visitor. The place,
the people, the culture, even our identity as a “Native” people
is for sale. Thus, Hawai’i, like a lovely woman, is there for the
taking. (1993, 194)
Within the context of colonization of Native nations, sexual violence does
not affect Indian men and women in the same way. However, when a Native
woman suffers abuse, this abuse is not just an attack on her identity as a woman,
but on her identity as Native. The issues of colonial, race, and gender oppres-
sion cannot be separated. This explains why, in my experience as a rape crisis
counselor, every Native survivor I ever counseled said to me at one point, “I
wish I was no longer Indian.” Women of color do not just face quantitatively
more issues when they suffer violence (that is, less media attention, language
barriers, lack of support in the judicial system, etc.) but their experience is
qualitatively different from that of white women.
72 Hypatia
Historical Context
Ann Stoler argues that racism, far from being a reaction to crisis in which racial
others are scapegoated for social ills, is a permanent part of the social fabric.
“[R]acism is not an effect but a tactic in the internal > ssion of society into
binary opposition, a means of creating ‘biologized’ internal enemies, against
whom society must defend itself” (1997, 59). She notes that in the modern
state, the constant puri> cation and elimination of racialized enemies within
that state ensures the growth of the national body. “Racism does not merely
arise in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the biopoliti-
cal state, woven into the web of the social body, threaded through its fabric”
(1997, 59).
Similarly, Kate Shanley notes that Native peoples are a permanent “pres-
ent absence” in the U.S. colonial imagination, an “absence” that reinforces at
every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that
the conquest of Native lands is justi> ed. Ella Shoat and Robert Stam describe
this absence as “an ambivalently repressive mechanism [that] dispels the anxi-
ety in the face of the Indian, whose very presence is a reminder of the initially
precarious grounding of the American nation-state itself . . . In a temporal
paradox, living Indians were induced to ‘play dead,’ as it were, in order to
perform a narrative of manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to
disappear” (1994, 118–19). This “absence” is effected through the metaphorical
transformation of Native bodies into a pollution of which the colonial body must
purify itself. As white Californians described in the 1860s, Native people were
“the dirtiest lot of human beings on earth.” They wear “> lthy rags, with their
persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin” (Rawls 1984,
195). The following 1885 Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap also illustrates
this equation between Indian bodies and dirt:
We were once factious, > erce 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
Andrea Smith 73
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see. (Lopez n.d, 119)
In the colonial imagination, Native bodies are also immanently polluted
with sexual sin. Alexander Whitaker, a minister in Virginia, wrote in 1613:
“They live naked in bodie, as if their shame of their sinne deserved no cover-
ing: Their names are as naked as their bodie: They esteem it a virtue to lie,
deceive and steale as their master the divell teacheth them” (Berkhofer 1978,
19). Furthermore, according to Bernardino de Minaya: “Their [the Indians’]
marriages are not a sacrament but a sacrilege. They are idolatrous, libidinous,
and commit sodomy. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen idols,
and commit bestial obscenities” (cited in Stannard 1992, 211).
Stoler’s analysis of racism in which Native peoples are likened to a pollu-
tion that threatens U. S. security is indicated in the comments of one doctor
in his attempt to rationalize the mass sterilization of Native women in the
1970s: “People pollute, and too many people crowded too close together cause
many of our social and economic problems. These in turn are aggravated by
involuntary and irresponsible parenthood . . . We also have obligations to the
society of which we are part. The welfare mess, as it has been called, cries out
for solutions, one of which is fertility control” (Oklahoma 1989, 11). Herbert
Aptheker describes the logical consequences of this sterilization movement:
“The ultimate logic of this is crematoria; people are themselves constituting
the pollution and inferior people in particular, then crematoria become really
vast sewerage projects. Only so may one understand those who attend the
ovens and concocted and conducted the entire enterprise; those “wasted”—to
use U. S. army jargon reserved for colonial hostilities—are not really, not fully
people” (1987, 144).
