💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › indigenous-feminism-without-apology.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:54:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Indigenous Feminism Without Apology Author: Andrea Smith Date: September 8th, 2011 Language: en Topics: feminism, indigenous, indigenism, indigenous feminism, Source: http://www.oregoncampuscompact.org/uploads/1/3/0/4/13042698/indigenous_feminism_without_apology__andrea_smith_.pdf?msclkid=6113a409aa1c11ecbbda495c93eab55c Notes: Andrea Smith is Cherokee and a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and cofounder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and the Boarding School Healing Project.
We often hear the mantra in indigenous communities that Native women
aren’t feminists. Supposedly, feminism is not needed because Native
women were treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native
woman who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being “white.”
However, when I started interviewing Native women organizers as part of
a research project, I was surprised by how many communitybased activists
were describing themselves as “feminists without apology.” They were
arguing that feminism is actually an indigenous concept that has been
coopted by white women.
The fact that Native societies were egalitarian 500 years ago is not
stopping women from being hit or abused now. For instance, in my years
of antiviolence organizing, I would hear, “We can’t worry about domestic
violence; we must worry about survival issues first.” But since Native
women are the women most likely to be killed by domestic violence, they
are clearly not surviving. So when we talk about survival of our
nations, who are we including?
These Native feminists are challenging not only patriarchy within Native
communities, but also white supremacy and colonialism within mainstream
white feminism. That is, they’re challenging why it is that white women
get to define what feminism is.
The feminist movement is generally periodized into the socalled first,
second and third waves of feminism. In the United States, the first wave
is characterized by the suffragette movementÍľ the second wave is
characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women,
abortion rights politics, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendments.
Suddenly, during the third wave of feminism, women of colour make an
appearance to transform feminism into a multicultural movement.
This periodization situates white middleclass women as the central
historical agents to which women of colour attach themselves. However,
if we were to recognize the agency of indigenous women in an account of
feminist history, we might begin with 1492 when Native women
collectively resisted colonization. This would allow us to see that
there are multiple feminist histories emerging from multiple communities
of colour which intersect at points and diverge in others. This would
not negate the contributions made by white feminists, but would decenter
them from our historicizing and analysis.
Indigenous feminism thus centers anticolonial practice within its
organizing. This is critical today when you have mainstream feminist
groups supporting, for example, the US bombing of Afghanistan with the
claim that this bombing will free women from the Taliban (apparently
bombing women somehow liberates them).
Indigenous feminists are also challenging how we conceptualize
indigenous sovereignty — it is not an addon to the heteronormative and
patriarchal nationstate. Rather it challenges the nationstate system
itself. Charles Colson, prominent Christian Right activist and founder
of Prison Fellowship, explains quite clearly the relationship between
heteronormativity and the nationstate. In his view, samesex marriage
leads directly to terrorism; the attack on the “natural moral order” of
the heterosexual family “is like handing moral weapons of mass
destruction to those who use America’s decadence to recruit more snipers
and hijackers and suicide bombers.”
Similarly, the Christian Right World magazine opined that feminism
contributed to the Abu Ghraib scandal by promoting women in the
military. When women do not know their assigned role in the gender
hierarchy, they become disoriented and abuse prisoners.
Implicit in this is analysis the understanding that heteropatriarchy is
essential for the building of US empire. Patriarchy is the logic that
naturalizes social hierarchy. Just as men are supposed to naturally
dominate women on the basis of biology, so too should the social elites
of a society naturally rule everyone else through a nationstate form of
governance that is constructed through domination, violence, and
control.
As Ann Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to
argue that the goal of Christian Right politics is to create a theocracy
in the US. Rather, Christian Right politics work through the private
family (which is coded as white, patriarchal, and middleclass) to create
a “Christian America.” She notes that the investment in the private
family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of
social connection.
