I write a lot about invisibility. It’s how, for decades, I’ve characterized our status in the public mind, to say nothing of it discourse. We are, as I’ve said elsewhere, the Invisible People, the Forgotten Ones, even among supposed liberals and supposed anti-racist activists. Native people simply don’t exist in any real way in their consciousness.
That’s all the more true for Native women. Our men do find roles in the nation’s zeitgeist as cartoonish stereotypes: the chief, the brave, the medicine man (all misconceived and misconstrued, all rendered not merely inaccurately but as artificial constructs of the great white American mythos, with an able assist from Hollywood and so-called literature). To the extent women exist at all, it’s usually overtly sexualized, the Pocahottie/Pocahotass, with plunging neckline and split fringed faux-buckskin microskirt, sometimes “warpaint,” all too often a warbonnet that belongs only to a few very specific cultures and in none of which is it worn by women.
First, a word of warning: Today’s “feature” is not going to make for pleasant reading. Quite the opposite. It’s also not going to link to anything on offer for sale; it’s not that kind of post. Today’s topic is far more difficult, and far more important, than anything to do with commerce. The earrings, though, feature prominently in symbolic terms, as you’ll see when you get to the closing sections of this post. It’s going to be a long post, one that calls at length on writings past of my own, and on the work of other activists. And I am going to ask you to read on, and to share this, and to join us in this effort. Because today, it’s about our missing and murdered indigenous women, and they must not be forgotten.
#MMIW
I’ve written about these phenomena too many times to count. I’ve also written far too often, about their even darker side: the one that feeds violence against Native women, that contributes to our astronomical rates of assault, domestic abuse, sexual violence, abduction and human trafficking, murder . . . and our obliteration from society’s consciousness and collective memory, as those abducted, raped, trafficked, and murdered are consigned to oblivion.
I’ve written about that darkest of dark sides, too. Too often, and yet it’s never enough. Our women are still assaulted, raped, abducted, trafficked, murdered on a scale unimaginable among any other ethnic group on this continent. But now, Native women are banding together to do something about it.
The campaign is known on social media as #MMIW: “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” It’s an indigenous grass-roots effort to restore these women’s identities in the public sphere, to show their faces, to give them voice. It’s a way to let them, their spirits, and their loved ones know that they are not forgotten, that they are remembered, they are loved, they are needed, they are missed and mourned.
And there are ways that you can help.
Before we get to that, though, I want readers to understand exactly what we’re dealing with here. This is a subject that is oh, so close to my heart, too close, for too many reasons. I wrote about in great depth most recently something over a year ago, a piece in two parts, sparked by the knowledge of the horrors inflicted on our women in the lands north of here, at a time when no one — no one —was talking about it except we Native women. No one cared. We were invisible, and our sisters caught up in this ongoing daily atrocity were even less than invisible, they were simply nonexistent. Who needs to talk about something that doesn’t exist?
We do. And we did. And now it’s becoming known outside the reaches of the Bakken and Boundary Waters, but we’re not there yet. Just look at the statistics:
By the Numbers
One in every three Native American women will be raped at least once during her lifetime.
One in three.
At least once.
That’s more than twice the rate for any other ethnic group in the U.S.
I’ve sat with some of these women, heard their stories, shared their pain and grief and fear. And I’ve shared their frustration with the knowledge that, some 86% of the time, their rapists were virtually untouchable.
Why?
Because with very few exceptions, tribal authorities have had no jurisdiction over non-Indian criminal offenders – and 86% of rapes of Native women are committed by non-Indian rapists (70% are white).
These numbers, of course, included only those rapes that are actually reported … According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 70% of all rapes in the U.S. go unreported; other sources place the number as high as 84%. It’s understandable that rape survivors often fear reporting the rape. They may be afraid the attacker will retaliate. They may fear that no one will believe them, or that they will be blamed for the assault. They may feel ashamed, humiliated, degraded, dishonored –- and fear that reporting it will only allow others to humiliate them further. And Native women’s fears are exacerbated by historical tragedy and the knowledge that the system is not set up to help them.
