Silent Screams

Though the United States of America is a land priding itself on “insuring domestic tranquility,” in some areas of the nation, America has seemingly forgotten this founding value. One such example is the sovereignty dispute between U.S. and Tribal authorities, as whether crimes committed on Native lands or against Native peoples are within Tribal or U.S. jurisdiction is often called into question. States assert that their sovereignty governs, and claim that it is unconstitutional to privilege Tribal sovereignty over their own.  A critical issues arising out of the sovereignty dispute between Tribal and U.S. authorities is how crimes, especially those committed against Natives by non-Natives, are adjudicated. Importantly, violence against Native women by non-Native men is often a crime where jurisdiction is disputed, and this is reflective of the larger racial structures and injustice on a larger national scale.  The dispute between state and Tribal sovereignty relates to the larger racial and systemic issues in the United States.

Though it may seem consistent with the United States’s value that Tribal lands fall under Tribal jurisdiction, the individual states resist Tribal sovereignty. Many states propose that privileging Tribal sovereignty over sovereignty of the state is unconstitutional; and the notion that extending “Tribal jurisdiction is unconstitutional reveals the State’s  discomfort with the expansion of Tribal sovereignty, even when that sovereignty is limited to crimes perpetrated against Native people, on Tribal land” (Gurr, 116). The discomfort of states to privilege Tribal sovereignty over their own lies within the absence of discourse surrounding issues of inclusion of Native peoples and the crimes, such as domestic violence, committed against them. Moreover, the representation of Native peoples surrounding this discussion is limited due to a lack of inclusion of native peoples in the creation and maintenance of legislation pertaining to Natives. This is exemplified through Senator Chuck Grassley who stated, “under the laws of our land, you got to have a jury that is a reflection of a society as a whole, and on an Indian reservation, it’s going to be made up of Indians, right? So the non-Indian doesn't get a fair trial” (Keyes, 2013). The attitude articulated through Senator Grassley’s statement discredits the process of Tribal courts through its implication that trials under Tribal jurisdiction for non-Native people would be unjust, calling into question the validity of the tribal law system and its practices in a national context.The act of privileging state jurisdiction over Tribal displays not only a discomfort with the sovereignty of Native peoples, but also allows for continued violence against native bodies by reinforcing the lack of consequences for non-Natives individuals committing the crimes.

The American government plays a salient role creating legislation regarding how crimes are prosecuted on tribal land; unfortunately, the passed legislation often leads to perpetuating injustice against Native peoples, as seen through the PL 280. PL 280 limits Tribal and privileges state jurisdiction in cases of violence against Native peoples by non-Natives, as the legislation “imposes regional state privilege in the prosecution of all violent crimes committed on Tribal land and restricts or prohibits Tribal jurisdiction, particularly against non-native perpetrators” (Gurr, 113). Violence against Native women is especially affected by PL 280, as the implicit ravaging of female Native bodies by non-Native men continues to be a major issue, as it is “non-Native men who commit over 67 percent of rapes and sexual assaults against Native women“ (Gurr, 116). Through privileging state and limiting tribal jurisdiction, effective prosecution of crimes committed against Native peoples remains restricted and furthers the vulnerability of Native women.

The need to engage in a national discourse over issues regarding tribal sovereignty, however, extends beyond violence against Native women. The dispute between U.S. and Tribal sovereignty relates to racial tension in America as well. In the United States, whites, although axiomatically willing to agree that racial tension exists, do not then take part in learning the process of combating racial injustices. This is seen through the state as [..] organizing access to care, safety, and justice is deeply reflective and reproductive of colonialist structures of domination, assimilation, and removal.” (Gurr, 118). These structures affect the safety and security of marginalized people, as seen through the increased risk for Native peoples to be sexually assaulted (Gurr, 105). Moreover, the Black Lives Matter movement, which stemmed from the mistreatment of African - American individuals. The continued strife over racial identity in the U.S. reveals the inequalities that negatively impact the safety of marginalized people. Furthermore, the U.S. government does not provide avenues for fixing this problem with the justice system, but instead mitigates the punishment  for the individuals who violated the law or committed the crime. U.S. courts exist within these unjust societal structures, and therefore are non-objective operators as well, as, "Our courts and juries aren’t impartial arbiters -- they exist inside society, not outside of it -- and they can only provide as much justice as society is willing to give." (Bouie, 2014).