For example, more investment in the suburban private family means less
funding for urban areas and Native reservations. The resulting social
decay is then construed to be caused by deviance from the Christian
family ideal rather than political and economic forces. As former head
of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed states: “The only true solution to
crime is to restore the family,” and “Family breakup causes poverty.”
Unfortunately, as Navajo feminist scholar Jennifer Denetdale points out,
the Native response to a heteronormative white, Christian America has
often been an equally heteronormative Native nationalism. In her
critique of the Navajo tribal council’s passage of a ban on samesex
marriage, Denetdale argues that Native nations are furthering a
Christian Right agenda in the name of “Indian tradition.”
This trend is equally apparent within racial justice struggles in other
communities of colour. As Cathy Cohen contends, heteronormative
sovereignty or racial justice struggles will effectively maintain rather
than challenge colonialism and white supremacy because they are premised
on a politics of secondary marginalization. The most elite class will
further their aspirations on the backs of those most marginalized within
the community.
Through this process of secondary marginalization, the national or
racial justice struggle either implicitly or explicitly takes on a
nationstate model as the end point of its struggle – a model in which
the elites govern the rest through violence and domination, and exclude
those who are not members of “the nation.”
Grassroots Native women, along with Native scholars such as Taiaiake
Alfred and Craig Womack, are developing other models of nationhood.
These articulations counter the frequent accusations that nationbuilding
projects necessarily lead to a narrow identity politics based on ethnic
cleansing and intolerance. This requires that a clear distinction be
drawn between the project of national liberation, and that of
nationstate building.
Progressive activists and scholars, while prepared to make critiques of
the US and Canadian governments, are often not prepared to question
their legitimacy. A case in point is the strategy of many racial justice
organizations in the US or Canada, who have rallied against the increase
in hate crimes since 9/11 under the banner, “We’re American [or
Canadian] too.”
This allegiance to “America” or “Canada” legitimizes the genocide and
colonization of Native peoples upon which these nationstates are
founded. By making anticolonial struggle central to feminist politics,
Native women place in question the appropriate form of governance for
the world in general. In questioning the nationstate, we can begin to
imagine a world that we would actually want to live in. Such a political
project is particularly important for colonized peoples seeking national
liberation outside the nationstate.
Whereas nationstates are governed through domination and coercion,
indigenous sovereignty and nationhood is predicated on interrelatedness
and responsibility.
As Sharon Venne explains, “Our spirituality and our responsibilities
define our duties. We understand the concept of sovereignty as woven
through a fabric that encompasses our spirituality and responsibility.
This is a cyclical view of sovereignty, incorporating it into our
traditional philosophy and view of our responsibilities. It differs
greatly from the concept of Western sovereignty which is based upon
absolute power. For us absolute power is in the Creator and the natural
order of all living things; not only in human beings… Our sovereignty is
related to our connections to the earth and is inherent.”
A Native feminist politics seeks to do more than simply elevate Native
women’s status — it seeks to transform the world through indigenous
forms of governance that can be beneficial to everyone.
At the 2005 World Liberation Theology Forum held in Porto Alegre,
Brazil, indigenous peoples from Bolivia stated that they know another
world is possible because they see that world whenever they do their
ceremonies. Native ceremonies can be a place where the present, past and
future become copresent. This is what Native Hawaiian scholar Manu Meyer
calls a racial remembering of the future.
Prior to colonization, Native communities were not structured on the
basis of hierarchy, oppression or patriarchy. We will not recreate these
communities as they existed prior to colonization. Our understanding
that a society without structures of oppression was possible in the past
tells us that our current political and economic system is anything but
natural and inevitable. If we lived differently before, we can live
differently in the future.
Native feminism is not simply an insular or exclusivist “identity
politics” as it is often accused of being. Rather, it is framework that
understands indigenous women’s struggles part of a global movement for
liberation. As one activist stated: “You can’t win a revolution on your
own. And we are about nothing short of a revolution. Anything else is
simply not worth our time.”