Because Indian bodies are “dirty,” they are considered sexually violable and
“rapable.” That is, in patriarchal thinking, only a body that is “pure” can be
violated. The rape of bodies that are considered inherently impure or dirty
simply does not count. For instance, prostitutes have almost an impossible
time being believed if they are raped because the dominant society considers
the prostitute’s body undeserving of integrity and violable at all times. Simi-
larly, the history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes
it clear to Indian people that they are not entitled to bodily integrity, as these
examples suggest:
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. (cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 113)
Each of the braves was shot down and scalped by the wild volun-
teers, who out with their knives and cutting two parallel gashes
74 Hypatia
down their backs, would strip the skin from the quivering [ esh
to make razor straps of. (cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 90)
One more dexterous than the rest, proceeded to [ ay 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. (cited in Wrone and Nelson 1982, 82)
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 [ esh from their
bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins. (Stannard 1992, 121)
Echoing this mentality was Governor Thompson, who stated in 1990 that
he would not close down an open Indian burial mound in Dickson, Illinois,
because of his argument that he was as much Indian as are current Indians,
and consequently, he had as much right as they to determine the fate of Indian
remains.1 He felt free to appropriate the identity of “Native,” and thus felt
justi> ed in claiming ownership over both Native identity and Native bodies.
The Chicago press similarly attempted to challenge the identity of the Indian
people who protested Thompson’s decision by stating that these protestors were
either only “part” Indian or were only claiming to be Indian (Hermann 1990).2
The message conveyed by the Illinois state government is that to be Indian
in this society is to be on constant display for white consumers, in life or in
death. And in fact, Indian identity itself is under the control of the colonizer,
subject to eradication at any time. As Aime Cesaire puts it, “colonization =
‘thingi> cation’” (1972, 21).
As Stoler explains this process of racialized colonization: “[T]he more ‘degen-
erates’ and ‘abnormals’ [in this case Native peoples] are eliminated, the lives of
those who speak will be stronger, more vigorous, and improved. The enemies are
not political adversaries, but those identi> ed as external and internal threats to
the population. Racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put [certain
people] to death in a society of normalization” (1997, 85).
Tadiar’s description of colonial relationships as an enactment of the “prevail-
ing mode of heterosexual relations” is useful because it underscores the extent
to which U. S. colonizers view the subjugation of women of the Native nations
as critical to the success of the economic, cultural, and political colonization
(1993, 186). Stoler notes that the imperial discourses on sexuality “cast white
women as the bearers of more racist imperial order” (1997, 35). By extension,
Native women as bearers of a counter-imperial order pose a supreme threat to
the imperial order. Symbolic and literal control over their bodies is important
in the war against Native people, as these examples attest:
Andrea Smith 75
When I was in the boat I captured a beautiful Carib women . . . 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 agree-
ment in such a manner that I can tell you that she seemed to
have been brought up in a school of harlots. (Sale 1990, 140)
Two of the best looking of the squaws were lying in such a posi-
tion, and from the appearance of the genital organs and of their
wounds, there can be no doubt that they were > rst ravished and
then shot dead. Nearly all of the dead were mutilated. (Wrone
and Nelson 1982, 123)
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 . . . the child
was torn alive from the yet palpitating body of its mother, > rst
plunged into the holy water to be baptized, and immediately
its brains were dashed out against a wall. (Wrone and Nelson
1982, 97)
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 of> cer. (Las Casas 1992, 33)
I heard one man say that he had cut a woman’s private parts out,
and had them for exhibition on a stick. I heard another man
say that he had cut the > ngers off of an Indian, to get the rings
off his hand. 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. (Sand
Creek 1973, 129–30)
American Horse said of the massacre at Wounded Knee:
The fact of the killing of the women, and more especially the
killing of the young boys and girls who are to go to make up the
future strength of the Indian people is the saddest part of the
whole affair and we feel it very sorely. (Stannard 1992, 127)
76 Hypatia
Colonization and the Normality of Patriarchy
Native women are threatening to the project of genocide in many ways. Hazel
Carby notes that in the Afro-American context, white men justi> ed the lynch-
ing of black men as a means of protecting white women from the supposed
predations of black men. “White men used their ownership of the body of the
white female as a terrain on which to lynch the black male. White women felt
that their caste was their protection and that their interests lay with the power
that ultimately con> ned them” (Carby 1996, 309). The racist violence, then,
used by white men against black men simultaneously strengthened patriarchal
relationships within white society as white men were pictured as the protectors
of white women. Similarly, the colonization of Native women as well is part of
the project of strengthening white male ownership of white women.