These racial ideologies embedded into the structure of the American fabric are the result of white supremacist ideologies that have been historically driven. This leads to the need to think critically of racial tension and examine, on a national scale, the issues so we can contribute positively to the discourse. As a result, we can start looking towards the improvement of the country as whole. Through this discourse we can move towards making effective change and promoting fairness for each individual in this country.

Changing Lenses: Revealing Underlying Structures in Medicine

As I have progressed through my education here at Allegheny, I have changed completely in how I think and how I view the world. This continuous process has not been easy, but it has defined who I am and it will determine the impact I have on the world. From where I am now, I can look back on my past and see how different I am. This allows me to be insightful and self-aware, but it also means that I can see in the past the things I could or should have done differently. We have discussed in class the many systems that work against Native American women in this country, and I would like to examine these systems and how they played out in a project that I worked on the summer after my freshman year. While this project was valuable for the health initiative that I worked with, I believe that the approach taken by the project managers and myself did nothing to address the systemic barriers faced by Native people in the United States, especially women.

The project I worked on was a review of current public service messaging directed towards Native people in the Northern Plains for the Safe Passage Study, which is run by the Prenatal Alcohol and SIDS and Stillbirth (PASS) Network. I looked at published literatures and public policy and recommendations by mostly federal level health organizations (Some examples can be found here and here). The PASS Network focuses on two clinical sites; the Northern Plains of North America (located in North and South Dakota), and South Africa. The network uses "community-based studies to investigate the role of prenatal exposure to alcohol in SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) and FASDs (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders)" (Dukes, et al., 2014). The Safe Passage Study, run by the PASS network, seeks to determine the relationship between prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) and SIDS and stillbirth, the fetal and placental mechanisms that contribute to these conditions, and the maternal, environmental, and genetic factors that modify the development of the fetal and infant face and brain. 

Consumption of alcohol during pregnancy can have detrimental impacts on fetal development. 

While this is very valuable for medicine's understanding of these conditions and relationships, I think that in order to truly address the issue of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and SIDS in Native communities, so much more must be considered.  Using a justice lens to look critically at my project and the greater study, I am hoping to create a better understanding of the barriers facing Native women and the ways in which they are governed by the State.

Using only a medical lens often prevents detection of other factors, discussed below, that create the conditions for certain populations to have systematically poor health outcomes.

Looking back at this project now through the justice lens I have developed over the past few years, I can see many issues that greatly limit the potential benefits that could have been reaped from such an extensive undertaking. The issues Barbara Gurr discusses in her book are clearly visible in this project (Gurr, 2015). Highly evident is the doctrine of scientific motherhood. Women in the Safe Passage study are discussed only as mothers and producers (p. 57). This also ties to Gurr’s discussion of the preconception model of care, which prioritizes the health of mothers as secondary to their potential or real children (p. 58-59). The European American valorization of empirical science can be seen throughout the language of the PASS publications, despite the fact that this lens of evidence-based medicine is generally acultural and inconsistently generalizable (p. 5, 57). Also obvious upon examination of the PASS network and its studies is that it is coming from a point of view external to the population in need. That means that those conducting the study and publishing its results will not have intimate knowledge of the true comprehensive needs of this community. This means that the study will go on to produce and encourage intervention efforts that will have to have an outside-in approach. These approaches, as well as the idea of telling Native American women what the can and cannot do with their bodies reveals the assumption of authority  over women and their bodies held by professional medical organizations (p. 43). 