Thanks to serious jurisdictional and cultural barriers, the under-reporting rate is undoubtedly much higher in Indian Country than elsewhere. It’s difficult to report a crime — especially one involving sexual violence — to members of federal law enforcement agencies, when long historical experience has given Indian women and men alike abundant reason to distrust both the officers and the entities they represent. The ranks of police officers, investigators, and prosecutors are still filled disproportionately by white men, and cultural practices and spiritual requirements may deter many Native women from filing a report. Many Native women decline even to seek medical treatment, because too many Indian Health Service facilities have non-Native (often male) physicians lacking in cultural awareness, and a severe shortage of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE practitioners) exists all across Indian Country.
A Legacy of Conquest
In nearly 500 years of contact, rape has been part of a deliberate strategy of war, conquest, and annihilation of Native peoples. It was not uncommon for European settlers to assault Indian women on an individual (or group) basis, but more than that, rape was one of many weapons in the U.S. government’s arsenal as it executed its policies of Manifest Destiny and Indian removal.
Of course, the written record is sparse with regard to rape of Native women. To the victors who kept the records, we were not important –- we weren’t even fully human. But our memories are long, and our oral traditions strong, and the stories are handed down from generation to generation.
. . .
This behavior was not unusual. To a patriarchal culture that regarded Indians as something less than human, the ability to rape Native women with impunity was seen as nothing more than their due –- the spoils of conquest and colonialism. And they violated, despoiled, and stole our grandmothers’ bodies and souls in the same way that they violated, despoiled, and stole the body and soul of Akii, our Mother Earth.
Amplifying Violence
There’s a significant and deadly difference in rape statistics as they relate to Native women:
Among rape victims in the general population, 74% report being physically battered in additional ways during the commission of the rape. For Native women, that number jumps to 90%.
Among the general population, 30% of rape victims report sustaining other physical injuries, in addition to the rape itself. Among Native women, that number is 50%.
Roughly 11% of rape victims as a whole report that their rapist used a weapon. For Native women, that number more than triples, to 34%.
Taken in historical context, and coupled with the fact that 86% of all rapes of Native women are committed by non-Indians, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that something even more insidious is at work here.
Eluding Jurisdiction
Most rape survivors are attacked by a member of their own racial or ethnic group: In other words, white women tend to be sexually assaulted by white men, African American women by African American men, etc. The one group for whom this rule does not hold is Native American women. As noted above, more than 86 percent of Native rape survivors are attacked by non-Indians, (more than 70 percent of whom are white).
Why does this matter?
It matters because, until [2010], the vast majority of Native women rape survivors had little or no legal recourse: Even where the victim is a tribal member, tribal authorities have had no jurisdiction over non-Native defendants. With limited exceptions, only federal authorities have had jurisdiction to arrest and prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on tribal lands — and historically, cases involving violence against Native women have received little to no attention. As I’ve noted elsewhere, “[f]ederal authorities routinely decline to prosecute more than 50 percent of all violent crimes committed in Indian Country; the rate of declination is much higher for sexual assault cases.”
I wrote those words four and half years ago, but sadly, the statistics remain unchanged. Even with the renewal of VAWA (the Violence Against Women Act) nearly two years, with added provisions that provide greater jurisdiction for tribal authorities to prosecute non-Native offenders on tribal lands, the practical barriers remain too great.
GROUND ZERO OF OUR DISAPPEARED
In recent years, these issues have become magnified — in some places, to a genuinely exponential degree — accompanied by a new wave of misogyny and racism and corporate imperialism, facilitated by governments and their agents who place greater value on profits and exploitation than on the lives of Native women and the very earth itself. In Canada, it’s a dynamic that long ago reached epidemic proportions, and it is the First Nations women there who took the lead on forcing the issue of these crimes into the larger public discourse. It exists on our side of that border, too, and in that watery netherworld between. I’ve written about both: the “man camps” of the Bakken, and the human trafficking in the channels of the Boundary Waters.