Karen Warren sheds light on how the colonization of Native women
strengthens patriarchy within white society. She argues that patriarchal society
is a dysfunctional system that mirrors the dysfunctional nuclear family. That
is, when there is severe abuse in the family, the abuse continues because the
family members regard it as “normal.” Only when a victim of abuse has contact
with less abusive families may she come to see that her abuse is not “normal.”
Similarly, Warren argues, patriarchal society is a dysfunctional system based
on domination and violence. “Dysfunctional systems are often maintained
through systematic denial, a failure or inability to see the reality of a situation.
This denial need not be conscious, intentional, or malicious; it only needs to
be pervasive to be effective” (1993, 125).
Europe at the time of Columbus’s misadventures was just such a completely
dysfunctional system wracked with violence, mass poverty, disease, and war.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in the Inquisition, and their con-
> scated property was used to fund Columbus’s voyages. David Stannard states:
“Violence, of course, was everywhere . . . in Milan in 1476 a man was torn to
pieces by an enraged mob and his dismembered limbs were eaten by his torment-
ers. In Paris and Lyon, Huguenots [sic] were killed and butchered, and their
various body parts were sold openly in the streets. Other eruptions of bizarre
torture, murder, and ritual cannibalism were not uncommon” (1992, 61; see
also Sale 1990, 28–37).
European societies were thoroughly misogynistic. Europe’s hatred for women
was most fully manifest in the witch hunts. In many English towns, as many
as a third of the population were accused of witchcraft (Stannard 1992, 61).
Women were the particular targets of this witch hunts (Barstow 1994, 21). The
women targeted for destruction were those most independent from patriarchal
authority: single women, widows, and women healers (Ehrenreich and English
1979, 35–39).
Andrea Smith 77
By contrast, Native societies were relatively more peaceful and egalitarian.
Their egalitarian nature poses a threat to the ability of white men to continue
their ownership of white women because they belie patriarchy’s defense of itself
as “normal.” And in fact, the 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!” (Stannard 1992, 104).
As William Apess (Pequot) once stated in the 1800s: “Where, in the records
of Indian barbarity, can we point to a violated female?” (O’Connell 1992, 64).
Brigadier General James Clinton of the Continental Army said to his soldiers as
they were sent off to destroy the Iroquois nation in 1779: “Bad as the savages are,
they never violate the chastity of any women, their prisoners” (cited in Wrone
and Nelson 1982, 17). As Shoat and Stam argue, the real purpose behind this
colonial terror “was not to force the indigenes to become Europeans, but to
keep Europeans from becoming indigenes” (1994, 72).
