Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators

By Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren

Essays that use “gender as a critical lens for staging intersectional, multidisciplinary investigations of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries” (Reading Religion).

The genocides of modern history—Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala, the Holocaust, and countless others—and their effects have been well documented, but how do the experiences of female victims and perpetrators differ from those of men? In Women and Genocide, human rights advocates and scholars come together to argue that the memory of trauma is gendered and that women’s voices and perspectives are key to our understanding of the dynamics that emerge in the context of genocidal violence. The contributors of this volume examine how women consistently are targets for the sexualized violence that serves as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, how female perpetrators take advantage of the new power structures, and how women are involved in the struggle for justice in post-genocidal contexts. By placing women at center stage, Women and Genocide helps us to better understand the nexus existing between misogyny and violence in societies where genocide erupts.

“It elegantly bridges the historical divide between the study of political violence and the study of gendered violence in the so-called domestic sphere . . . Women and Genocide is an immense scholarly accomplishment that has the potential to fund creative advances in each of the scholarly disciplines it engages, as well as human rights, peace, and anti-violence programs of advocacy.” —Reading Religion

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780253033826

Book preview

1

The Gendered Logics of Indigenous Genocide

Andrea Smith

Genocide and Native¹ studies scholars have debated whether Native peoples in the Americas suffered genocide. Such discussions focus on what counts as genocide. Is intentionality required on the part of those who inflict it? Does it require a complete lack of agency from those who suffer from it? Does it count as genocide if many of the deaths resulted from disease? The debate continues. Critical ethnic studies and Native feminist scholars, however, have shifted the focus from defining genocide to analyzing the genocidal logics at play. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Dylan Rodriguez’s work suggests, if we understand racialization as the process by which people are subject to premature death, then racialization and genocide cannot be so sharply separated. Genocide is less a politics of the extreme or the exception, and instead a foundational logic on which white supremacy is based. In addition, as Maile Arvin notes, Native peoples are not simply subject to mass extermination, but to the logic of being in a perpetual state of disappearance that enables the settlers to imagine themselves as the rightful heir to all that is indigenous. As Arvin argues,

I find it important to articulate the ways in which settler colonial practices of elimination and replacement are continuously deferred—they are not, and cannot ever be, complete . . . the permanent partial state of the Indigenous subject being inhabited (being known and produced) by a settler society . . . [provides] . . . a promised consanguinity between settler and native that is often eclipsed in formulations that focus only on settler colonial vanishing and extinction. This consanguinity enables constant (sexual, economic, juridical) exploitation, by producing the image of a future universal raceless race just over the settler colonial horizon.²

Thus, expanding our framework for articulating genocide enables us to see what Michelle Raheja terms the everyday forms of genocide³ to which Native peoples are subject. This shift then reframes how Native feminists in particular have organized against the logics of genocidal gender violence.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

As I have argued elsewhere, Native genocide operates through a gendered logic in a number of ways.⁴ Sexual violence was routinely used in the conquest of Native peoples. Massacres were always accompanied by rape and sexual mutilation as these examples illustrate:

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.⁵

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.⁶

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.⁷

One woman, big with child rushed into the church, clasping the altar 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, first plunged into the holy water to be baptized, and immediately its brains were dashed out against a wall.⁸

Sexual violence was a strategy used to justify raping Native peoples, and by extension, invading their lands and extracting their resources. Colonizers did not just kill Native peoples; they destroyed Native peoples’ sense of even being people. Native studies scholar Luana Ross notes that Native genocide (and the sexual violence central to it) was never against the law; in fact, it was sanctioned by the law.⁹

Gender violence was also an important strategy in instilling patriarchy in Native communities. When colonists first came to this land they saw the necessity of instilling patriarchy in Native communities because they realized that Indigenous peoples would not accept colonial domination if their own indigenous societies were not structured on social hierarchy. Patriarchy in turns rests on a gender-binary system; hence, it is not a coincidence that colonizers also targeted indigenous peoples who did not fit within this binary model.¹⁰

Gender violence was largely introduced into Native communities through the boarding school system. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, Native children were taken from their homes to attend Christian and US government-run boarding schools as a matter of state policy. The boarding school system became more formalized under President Grant’s Peace Policy of 1869/1870. The goal of this policy was to turn over the administration of Indian reservations to Christian denominations. As part of this policy, Congress set aside funds to erect school facilities to be run by churches and missionary societies. Although they were under the direct control of church administrators, the churches were acting under the auspices of the state. These facilities were a combination of day and boarding schools erected on Indian reservations.