In the Bakken, abutting the Fort Berthold Reservation, the ongoing rape of Mother Earth mirrors the ongoing rape of Native women, vicious “sport” in what the area’s denizens proudly refer to as “man camps”:
Earlier [in 2013], a reporter for The Atlantic, Sierra Crane-Murdoch, covered the man camps in sickening detail. She recounted a slowly-growing awareness among area law enforcement that Native women, whose assaults are historically underprosecuted in the first place, were increasingly becoming explicit targets:
Fort Berthold, like many reservations, has a long history of crimes slipping through jurisdictional cracks. Sadie Young Bird, director of the Fort Berthold Coalition Against Violence, told me that before 2010, when the Tribal Law and Order Act passed Congress, very few sexual assault cases reported on the reservation were prosecuted. The Act provided greater resources for tribal law enforcement agencies, in part by encouraging U.S. attorneys to hire special assistants to boost prosecution rates. In 2011, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Volk was appointed to work specifically with Fort Berthold. Between 2009 and 2011, federal case filings on North Dakota reservations rose 70 percent.
When I asked Tim Purdon, North Dakota’s U.S. [A]ttorney, if the numbers had anything to do with a rise in crime, he first insisted they did not. He believed there was a growing sense among Native American victims that the crimes they reported would be prosecuted, and this encouraged more women to come forward.
But beginning last summer, Purdon noticed a peculiar pattern emerging from Fort Berthold. Many of his filings—a surprising number of them—involved non-Indian perpetrators. “We had five or six in a month,” he told me. “Why was this? We realized it’s non-enrolled folks moving to the oil patch.”
As Crane-Murdoch points out, the Fort Berthold Reservation’s effective population “doubled” in a very short period of time, without accompanying infrastructure to support such an increase. But more to the point, the new “residents” — now more than 4,000 of them — are neither tribal members nor even Indian.
And that’s the dirty little secret of law enforcement in the Bakken:
A year earlier, I had stood in this camp with a mechanic from Washington, a friendly, jovial man, who marveled at the seeming lack of rules here. “Basically,” he said, “you can do anything short of killing somebody.”
When I share this quote with tribal officers, none ever seems surprised. What the mechanic said was not entirely true—cases that fall outside tribal and federal jurisdiction belong to the state. But several officers insinuated that crimes committed on Fort Berthold are often a low priority for deputies and sheriffs, who are already overworked by the boom outside reservation borders.
And the non-Indians know it. Not only do they know it, but they exploit it. Proudly.
It was as though, tribal officers said, their lack of jurisdiction had encouraged a culture of lawlessness. Every officer could recount being told by a non-Indian, “You can’t do anything to me.” Once, when Young Bird and [tribal investigator Angela] Cummings went into a man camp to check on a domestic violence victim, the manager of the camp said, “Women aren’t allowed here,” and shut the door. “Perpetrators think they can’t be touched,” Young Bird told me. “They’re invincible.”
The same reporter interviewed Fort Berthold tribal police officer Nathan Sanchez at some length. The stories Officer Sanchez tells are bloodcurdling:
One morning a few weeks earlier, Sanchez had just come on duty when he stopped a man for reckless driving. “Come to find out, this guy is one of those sex offenders that kills his victims after. It’s like, what the freak is going on here? I don’t even have my coffee yet.”
Serial killers.
Most of the violence, of course, is much more mundane. For too many indigenous women, it’s long been a way of life. But the situation at Fort Berthold takes it to a whole other level.
This is life in the man camps of the Dakotas, a modern-day role play of a “Wild West” free-for-all of the worst that capitalism and colonialism have to offer. And it’s playing out on the body of our Mother, and on the bodies of our women.
And it’s not just a land-bound class of criminality, either. I subsequently wrote about water-based trafficking in the bodies and spirits of Native women:
To bring attention to the fact that our women, our girls — our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our very selves — are being sold into the sexual slavery of human trafficking. Right here. In the U.S. and Canada. In the boundary waters separating the two countries, just as they are in the filthy, gritty oilfield towns of the Northern Plains.
Indian women are being raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, and worse — on a daily basis, and in an organized way.
And it has to stop.