The high status of women in Native societies did not escape the notice of
white women either. White women often looked to the Native societies as
models of equality from which the white society should base itself, often to the
dismay of white men. Even in war, European women were often surprised to > nd
that they went unmolested by their Indian captors. Mary Rowlandson said of
her experience: “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” (Rowlandson
1974, 108–109). Between 1675 and 1763, almost 40 percent of women who were
taken captive by Native people in New England chose to remain with their cap-
tors (Namias 1993, 25).3 In 1899, Mrs. Teall wrote an editorial in the Syracuse
Herald-Journal discussing the status of women in Iroquois society:
They had one custom the white men are not ready, even yet, to
accept. The women of the Iroquois had a public and in[ uential
position. They had a council of their own . . . which had the ini-
tiative in the discussion; subjects presented by them being settled
in the councils of the chiefs and elders; in this latter council the
women had an orator of their own (often of their own sex) to
present and speak for them. There are sometimes female chiefs
. . . The wife owned all the property . . . The family was hers;
descent was counted through mother. (Lopez n.d., 101)
78 Hypatia
In response to her editorial, a man who signs himself as “Student” replies:
Women among the Iroquois, Mrs. Teall says . . . had a council of
their own, and orators and chiefs. Why does she not add what
follows in explanation of why such deference was paid to women,
that “in the torture of prisoners women were thought more skil-
ful and subtle than the men” and the men of the inquisition were
outdone in the re> nement of cruelty practiced upon their victims
by these savages. It is true also that succession was through
women, not the men, in Iroquois tribes, but the explanation is
that it was generally a dif> cult guess to tell the fatherhood of
children . . . The Indian maiden never learned to blush . . . The
Indians, about whom so much rhetoric has been wasted, were a
savage, merciless lot who would never have developed themselves
nearer to civilization than they were found by missionaries and
traders . . . Their love was to butcher and burn, to roast their
victims and eat them, to lie and rob, to live in > lth, men, women,
children, dogs and [ eas crowded together. (Lopez n.d., 103)
Thus, as Warren argues, the dysfunctionality of patriarchal white society can
only be maintained if it seems like the only option. The relatively egalitarian
nature of Native societies belies patriarchy’s claims to normality, and thus it is
imperative for a patriarchal society to thrive to destroy egalitarian societies that
present other ways of living. The demonization of Native women, then, is part
of white men’s desires to maintain control over white women.
Sexual Violence and Reproductive Health
Native women are also threatening because of their ability to reproduce the
next generation of peoples who can resist colonization. While the bodies of
both Indian men and women have been marked by sexual violence, Ines Her-
nandez-Avila notes that the bodies of Native women have been particularly
targeted for abuse because of their capacity to give birth. “It is because of a
Native American woman’s sex that she is hunted down and slaughtered, in fact,
singled out, because she has the potential through childbirth to assure the con-
tinuance of the people” (Hernandez-Avila 1993, 386). David Stannard points
out that control over women’s reproductive abilities and destruction of women
and children are essential in destroying a people. If the women of a nation are
not disproportionately killed, then that nation’s population will not be severely
affected. He says that Native women and children were targeted for wholesale
killing in order to destroy the Indian nations (1992, 121). This is why colonizers
such as Andrew Jackson recommended that troops systematically kill Indian
women and children after massacres in order to complete extermination.
Andrea Smith 79
This practice of controlling Native women’s ability to reproduce continues in
new forms. The General Accounting Of> ce released a study in November 1976
indicating that Native women were being sterilized without informed consent.
Dr. Connie Uri (Cherokee/Choctaw) conducted further investigations leading
her to estimate that 25 percent of all Native women of childbearing age had
been sterilized without their informed consent, with sterilization rates as high
as 80 percent on some reservations (Jarvis n.d.; Dillingham 1977a; Dillingham
1977b; Oklahoma 1989).
While the institution of informed consent policies has somewhat curbed
the abuse of sterilization, it has reappeared in the form of dangerous contra-
ceptives such as Norplant and Depo-Provera. These are both extremely risky
forms of long-acting hormonal contraceptives that have been pushed on Indian
women.4 Depo-Provera, a known carcinogen which has been condemned as an
inappropriate form of birth control by several national women’s health organi-
zations, was routinely used on Indian women through Indian Health Services
(IHS) before it was approved by the FDA in 1992. It was particularly used for
Indian women with disabilities. The reason given: hygienics. Depo- Provera
prevents Native women with disabilities from having their periods, keeping
them “cleaner” for their caretakers. Once again, Native women’s bodies are
viewed as inherently dirty, in need of cleansing and puri> cation. The Phoenix
IHS policy in the 1980s, according to Raymond Jannet, was, “We use it to stop
their periods. There is nothing else that will do it. To have to change a pad on
someone developmentally disabled, you’ve got major problems. The fact they
become infertile while on it is a side bene> t.” Jannet argues that Depo Provera
helps girls with emotions related to their periods. “Depo Provera turned them
back into their sweet, poor handicapped selves. I take some pride in being a
pioneer in that regard.” But, he said, while he has no problems using the drug
on Indian women, “I will not be going out and using it on attractive 16–year-old
girls who one day hope to be mothers” (Masterson and Guthrie 1986).