Linguistically, the PASS and Safe Passage websites and publications position their study population of Native women as passive recipients of instruction who, if left unattended, will drink their children to death. As Gurr discusses in her book, networks of health care providers and the services they provide for Native American women constantly position them as people who will not get the care they need, people who will be noncompliant, and many other perceptions that allow us to see the identity collectively shaped for Native women by the State. This includes the assumption that Native people will abuse alcohol. This assumption was greatly reflected in the recommendations I reviewed several summers ago. Finally, the entire basis of the study revolved around the assumption of individual choice and agency as the primary contributor to the alcohol consumption rates seen in Native communities. This is a false and deeply problematic assumption that misdirects intervention efforts, masks the true systems responsible for these outcomes, and places the blame solely on Native women.

There are a multitude of concerns that I can see now that I could not have seen as I was working on this project. Simply telling women not to drink is simply an inadequate approach to take, yet it is the only message consistently and aggressively given to Native American women. Since Gurr primarily focuses on the problems with how Native American women are minimized, silenced, made invisible, and governed by the ruling State, I want to use this knowledge to try and envision what a justice approach to the Safe Passage study might look like.

Several studies have shown that self-expression and identity processes can dampen and counteract the negative effects, including alcohol consumption, of health stressors (p. 147). Native practices and beliefs may decrease rates of alcoholism seen in indigenous populations, thereby reducing the incidence of FAS and SIDS observed. Conversely, inhibiting the integration of these elements into the health care received by Native women may increase the chance that they consume alcohol, even when pregnant. Another approach may be the implementation of a Centering Pregnancy model of prenatal care, which is largely lead by Native participants and integrates evidence-based medical care with tradition-oriented knowledge (p. 96). This allows it to be much more culturally appropriate than other models, as well as reduce costs, empower native women to become more fully engaged with their prenatal care, and can encourage trust between the Native community and their medical system. It is important to remember that successful justice interventions must start from within the community or at the very least be partnered with the community and they must address the external governances that shape the lives of the population they are working with. We must address those systems that, as Dr. Camara Jones would say, push certain groups of people towards a cliff, rather than trying to improve the strength of the net meant to catch them. Only once these elements are considered can projects such as the Safe Passage study have the truest beneficial impact.

Dukes, K. A., Burd, L., Elliott, A. J., Fifer, W. P., Folkerth, R. D., Hankins, G. D. V., … Kinney, H. C. (2014). The Safe Passage Study: Design, Methods, Recruitment, and Follow-Up Approach. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology,28(5), 455–465. http://doi.org/10.1111/ppe.12136

Gurr, B. (2015). Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 

Pictures retrieved from 

http://usercontent2.hubimg.com/5735993_f260.jpg (FAS Facial Characteristics)

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL5rE2MI_h-GP2s3hnV58wP9TSbK5VDkd9GPEhoKSIsCIFDbz9aotu1adje0_-DvPV9SUyPFYXR7WWlHiUJLsxjNb3J9OPa8uR2C-0EwNofb5RJjwnFePVoyhBYGpjqfS1SJ9zSEOJjw/s400/AP_ALCOHOL_ABUSE.gif

(Alcohol Abuse graph)

On the Medicalization of Women’s Bodies

Women’s subjectivities are exchanged for their childbirthing ‘responsibilities’, their bodies only gateways to their reproductive parts in the eyes of the state. In her book “Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women,” Barbara Gurr argues that the reproductive-health care system is anchored in these “heteropatriachal assumptions about women as reproducers...which privilege the production of babies as the social objective of women’s biology” (Gurr 39). The essentializing of womanhood as motherhood guarantees that women are never quite recognized as human beings or as valuable beyond their ability to bear children; their bodies are never whole, never seen in their fullness. The healthcare system continues to neglect women before they enter and after they are past their childbearing years. The most obvious example of this is the way women’s general health is always intertwined with and even disappeared into child, maternal and reproductive health; medical services for women are relegated to obstetrics and gynecology even when their health conditions have nothing to do with reproduction. 