Then, in 1879, the first off-reservation boarding school, Carlisle, was founded by Richard Pratt in Pennsylvania. Pratt argued that as long as boarding schools were primarily situated on reservations, then (1) it was too easy for children to run away from school, and (2) the efforts to assimilate Indian children into boarding schools would be reversed when children went back home to their families during the summer. He proposed a policy in which children would be taken far from their homes at an early age and not returned to their homes until they were young adults. By 1909, there were 25 off-reservation boarding schools, 157 on-reservation boarding schools, and 307 day schools in operation. The stated rationale of the policy was to Kill the Indian and save the man. Children in these schools were not allowed to speak Native languages or practice Native traditions. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were rampant. Children were given inadequate education that only prepared them for manual labor. They were often forced to do grueling work to maintain the schools and to raise monies for the schools and salaries for the teachers and administrators. They were given inadequate food and medical care, and overcrowding contributed to the spread of epidemics. As a result, children routinely died in mass numbers of starvation or disease.¹¹

In general, while other settler states such as Canada have at least acknowledged their histories of boarding school abuse, there has been no such acknowledgement in the United States. A number of human rights violations have occurred and continue to occur in these schools. US officials have provided no recompense for victims of boarding schools, nor have they attended to the continuing effects of human rights violations. The Boarding School Healing Coalition began to document some of these abuses in South Dakota and interviewed boarding school survivors in South Dakota. Some of the findings are included in these interviews described below.¹²

RELIGIOUS/CULTURAL SUPPRESSION

Native children were generally not allowed to speak their Native languages or practice their spiritual traditions. As a result, many Native peoples can no longer speak their Native languages. Survivors widely report being punished severely if they spoke Native languages. A survivor of boarding schools in South Dakota testified to the following abuses: You weren’t allowed to speak Lakota. If children were caught speaking, they were punished. Well, some of them had their mouths washed out with soap. Some of their hands slapped with a ruler. One of the ladies tells about how they jerked her hair, jerked her by the hair to move her head back to say no and up and down to say yes. I never spoke the language again in public.

The continuing effect of this human rights abuse is that of the approximately 155 Indigenous languages still spoken, it is estimated that 90 percent will be extinct in ten years. By 2050, there will be only twenty languages left, of which 90 percent will be facing extinction by 2060.¹³

INADEQUATE MEDICAL CARE

Survivors report that they received inadequate medical care.

There was a time when my little brother was sickly and he was in the hospital with a cold and I don’t know what else was wrong. But they had the high beds in the hospital and he was little. And he fell out of bed during the night and got a nosebleed. He told them that he had a nosebleed, but they didn’t believe him because the thought was that everybody, Indians, had TB [tuberculosis]. So they sent him to Toledo, Ohio to a TB sanatorium, where he spent about a year doing tests to see if he had TB. And he didn’t have TB, but it took a year to find out that he didn’t have TB. That was a whole year that he was sent away because they wouldn’t believe him when he had nosebleeds.

I just suspect, you know, that he must have been sick and had appendicitis. And he was thrown over the hood of a bed, the metal bedstead. And he was thrown over that and whipped. And he must have been sick. And so whatever it was, he wasn’t doing or he got punished for it and got whipped and then he got sick and died from it. He had a ruptured appendix.

They also report that when they were sent to infirmaries, they were often sexually abused there. Besides the effects that continued to arise from the lack of proper medical treatment in the boarding schools, survivors reported a reluctance to seek medical attention after they left given the treatment they received.

PHYSICAL ABUSES

Children reported widespread physical abuse in boarding schools. They also reported that administrators forced older children to physically and sexually abuse younger children. Children were not protected from the abuse by administrators or other children, as shown in the following report:

If somebody left some food out and you beat the other one to it, they would be waiting for you. So there was a lot of fighting going on, a lot of the kids fighting with each other, especially the bigger kids fighting the little ones. That is what you learned.