The colonization of Native women’s bodies continues today. In the 1980s,
when I served as a non-violent witness in the non-violent witness program for
the Chippewa spear> shers being harassed by white racist mobs, one persecutor
carried a sign saying “Save a > sh; spear a pregnant squaw.” During the 1990
Mohawk crisis in the town of Oka, a white mob surrounded the ambulance of
a Native woman attempting to leave the Mohawk reservation because she was
hemorrhaging after having given birth. She was forced to “spread her legs” to
prove she had given birth. The police at the scene refused to intervene. An
Indian man wearing jeans was arrested for “wearing a disguise,” he was brutally
beaten, and his testicles were crushed. Two women from Chicago Women of
All Red Nations (the organization I belong to) went to Oka to videotape the
crisis. They were arrested and held in custody for eleven hours without being
charged, and were told that they could not go to the bathroom unless the male
80 Hypatia
police of> cers could watch. The walls of the place where they were held were
covered with pornographic magazines.
This colonial desire to subjugate Indian women’s bodies was quite apparent
when, in 1982, Stuart Kasten marketed a new video game, “Custer’s Revenge,”
in which players get points each time they, in the form of Custer, rape an Indian
woman. The slogan of the game is “When you score, you score.” He describes
the game as “a fun sequence where the woman is enjoying a sexual act willingly.”
According to the promotional material:
You are General Custer. Your dander’s up, your pistol’s wavin’.
You’ve hog-tied a ravishing Indian maiden and have a chance to
rewrite history and even up an old score. Now, the Indian maid-
en’s hands may be tied, but she’s not about to take it lying down,
by George! Help is on the way. If you’re to get revenge you’ll have
to rise to the challenge, dodge a tribe of [ ying arrows and protect
your [ anks against some downright mean and prickly cactus. But
if you can stand pat and last past the strings and arrows—You
can stand last. Remember? Revenge is sweet.5
Sexual Violence, Land, and Environmental Racism
The connection between the colonization of the bodies of Native peoples,
particularly those of Native women, is not simply metaphorical. Many feminist
theorists have argued for a connection between patriarchy’s disregard for nature,
for women, and for indigenous peoples. It is the same colonial/patriarchal mind
that seeks to control the sexuality of women and indigenous peoples that also
seeks to control nature (Merchant 1980; Caputi 1993; Ruether 1975). As Shoat
and Stam explain, “Colonized people are projected as body rather than mind,
much as the colonized world was seen as raw material rather than as mental
activity and manufacture” (1994, 138).
Certainly, even today, colonizers justify the theft of Native lands on the
grounds that Native peoples did not or do not properly control or subdue
nature. For instance, among the Christian Right, John Eidsmoe contends that
Christians never stole Indian land. He argues that since Native people did not
privatize land, and since their communities had not been “established by God,”
then Europeans had a right to seize the land from them. And furthermore, while
Christianity may have been forced on Native people, “millions of people are in
heaven today as a result” (Eidsmoe 1992, 133, 140). As Pat Robertson states:
These tribes are . . . in an arrested state of social development.