Gurr traces the history of institutionalized medical practice and research along with the induction of midwifery (now obstetrics and gynecology) into this professional medicine. She explicates how standardizing medicine through medical schools, integrating medical practice with research, establishing professional associations, and developing rigid legislation and licensing criterias grounded in academia has effectively constricted what kinds of medicines and healers can be considered legitimate and which people are able to participate in medicine (Gurr 41). These various processes have made organized medicine the only site of medical knowledge and health care as well as they served to link governmental procedures with the medical field, affording the government authority over medical structures and thus over bodies. Not only that but the assimilation of midwifery into professional medicine meant the medicalization of women’s bodies. It was an exercise of male power over women which disassociated women from their own bodies and increased the doctor’s authority over their female patients. This served to enhance the state’s ability to manage them through physicians.

In the process of the medicalization of reproduction, women’s bodies were dismembered, distorted, and then alienated from them. I use “dismembered” to describe the fragmentation women continue to suffer at the hand of biomedicine which treats women like the ‘womb on legs’ and rarely like whole human beings, while I say “distorted” and “alien” to mean that women’s bodies became something else, something foreign even to themselves. By locating medical knowledge production, dissemination and practice - especially that which pertained to women’s health (really maternal health) - in the elite medical academy, medical professionals became the gatekeepers to medical funding and the authority on women’s bodies. They became the only approved avenue through which women could receive health care, learn and talk about their bodies as well as make decisions about them. Unsurprisingly, these medical systems are a great deal less accessible to disadvantaged communities economically and because they privilege middle class heterosexual white health experiences. 

A discourse of fear was erected around childbirth (and in many ways the female body itself), constructing it as an “...unpredictable...and dangerous...pathological process from which only a small number of women escaped permanent damage” (Gurr 42-43).  In a study of medical shows, documentaries and reality television by Judith A. Lothian, she found that the  “maternity ward-ization of birth” (as she called it) was in the business of “marketing fear” to women about childbirth (and since childbirth is deemed women’s sole purpose in life, fear of childbirth naturally facilitated fear of their bodies). It normalized and naturalized “medical births” and marginalized all other forms of giving birth that do not involve maternity wards (e.g. non-medicated or home births, the involvement of midwives and doulas). 

Under this assumption, the female body is the unknown; it is inherently fragile, unstable and always on the verge of needing medical intervention and childbirth is a dangerous medical condition rather than a normal process. The body becomes a medical technology only the doctor is knowledgeable on; he/she can act on it and manipulate it in much the same way as their medical instruments. Female anatomy becomes enshrouded in mystery which is compounded by the fact that medical treatments and general medical knowledge are garnered from male anatomy. This leaves chasms in our understanding of female biology beyond reproductive processes, and this information poverty continues to support assumptions of women solely as reproducers and doctors as the “all knowers”. I say “information poverty” to highlight that power exists in the epistemology of women’s bodies, structures that determine what we know, don’t know and what the medical field chooses to know about female biology thus controlling the discourse around it.

https://psmith0182.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/woman_puppet.jpg

It is no wonder that there has also been a growing body of knowledge, through studies and personal narratives, discussing gender bias in the medical field that regards and treats women’s pain less seriously leading to large disparities in health outcomes between men and women. The study “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain” by Diane E. Hoffman and Anita J. Tarzian found that doctors were more likely to dismiss female patients’ symptoms as imaginary or due to emotional or psychological factors. The study found that doctors most often believed that men’s pain was organic, rational and real in contrast to women’s pain which was seen as psychological, and so male patients were likely to receive pain medications versus women who were more likely to receive sedatives. Due to this, women are hesitant to seek health care lest they be accused of overreacting or hysteria. More information on this gender gap in health care and its effects can be found here.

The fear rhetoric along with the mystique that has surrounded women’s health since midwifery was introduced into organized medicine, ensures that women are not only fearful of their bodies but that they feel that only medical professionals are able to interpret the enigma that is their form. Women are encouraged to trust medical practitioners (who could never reside in their bodies or understand fully what it is like to do so) and medical intervention as well as to distrust and ignore their own intuition or embodied experiences. “We don’t trust women to be the experts on their own bodies, or to be reliable narrators of their own lives” (Thinkprogress). Doctors assert their authority and exercise their medical knowledge as a mechanism for silencing women and disciplining them into docile and passive recipients of care. Not only that, but their social role over women’s lives is magnified, “incorporating functions of educator and guardian of morals and customs” as they increasingly begin to prescribe, behavioral and lifestyle changes rather than work to disrupt social barriers to women’s positive health outcomes and disparities between women and men, and then among women across difference.