They used to send the boys through a whipping line. And we were not too far from there and the boys lined up, I don’t know how many, in a line, and they all wore leather belts. They had to take off their leather belts and as the boy ran through, they had to whip them.

SEXUAL ABUSE

Sexual, physical, and emotional abuse was rampant. Many survivors report being sexually abused by multiple perpetrators in these schools. However, boarding schools refused to investigate, even when students publicly accused their teachers. One former BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) school administrator in Arizona stated the following: I will say this . . . child molestation at BIA schools is a dirty little secret and has been for years. I can’t speak for other reservations, but I have talked to a lot of other BIA administrators who make the same kind of charges.¹⁴

Despite the epidemic of sexual abuse in boarding schools, the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not issue a policy on reporting sexual abuse until 1987, and did not issue a policy to strengthen the background checks of potential teachers until 1989. In 1990, the Indian Child Protection Act was passed to provide a registry for sexual offenders in Native country, mandate a reporting system, provide rigid guidelines for background checks for prospective BIA and IHS (Indian Health Services) employees, and provide education to parents, school officials, and law enforcement on how to recognize sexual abuse. However, this law was never sufficiently funded or implemented, and child sexual abuse rates are dramatically increasing in Native country while they are remaining stable for the general population.¹⁵

Survivors testify to the following:

There was the priest or one of the brothers that was molesting those boys and those girls.

It seems like it was happening to the little ones. The real little ones. And that . . . I know that guy that they were accusing of that would always be around the little ones . . . the little kids . . . the little boys.

One of the girls, who was nine, nine or ten, jumped out the sixth floor window. The older girls were saying the nuns and the priests would take advantage of her and finally one of them explained to us younger ones what it was. And she finally killed herself. That was the most overt case that I can remember. They have been others that I have made myself forget because that one was so awful.

As a result of all this abuse, Native communities are now suffering continuing effects of increased physical and sexual violence that is believed to have been largely absent prior to colonization. Consequently, Native women are the women most likely to suffer domestic and sexual violence in the United States.

DEATHS IN SCHOOLS

Thousands of children have died in these schools, through beatings, medical neglect, and malnutrition. The cemetery at Haskell Indian School alone has 102 student graves, and at least 500 students died and were buried elsewhere. These deaths continue today. On December 6, 2004, Cindy Sohappy was found dead in a holding cell in Chemawa Boarding School (Oregon) where she had been placed after she became intoxicated. Someone was supposed to check on her every fifteen minutes, but for over three hours no one did so. When checked on, she was found not breathing, and was declared dead a few minutes later. The US Attorney declined to charge the staff with involuntary manslaughter. Sohappy’s mother is planning to sue the school. A videotape showed that no one checked on her when she started convulsing or stopped moving. The school has received warnings for the past fifteen years from federal health officials in Indian Health Services about the dangers of holding cells, but they ignored these warnings. Particularly troubling was that Sohappy and other young women who had histories of sexual assault, abuse, and suicide attempts were put in these cells in solitary confinement.¹⁶

Two paraphrased testimonies from survivors regarding the death of Native children in boarding schools provide further details of conditions:

Two children died in school, and the administrators took the bodies home. However, the parents weren’t there, so the administrators dumped the bodies on the parents’ house floor with no note as to what happened to them.

I used to hear babies crying in my school. Years later, the school was torn down, and they found the skeletons of babies in the walls.

United States boarding school policies would appear to be a direct violation of the United Nations Genocide Convention, which, in article II, defines genocide to include forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Furthermore, as discussed previously, the stated intention of this policy was explicitly genocidal: to kill the Indian through the forced transfer of children into boarding schools. This genocidal policy was constructed through a logic of gender violence in which cultural genocide would be accomplished through the imposition of patriarchy onto Native communities.

THE LOGICS OF GENOCIDE

As mentioned previously, our analysis of Indigenous genocide cannot be limited to the direct extermination of Native peoples. Rather, settler colonial society operates through genocidal logics in which Native peoples must continue to disappear in order to minimize the threat they pose for the legitimacy of settler society. These genocidal logics continue to inform US policies as they directed against Native peoples. Reproductive health policies illustrate these logics of disappearance. The Genocide Convention specifically name imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group as an aspect of genocide because genocide must ultimately stop a targeted group’s ability to reproduce the next generation. Native women have been no exception to this general rule.