They are not less valuable as human beings because of that,
but they offer scant wisdom or learning or philosophical vision
that can be instructive to a society that can feed the entire
Andrea Smith 81
population of the earth in a single harvest and send spacecraft
to the moon . . . Except for our crimes, our wars and our frantic
pace of life, what we have is superior to the ways of primitive
peoples . . . Which life do you think people would prefer: free-
dom in an enlightened Christian civilization or the suffering
of subsistence living and superstition in a jungle? You choose.
(Robertson 1993, 153)
Immanuel Wallerstein argues that “racism is meant to keep people inside the
work system [at a state of marginalization], not eject them from it” (1991, 34).
In the case of Native peoples, however, who have an unemployment rate on
many reservations as high as 90 percent, the intent of racism is to exclude them.
Because the majority of the energy resources in this country are on Indian lands,
the continued existence of Indian people is a threat to capitalist operations.
Thus, the connection between the colonization of Native bodies and Native
lands is not simply metaphorical but is rooted in material realities.
One way in which capitalism has succeeded in continuing its unrelenting
assault against the environment is that certain populations become deemed as
“surplus” populations and hence either worthy repositories of environmental
waste or scapegoats of environmental crisis in need of population control. Samir
Amin describes this process as “apartheid,” where “sacri> ces imposed on some do
not carry the same weight as the bene> ts obtained by others” (1977, 142). Those
peoples who have already been rendered dirty, impure, and hence expendable
are then forced to face the most immediate consequences of environmental
destruction. Unfortunately for colonizers, it is not so easy to contain environ-
mental degradation to those populations deemed expendable.
It is not an accident that 100 percent of uranium production takes place on
or near Indian land (La Duke 1993, 99). Nor is it a coincidence that Native res-
ervations are often targeted for toxic waste dumps. To date, over 50 reservations
have been targeted for waste dumps (Beasely 1991, 40). Military and nuclear
testing also takes place almost exclusively on Native lands. For instance, there
have already been at least 650 nuclear explosions on Western Shoshone land at
the Nevada test site. Fifty percent of these underground tests have leaked radia-
tion into the atmosphere (Taliman 1991). Native peoples, the expendable ones,
are situated to suffer the brunt of environmental destruction so that colonizers
can continue to be in denial about the fact that they will also eventually be
affected. As Aime Cesaire notes, the processes of colonization are not contain-
able; ultimately everyone is impacted: “Colonial activity, colonial enterprise,
colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justi> ed by the
contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer
. . . tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this
boomerang effect of colonization, that I want to point out” (1972, 20).
82 Hypatia
A case in point is the current plan to relocate all nuclear wastes into a perma-
nent high-level nuclear waste repository in Yucca mountain on Shoshone land,
for a cost of $3.25 billion. Yucca Mountain is located on an active volcanic zone
where kiloton bombs are exploded nearby, thus increasing the risks of radioac-
tive leakage (Taliman 1991). In addition, if this plan is approved, the proposed
repository on Yucca mountain would receive nuclear wastes throughout the
United States. Only > ve states would not be affected by the transportation of
high-level radioactive wastes. With up to 4,000 shipments of radioactive waste
crossing the United States annually, trucking industry statistics reveal that up
to > fty accidents per year could occur during the thirty-year period during which
nuclear waste would stream to Yucca Mountain (Taliman 1991).
Katsi Cook, Mohawk midwife, argues that this attack upon nature is yet
another attack on Native women’s bodies because the effects of toxic and
radiation poisoning are most apparent in their effect on women’s reproductive
systems.6 In the areas where there is uranium mining, such as in Four Corners
and the Black Hills, Indian people face skyrocketing rates of cancer, miscar-
riages, and birth defects. Children growing up in Four Corners are developing
ovarian and testicular cancers at > fteen times the national average (Taliman
1992). Meanwhile, Indian women on Pine Ridge experience a miscarriage rate
six times higher than the national average (Harden 1980, 15). And on the
Akwesasne Mohawk reserve, one of the most polluted areas in the country, the
PCBs, DDT, Mirex and HCBs that are dumped into their waters are eventually
become stored in women’s breast milk (Contaminated 1994, 11). Through the
rape of earth, Native women’s bodies are raped once again.