What sparked my own piece was the wider public dissemination of a report by [at the time it was written] a Master’s candidate from Minnesota, herself a Native woman:
In 2011, University of Minnesota-Duluth Master’s candidate Christine Stark (Anishinaabe/Cherokee) co-wrote a paper for the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition [MIWSAC] on Minnesota’s indigenous women being forced into human trafficking [.pdf]. Entitled Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota, the report was a joint project with Prostitution Research and Education [PRE]. It sought to explore the links between the high incidence of homelessness, poverty, and sexual violence and the rates of human trafficking among Native women in Minnesota.
It reads like a cross between a dissertation and a memorandum of law (apt, since it was published through the William Mitchell College of Law).
Except, of course, for the graphic stories of sexual violence. And the pain and desolation of the women whose stories are told.
There’s nothing academic about that.
The report’s background sections explore the historical backdrop against which contemporary trafficking of Native women must be evaluated.
Prostitution is another form of this egregious violence against Native women. An honest review of history indicates that European system of prostitution was imposed by force on tribal communities through nearly every point of contact between Europeans and Native people. It is essential to understand the history of this trafficking of Native women in order to reduce the epidemic of sexual violence against them (Deer, 2010). Yet most research on violence against Native women in the United States fails to include prostitution and sex trafficking as forms of sexual violence. Neither a 2007 Amnesty International report about sexual assault perpetrated against Native American women in the United States nor a 2010 report on sexual violence against Native American women (Bachman, Zaykowski, Lanier, Poteyeva, & Kallmyer, 2010) addressed prostitution and sex trafficking.
The report included interviews with 105 Native women who had been subjected to trafficking, including prostitution and rape. What came out of those interviews is nearly indescribable in its brutality, rendered all the more so by the flatness of affect that comes through in the report’s pages.
I wrote my piece through a series of four lenses: Objectifying; commodifying; targeting; and trafficking. I pulled from the report actual quotes by the indigenous women the authors interviewed. That flatness of affect I mentioned? It’s there, and it will break your heart:
“After you get into prostitution, you get used to it; it’s like using the bathroom. You don’t think about it after a while, it takes all your feeling of being a woman away.”
“A john said to me, ‘I thought we killed all of you’.”
“When a man looks at a prostitute and a Native woman, he looks at them the same: ‘dirty’.”
That last? It’s a #YesAllNativeWomen moment, as any and all of us who have ever had the epithet “squaw” flung at us can attest.
The statistics are beyond staggering, the stories nearly incomprehensible.
According to VICE reporter Dave Dean:
Through the process of researching and writing this report, Stark kept hearing stories of trafficking in the harbors and on the freighters of Duluth and Thunder Bay. The numerous stories and the gradual realization that this was an issue decades, perhaps centuries, in the making, compelled Stark to delve further into what exactly was taking place.
She found the women. Hundreds of them.
They called them “boat whores.”
In an article written for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Stark describes one disturbing anecdote of an Anishinaabe woman who had just left a shelter after being beaten by her pimp—who was a wealthy, white family man. He paid her bills, rent, and the essentials for her children, but on weekends, “brought up other white men from the cities for prostitution with Native women… he had her role play the racist ‘Indian maiden and European colonizer’ myth with him during sex.”
I had to stop reading at that point. Just for a while.
When I picked up where I left off, I learned that the trade in sexual slavery is no longer confined to adult indigenous women; young Native girls and boys, and even babies, are reportedly being sold as sexual commodities to be “owned,” however briefly, and used.
[Ms. Stark] told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. the Duluth port has been well-known among First Nations people for generations as a place where women, teenage girls and boys, and even babies are trafficked.
“The women and children — and I’ve even had women talk about a couple of babies brought onto the ships and sold to the men on ships — are being sold or are exchanging sex for alcohol, a place to stay, drugs, money and so forth,” Stark said. “It’s quite shocking.
“I have spoken with a woman who was brought down from Thunder Bay on the ships and talks about an excessive amount of trafficking between Canada and the Duluth-Superior harbor. There is a very strong link between Thunder Bay and Duluth.”
The numbers — in this one milieu alone — are staggering:
At the time of these interviews, more than a third (37%) of the women had been used by more than 500 men who bought them for sexual use. Eleven percent had been used by 500-900 men; 16% of the women had been used in prostitution by 900-1000 men. At a most basic level, these numbers provide a crude index of the harms perpetrated against these Native women in Minnesota prostitution.