In 1972, a Native woman entered the office of Dr. Connie Uri, a Cherokee/Choctaw doctor, and asked to have a womb implant. Dr. Uri discovered that the woman had been given a hysterectomy for sterilization purposes and had been told that the surgery was reversible. Dr. Uri began to investigate. Her work prompted Senator James Abourezk to request a study on IHS sterilization policies. The General Accounting Office released a study in November 1976, indicating that, in violation of federal guidelines, Native women were being sterilized.¹⁷ These investigations led Dr. Uri 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.¹⁸

While sterilization abuse has been curbed somewhat with the institution of informed consent policies, it has reappeared in the form of Norplant and Depo-Provera. These extremely risky forms of long-acting hormonal contraceptives have been pushed on Indian women.¹⁹ Depo-Provera, a known carcinogen that has been condemned as an inappropriate form of birth control by several national women’s health organizations,²⁰ was routinely used on Indian women through IHS before it was approved by the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) in 1992.²¹ There are no studies on the long-term effects of Norplant, the side effects of which include constant bleeding (sometimes for over ninety days), tumors, kidney problems, strokes, heart attacks, and sterility. These side effects are so extreme that approximately 30 percent of women on Norplant want it taken out in the first year,²² with the majority requesting within two years to have it taken out, even though it is supposed to remain implanted in a woman’s arm for five years. The Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center conducted a survey of Norplant and Depo-Provera policies of IHS and found that Native women were not given adequate counseling regarding the side effects and contraindications.²³

It is difficult to ascertain the accuracy of statistics. But what is of importance, as Dorothy Roberts notes, is not simply the number of Native women affected, or its effect on the population of Native peoples, but the genocidal logic that informs these policies and practices.²⁴ The ability of Native women to reproduce the future of Native peoples becomes so threatening to the colonial imagination that curbing this ability to reproduce becomes part of US policy.

Another example of how these gendered genocidal logics are manifest in US policy is in environmental policy. Native lands are disproportionally affected by environmental destruction. Almost all uranium production takes place on or near Indian land.²⁵ To date, over fifty Native reservations have been targeted for waste dumps.²⁶ In addition, military and nuclear testing also occurs 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 radiation into the atmospheres.²⁷

Katsi Cook, a Mohawk midwife, argues that this attack on 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.²⁸ In the areas where there is uranium mining, such as in Four Corners and the Black Hills, Native people face skyrocketing rates of cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects. Children growing up in Four Corners are developing ovarian and testicular cancers at fifteen times the national average.²⁹ Meanwhile, Native women on Pine Ridge experience a miscarriage rate six times higher than the national average.³⁰ Thus, environmental destruction becomes another form of sexual violence, inflicting destruction on Native women’s bodily integrity.

The gendered logics of genocide are far-reaching, expanding beyond extermination to structuring colonial society in a manner that subjects indigenous peoples to a slow death. Such policies must be seen as examples not just of racism, or colonialism, but also of genocide.

DECOLONIZATION

Native genocide is structured by a logic of gender violence. It is not simply that gender violence happens in the course of genocide, but that gender violence is the integral foundation for genocide. At the same time, in detailing how gender violence is inextricably linked to genocide, it is important to also present the ways in which Native peoples have been organizing against the gendered policies of genocide. To neglect this organizing is to reinforce the notion that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and this vanishing can never be reversed. By contrast, Native women continue to resist genocide and insist on the creation of new futures for Native peoples.