As long as Native people continue to live on the lands rich in energy
resources that government or corporate interests want, the sexual coloniza-
tion of Native people will continue. Native bodies will continue to be depicted
as expendable and inherently violable as long as they continue to stand in the
way of the theft of Native lands. The United States is indeed engaged in a
“permanent social war” against the Native bodies, particularly Native women’s
bodies, which threaten its legitimacy (Stoler 1997, 69). Colonizers evidently
recognize the wisdom of the Cheyenne saying, “A Nation is not conquered until
the hearts of the women [and their bodies as well] are on the ground.”
Notes
1. Press conference, Chicago, Illinois, August 17, 1990.
2. As a result of the organizing efforts of Native people in Illinois, the site was
eventually closed, but the remains were not reburied when the next governor took
of> ce.
Andrea Smith 83
3. I am not arguing that the non-patriarchal nature of Native societies is the
only reason white women may have chosen to live with their captors, but that it is a
possible explanation for why many chose to stay.
4. For a description of the hazards of Depo-Provera, see Minkin, who concludes
that “the continued use of Depo-Provera for birth control is unjusti> ed and unethical”
(n.d.). Depo-Provera, a known carcinogen that has been condemned as an inappropriate
form of birth control by several national women’s health organizations, was routinely
used on Indian women through Indian Health Services (IHS) before it was approved by
the FDA in 1992 (Masterson and Guthrie, n.d.). There are no studies on the long-term
effects of Norplant, and the side-effects (constant bleeding, sometimes for over ninety
days, tumors, kidney problems, strokes, heart attacks, sterility) are so extreme that
approximately thirty percent of women on Norplant want it taken out in the > rst year,
with the majority requesting to have it taken out within two years, even though it is
supposed to remain implanted in a woman’s arm for > ve years (Hanania-Freeman 1993,
20). To date, over 2,300 women have joined a class action suit against Norplant, who are
suffering from 125 side effects relating to Norplant (Plant 1994, 46). For a statement on
Depo-Provera from the National Black Women’s Health Project, National Latina Health
Organization, the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, the
National Women’s Health Network, and Women’s Economic Agenda Project, contact
NAWHERC, PO Box 572, Lake Andes, South Dakota 57356–0572.
5. Promotional material from Public Relations: Mahoney/Wasserman & Associ-
ates, Los Angeles, Calif., n.d.
6. Lecture at Indigenous Women’s Network conference at White Earth reserva-
tion, September 17, 1994.
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Introduction
In this paper complete all the required activities and answer the reflection questions. This assignment will help extend your understanding of the unit topics and concepts to applications in everyday life. Please respond to all of the questions in paragraph form with the question numbers labeled. You should incorporate concepts from the readings into your answers and cite the readings as needed. The paper should be 2-3 pages and submitted via Canvas by Sunday 11:59 pm CT.
Question 1
Watch the clip linked below that retells an account of an experience in a grocery store.
· How is privilege present within this story?
· How does this one personal experience connect to the larger history of oppression in the US?
· How does this clip portray ways to harness privilege to promote social change?
· What do you think about the effectiveness of this strategy?
Question 2
Personal Reflection on Social Class: Answer the following questions about your class identity and reflect on how your identity is located within systems of privilege and oppression. Share to your comfort level and reflect on your experience as one example of understanding the connection between biography and history.
· What is your social class position?
· How have you learned about your class position?
· How do you express your social class (ex: dress, communication, accessories, music, etc)?
· What advantages and/or disadvantages, if any, do you experience based upon your social class?
· Do you know of any stereotypes about your social class? If so, list them.
· How does your class position intersect with other identities?
After reading the article about indigenous women and sexual violence, answer the following questions. How does the article exemplify the importance of historical context in defining and understanding social problems? Identify examples from the reading.