Prostitution is intergenerational (Pierce, 2009). Fifty-seven percent of the 105 women we interviewed had family members also involved in prostitution. These included cousins, sisters, mothers, aunts, nieces, and daughters. Brothers and fathers, possibly involved in pimping, were also mentioned. Fifty-eight percent of the women’s families knew about their prostitution and in 43% of those instances, the families had tried to help the women get out of prostitution.
It’s also intergenerational in another sense:
Duluth police in 2002 found evidence that three traffickers had prostituted up to 10 women and girls on foreign ships in the port. Collin (2011) noted that approximately 1,000 ships a year dock at the Duluth harbor and also described reports of women and children trafficked to ships’ crews who are disappeared for months before returning. Intergenerational harms persist in that some girls whose mothers were prostituted on the boats were conceived during prostitution (Baran, 2009) [emphasis added].
And the damage spreads in all directions, before and after, outward and inward. Ms. stark, one of the authors of the 2011 report, knows this all too well. Just last month, she wrote of how it haunts her daily — the brutal matter-of-factness of the women’s stories, the casualness with which society concerns itself with whether they live or die:
“I’ve been raped my whole life. What else do you want to know?”
A trafficked Anishinaabe woman in her late 50s said this to me during an interview in Duluth. She was 4 the first time she was raped. As one of five women who interviewed 105 Native trafficked women in Minnesota for the report “Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota,” I hear her words reverberate in my mind.
I think of her. I wonder if she is OK. I wonder if she is still alive. I still feel her pain and desperation that began at such a young age and continued through decades of abuse and degradation in prostitution as an adult.
Wondering if she is still alive is not hyperbole. It’s realistic. The United States doesn’t compile the numbers, but a Canadian study found that women and girls who are prostituted have a 40 times higher death rate than those who are not.
A serial killer in Oklahoma has preyed on Native trafficked women. In Minnesota, one woman we were to interview died the day before we were to meet with her. Another trafficked Native woman was killed and her body dumped along Interstate 394 in Minneapolis. She had just turned 18. Murder. Suicide. Drug overdoses. Beatings. Rapes.
I’ve said over and over again that we are the Invisible People, the Forgotten Ones. Dispensable and disposable. To be used and abused and dumped like trash by the side of an interstate highway. And barely more than a child, by any calculus.
The women’s own words — the piece still mostly missing from existing coverage of this story — are soul-searing:
“It’s like incest — no one wants to talk about it.”
“As far as I’m concerned, all prostitution is rape.”
“Prostitution is dangerous. It’s like suicide.”
Or, as in the above story of the eighteen-year-old woman, “It’s like homicide.”
As I’ve noted repeatedly elsewhere:
Genocide need not depend upon heedless and bloody slaughter.
Stealing the children is enough to do the job.
So is stealing the lives of the women who would bear the children.
So is stealing the very earth that supports and sustains a culture and its people.
And once again, indigenous women, the earth mothers, are stand-ins for Mother Earth . . . and targets in their own right.
EARRINGS
It’s Super Bowl weekend — by one yardstick, the single most violent weekend of the year for women of all ethnicities in this country. It’s a pinnacle of capitalism and colonialism, one in which the players, disproportionately men of color themselves, who are paid to inflict violence upon one another for the amusement of fans, are largely incidental to the entire phenomenon. No, this weekend is about commercial success and corporate profits, astronomical profits of the sort that would feed many entire rezes for a year and more.
And it’s about the sexual trafficking of women.
It’s one of the dirty little not-so-secrets of the sport. But why, in a sport that boasts not one, but two racist team names and mascots, one of which is an actual genocidal slur, should anyone be surprised by this?
They shouldn’t.
And just as there is a direct line between the violence of the sport as it has evolved to this day and the domestic and partner violence inflicted upon women over the course of this weekend, so, too, is there an equally direct line between the objectification of and appropriation from Native peoples embodied in the use of racist mascots and the objectification and abuse of our women. We are cardboard cut-outs and caricatures, not human, something to be used, exploited, toyed with, discarded. Assault, abduction, rape, and murder don’t hurt us, because we don’t really exist.