Perhaps then before we adopt the rhetoric of choice and rights, a closer interrogation is needed of the regimes of power (those I mention in this article and even those not mentioned) that function to govern how we talk about women and their bodies, thus governing how it is women seek and receive medical care.

Bodies, Colonialism, & Health

Bodies, Colonialism, & Health

By: Rachael Robertson

When Gurr discusses bodies as a site for colonialism to play out, I kept thinking of ties to ecofeminism and the ties between the earth and body as feminine entities.  Racism and colonialism permeate far further than interpersonal relations.  These ideologies are built into the structures and ways of being that make up our world and the lives that we live.  Our health is also determined by how valuable our bodies and populations are considered.  Native lands are disproportionately used as sites for nuclear waste and dumping grounds in ways that continue the genocide brought upon these people.  The continuing erasure of culture and devaluing of land and of people perpetuates the racism that the United States is built upon.  Viewing Native lands as waste sites - places for both unwanted waste and unwanted reminders about the many diverse peoples who were, and are, treated as disposable.  Native bodies and Native land stand counter to the oppressive regimes that have created this nation.

In this respect, Native bodies are political; when a country is built on the subjugation of Native bodies, their continued existence goes against the narrative that the United States wishes to promote.  The preferred narrative of the U.S. is one of starting from scratch, of individualism, of escaping oppression, of fresh starts, when in actuality it is one of genocide and slavery.  I was struck by Gurr’s discussion of the structural erasure of Native bodies, land, and culture because it captured many of these tensions.  She talks about the U.S. in terms of purity and cleanliness in which those constructed to be Other or non-normative risk contaminating the broader culture.  These terms are coded to stand for non-white bodies, but considering Native populations’ implicitly acting as reminders of the not-so-clean aspects of history, their bodies and stories pose a particular threat to the untainted image of society we wish to portray.  Because of this threat, the structural devaluing of Native culture and people continues the genocide brought upon these people that forcibly strips them of their value.

“The settler State thereby enacts an unending performance of genocide:  Native people are always in the process of disappearing but never quite gone completely, for if the violable bodies disappeared completely and the pollution were permanently removed, then how would the settler State determine its ideological boundaries?  How would the collective body be defined without a challenge against which to define - and defend - itself?” (Gurr 108).

This quote reasserts the notion that Native bodies are posed in opposition to the narrative of the United States.  Bodies are a site for argument and are inherently political when a the dominant story is one of erasure.  However, bodies are also inseparable from health and from personhood; the systematic devaluing of Native bodies does not only reflect an unspoken political agenda, but an institutional threat to the health of Native people.  In many ways, health is determined by the condition of the body.  Of course it is more complex than simply physical - mental and environmental health contribute to the overall well-being of a person and community.  Yet as much as the body defines our health status, I can’t help but think that we don’t think enough about the complex ways in which it contributes to our lives and is affected by our cultures.  It is extremely privileged to be able to not think about your own health, the accessibility of health care around you, or the systems in place that contribute to the availability of health services near you and for you.

Gurr argues that the inadequate health services available to Native people are part of the violent erasure of Native people and that we need to view this erasure as being, “reinforced through and reproduced by the physical violence against Native communities and particularly against Native women” (Gurr 109).  Re-thinking violence as being structural, personal, and political - as something that can affect communities, history, and individuals - can help to conceptualize the forces that continually work against the health of Native people.  This can incorporate the environmental racism, the issues within Indian Health Services, the lack of health and reproductive health resources for women, and explicit violence against women.  While using the term violence seems extreme, the historical devaluing of Native people is extreme.  Situating violence in the present while rooting it in the colonial and racist logics that have contributed to the current moment reveals the severity of health disparities for Native populations.  