Native peoples have been resisting genocide since 1492. But the emergence of the contemporary movement to address the links between gender violence and genocide began in the 1970s. In 1977, the White Buffalo Calf Women’s Shelter was founded on the Rosebud Indian reservation in South Dakota, one of the first domestic violence shelters in the country. Tillie Black Bear, one of its cofounders, attended a national meeting on domestic violence, where she networked with other anti-violence advocates, and helped found the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. In 1978, she, along with other Native activists, such as Karen Artichoker, helped to found the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Thus, while the mainstream anti-violence movement marginalized Native peoples, Native activists were central to its formation.³¹

This movement developed in the midst of numerous challenges. Even twenty years ago, there was a deafening silence around the issues of gender violence within Native communities. To discuss gender violence resulted in being told you were airing dirty laundry, or being divisive. At the same time, as Kimberley Robertson’s work demonstrates, Native women were key organizers of the anti-violence movement and helped spawn the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence. However, despite the key leadership role played by Native women, Robertson argues Native women did not participate in significant numbers in the mainstream movement.³² Thus, anti-violence advocates had to organize creatively under challenging circumstances. In Minnesota, Native women organized by advertising events through matchbooks at bowling alleys. In Chicago, activists distributed anti-violence brochures while offering free blood-pressure testing at Native flea markets. A central problem faced by many Native feminist organizers was that gender violence was seen as secondary to Native genocide. Such an understanding presupposes that we could actually address Native genocide without addressing sexism, which ignores the fact that it has been precisely through gender violence that Native genocidal practices were enacted.

Despite the fact that the gender violence was an integral strategy of Native genocide, it was common to hear in Native organizing contexts that Native peoples do not have time to address sexual/domestic violence in our communities because we have to work on survival issues first. However, Native women suffer death rates twice as high as any other women in this country because of domestic violence.³³ They are clearly not surviving as long as issues of gender violence go unaddressed.

When the Native anti-violence movement developed, it did not articulate gender violence as separate from genocide. Movement activists argued that violence was not traditional but was the result of colonial imposition of gender hierarchies through massacres, boarding school policies, and so forth. The anti-violence movement that developed then simultaneously organized against genocide and colonialism.

As this analysis developed, it became increasingly apparent that it was not simply that gender violence happens in the course of genocide, but that genocide is structured by a logic of sexual violence. Now, it is commonplace for Native organizers to make these connections. Leanne Simpson argues:

What the colonizers have always been trying to figure out is How do you extract natural resources from the land when the peoples whose territory you’re on believe that those plant, animal and minerals have both spirit and therefore agency? . . . [They] answer: You use gender violence to remove Indigenous peoples and their descendants from the land, you remove agency from the plant and animal worlds and you reposition aki (the land) as natural resources for the use and betterment of white people.³⁴

Winona LaDuke and her organization, Honor The Earth, similarly organize around the links between gender violence and environmental violence. We are in a time of extreme extraction, as we grasp desperately for the last remaining deposits of fossil fuels to satisfy our addiction. This means extreme violence against Mother Earth, exploding her bedrock, pumping lethal chemicals into the water, removing entire mountaintops, and destroying our own habitat. This violence affects Indigenous communities the most, especially women. Violence against the land has always been violence against women.³⁵

At the same time, however, it has not always been that simple to tackle gender violence through a framework that addresses genocide and colonization simultaneously. This difficulty is evidenced in the growing prominence of the Native anti-violence movement. In the United States and Canada, the public visibility of the Indigenous anti-violence movement has grown significantly in recent years. In 2004, Amnesty International issued a report titled Stolen Sisters that detailed the lack of law enforcement response to the hundreds of missing and murdered women in Canada.³⁶ In 2007, Amnesty International published Maze of Injustice, a report detailing the epidemic of sexual violence in Native communities in the United States, as well as the jurisdictional gap that allowed perpetrators of sexual violence against Native women to act with impunity.³⁷ The public outcry from these reports contributed to some government action. In Canada, the federal government offered an apology for Canada’s residential school system, which Native children were forced to attend and where they were systematically abused. After a plethora of lawsuits, the federal government agreed to a settlement that included the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document this history of abuse. In the United States, Congress passed the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, which facilitated the ability of tribes to exercise jurisdiction over perpetrators. This Act was followed by the passage of the 2012 Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which provided limited tribal jurisdiction for non-Native offenders. Previously, the US Supreme Court had ruled in Oliphant v. Suquamish (1978) that tribal governments could exercise no criminal jurisdiction over non-Native peoples on tribal lands, which allowed non-Native offenders to perpetrate violence with impunity. VAWA provided some limited corrective to this