But we do. And numerous indigenous groups are using this weekend to continue to protest not only the racism inherent in mascots and minstrelsy and other exploitative and appropriative behaviors, but to draw attention to the much more than 1,000 murdered and missing indigenous women who the dominant culture has tried conveniently to erase from existence.
One of the organizers of one of these efforts is a brilliant Native poet and activist, Tanaya Winder, and some of her peers. She has conceived and launched a poignant and graphic campaign to draw attention to the [recorded to date] 1,181 stolen indigenous women that the rest of this society would prefer to ignore and forget. To that end, she is seeking to collect 1.181 single earrings, each to represent one of our women stolen from her culture, her community, her family, her very existence.
Why earrings?
It’s a stroke of cultural genius, actually.
Indian women are known by our earrings. Even those who wear almost no other jewelry . . . virtually all of us wear earrings. They’re both creative self-expression and marker of identity. If I venture out and realize that I’ve forgotten my earrings, I feel off-balance. I feel as though I’m not showing the world who I am. In an odd way, I feel invisible.
I have so many earrings — most, of course, made by Wings himself, but several pairs by other Native artists, too. Turquoise. Coral. Spiny oyster. Hearts. Heartlines. Eagle feathers. The crane whose name I was given. A pair of old Comanche earrings, shields and the four directions melded in one unifying symbol. The water birds that Wings made for his late mother, now passed on to me, one of my most sacred possessions. When I wear them, particularly when I wear those made for me by Wings himself, I am protected. I am strong. I am visible. I am me.
And so to me, it makes perfect sense that Ms. Winder should have chosen this marker of our identity to bring home the ongoing genocide — yes, genocide — of our women. Her focus on single earrings, not pairs, demonstrates the void left in our lives, our families, our communities, our cultures, with the forced absence of every missing and/or murdered indigenous woman. they will be displayed at upcoming demonstrations, a “Speak Out” event at North Dakota State University on February 9th, and a march in Fargo, North Dakota, on February 14th. I would love to be able to join the events myself, but it’s perhaps lucky for me that I cannot; I weep writing about it. The soul-scarring sight of the collected earrings would flatten me.
The lateness of this post is entirely my fault; I have been stretched far too thin with other obligations to give it the focus the subject demands. I only noticed this morning that the deadline for contributing earrings to this effort is tomorrow, January 31st, although as of a few days ago, more than 800 were still needed. There is also another caveat: Each earring must be Native-made, no knock-offs, no frauds or fakes. But I don’t know a single woman who does not have a collection of single earrings, mates long since lost. If you have earrings meeting “Native-made” requirements that you would like to contribute and the ability to get them there by tomorrow, send them to:
Netha Cloeter
Memorial Union 258
Dep’t. 5340, P.O. Box 6050
Fargo, N.D. 58108-6050
It might be worth reaching out to Ms. Winder to see whether the deadline has been extended, too.
If that’s not feasible,there is more that you can do: Follow the #MMIW hashtag on Twitter and other social media; promote these upcoming events; share knowledge of the campaign and these women’s stories with your own networks of family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues. Become educated about the tragedy, the crime, of our missing and murdered indigenous women, and help us force change: lobby your politicians and public officials; boycott corporate enablers; contact tribal entities to find out how, in practical terms, you can lend a hand in the ways they need most.
And now, since many of you know me in person, I want to put a face to this. I want to see what we see when one of our women is stolen, and what we see in the way society treats her loss.
Wings saw the photo below last night; it brought this issue home in very concrete terms. I altered it myself, explicitly for this purpose, to illustrate what is beyond imagining. And yet, I find that I cannot look at it beyond a glance.
The photo below is of me, wearing my beloved water birds. It would be me, were I to become a statistic, another among the #MMIW: one earring gone, my face, my name, my identity, my very existence inexorably fading away into invisibility.
Not one more missing earring.
Not one more missing soul.
Not one more #MMIW.
Not one more.
~ Aji
Except where otherwise noted, including quotes and links, all content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