Pictured below:  Graphic of native lands situated near Nuclear power sites – just one of many of the ways that environmental racism takes shape

Source: http://www.nrc.gov/images/reading-rm/doc-collections/maps/emergency-native-american-reservations.png

Reference:

Gurr, Barabara. Reproductive Justice.  New jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015.  Print.

Campaigning for Less: The Necessity of Action for Native American Women

 

Since my matriculation into the collegiate education system, I have been made aware of one particular safety concern for students more than any other: the prevalence of sexual violence, especially against women. Mostly notably, one statistic has been repeated above all others; one in four women are likely to experience sexual violence at some point in their life. While this statistic in itself frightens me as young woman, I have recently been made aware of another statistic that is even more terrifying. As Barbara Gurr (2015) reveals in her book, Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women, “Native American women are over two and a half times more likely than other US women to be sexually assaulted” (p. 105). While a quarter of US women will likely experience sexual violence, over half of Native American women will experience the same fate.

 

Information Provided by http://www.strongheartedwomen.org/home/statistics

Clearly, an inequality exists for Native Americans to result in such drastic differences in this statistic. As Gurr (2015) argues throughout her book, this is largely the responsibility of the non-indigenous members of the United States over the centuries since Europeans first decided to settle North America. While laws, such as the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, exist to address the disparities created by the country’s development, the gap for Native American women and other US women regarding sexual assault is not narrowing (Gurr, 2015, p. 115). In order to change the huge disparities in sexual assault on Native American women, the greater body of the United States must take responsibility for its role in disparity while broadening anti-sexual violence campaigns to be more inclusive.

The problem of sexual assault against Native women cannot be addressed without first addressing the systems and history that has created the inequality of indigenous people. As Gurr (2015) argues colonialism is largely to blame. Early settlers of the country engaged in violence as a way to remove indigenous people in the efforts to claim new land. Native people quickly became part of a category of “others”, believed to be inferior to the Europeans (p. 108). By allowing violence and declaring superiority by isolating the power and habituation of Native people, colonial powers introduced a new role for Native Americans. Gurr (2015) specifically identifies the ideology behind indigenous people being inherently “rapeable” (p. 108). Native communities, especially its female populations, have become a symbol of non-Native dominance. By creating an ideal of controllability of Native people, violence continues to be high against Native Americans, as is visible in sexual assault statistics.

In further support of the responsibility of the greater United States in inequality of women, Matamonasa-Bennett (2015) conducted research about violence in Native communities, prior to US involvement, the text of which can be found here. The study, which looks of the views of Native American men of various ages on intimate partner violence, a cultural shift occurring in Native communities during colonialism. As many men note, their culture was originally based on ideas of peace and nonviolence, with a strong focus on family, community, and tribal ethics. Though the arrival of alcohol from Europeans is largely blame amongst the men in the study, a general consensus is reached that high rates of intimate partner violence in Native Americans, which includes sexual assault, are a result of colonization (Matamonasa-Bennett, 2015).

Clearly, the United States, starting with its early colonization, is largely responsible for shifts in culture within indigenous communities, but also for the greater attitude towards these “othered” people. The United States has a moral responsibility towards Native Americans because of its role in the construction of prevalent sexual violence towards women. If any hope of change is to be made, all citizens need to be made aware of this history of violence and the conditions it has created. 

Moreover, the United States has neglected the needs of Native communities and of the victimized women of these communities by creating a jurisdictional system that fails to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. Gurr (2015) addresses the legal system of Native Sovereignty and Tribal jurisdiction, made ineffective by laws such as Public Law 280 which gives tribes little to no power to prosecute criminal acts (p. 113). This is especially concerning because of the rates of violence against Native American women. Women are unable to obtain justice without going through the long, arduous state system because non-Native men cannot be prosecuted by the Tribes, which can only give limited sentences anyways.

Amnesty International addressed this failure of policing in 2007 through a detailed look at Tribal jurisdiction. The document, which can be found here, focuses largely on the justice system of tribes. Specifically, the story of one Native woman is portrayed:

“The mother of a survivor of sexual violence from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation told Amnesty International how she returned home in September 2005 to find her 16-year-old daughter lying half-naked and unconscious on the floor... She described how the suspected perpetrator fled to Rapid City, South Dakota, which is outside the jurisdiction of the Standing Rock Police Department (SRPD). He returned to the Reservation in early 2006... They found out that the suspect was to go before a tribal court, but... She told Amnesty International that she hoped that the case would be referred to the federal authorities because this would mean a lengthier sentence for the perpetrator” (Amnesty International, 2007, p. 41-43).

The kinship narrative provided by the mother of a young Native American women embodies the lack of power of Tribal leadership, requiring lengthy state court proceedings.

Largely, the poorly created system of justice for Native Americans can be blamed for a continued high rate of sexual violence against Native women. A lack of accountability allows this violence to continue because the chance of severe repercussions is lower than it is on a national basis. If anti-sexual assault efforts are to be effective in any way, campaigns need to realize an address the failure of the courts to protect Native women. 

Any effort that does exist to lower rates of sexual assault of indigenous women is further impeded by the misguided focus of misinformation and a lack of comprehensive research on the subject. Gurr (2015) specifically addresses this problem by noting that campaigns focus largely on violence against Native women by Native men. In reality, 67 percent of sexual assaults and rapes are committed by non-Native men. Furthermore, when women attempt to obtain justice, they must turn to other non-Native men for protection in the legal system, increasing the disparity (p. 116). Yet, preventative measures are still being aimed at Native men. This misinformation is causing more harm than good by creating greater stereotypes about indigenous people. The situation is worsened by the fact that research on sexual violence against Native women is limited. A look through any database will reveal the lack of academic findings, especially that focus on non-Native men as perpetrators. Our information needs to be expanded into all perpetrators and situations of sexual assault to successfully identify focal points of a campaign against it.

While a deficiency in addressing this problem seems to be clear, arguments exist against the failures of the Unites State to indigenous people. We do give land and resources specifically to this group of people when other groups are not provided with such funding. However, as Gurr (2015) shows in her work, these resources have been and continue to be inadequate to meet the needs of Native Americans, who live in higher rates of poverty than the rest of the country, with serious problems like sexual assault. Commonly, such violence is blamed on the high levels of alcohol abuse by Native Americans. Yet, Matamonasa-Bennet (2015) identifies the role of colonization in providing alcohol to a group that previously practiced in abstinence and peace. Another common argument is that women do not report very often, making it hard to have accurate numbers regarding sexual violence. But structural injustices are largely to blame for the lack of trust of Native women to the Unites States government. Natives are considered to be inferior and are treated as so, earning them a lack of resources to provide for personal and legal needs. 

Ultimately, even though some action is being taking against sexual assault rates for Native Americans, it is far from being effective. Large disparities have structurally been implemented since the arrival of Europeans in North American. If any change is to be made, the country as a whole needs to realize its responsibility for the conditions than Native Americans currently face. Furthermore, steps need to be taken legally to make sure that victims of sexual assault are receiving justice for the crimes against them, while encouraging them to report the crimes in the knowledge that they will be protected against any perpetrator, regardless of race or ethnic origin. Lastly, we need to expand our understanding of the situation by conducting more research that focuses on non-Native responsibility as well. Only then can we hope to make a change in the rates of sexual assault against Native women.

References:

Amnesty International USA. (2007). Maze of injustice: The failure to protect indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA. Retrieved from http://www.amnestyusa.org/pdfs/mazeofinjustice.pdf

Gurr, B. (2015). Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 

Matamonasa-Bennett, A. (2015). “A Disease of the Outside People”: Native American Men’s Perceptions of Intimate Partner Violence. Psychology of Women Quarterly 39(1); 20-36.

Photo Retrieved From http://www.batchwilliams.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/Depositphotos_11048072_M.jpg