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The role of women in Native American liberation struggles
FIGHTING BACK
by
M. Annette Jaimes with Theresa Halsey
The patterns of resistance by which American Indians have
fought back against the overwhelming oppression of their
colonization are actually as old as the colonization itself,
occurring in an uninteruppted flow from the early 1500s onward. As
with any struggle, however, native resistance has been cyclical in
terms of its intensity, and varied in its expression over time.
The "modern era" in this regard was perhaps ushered in with the
adoption by Indians of written articulation as a mode of political
action. Women, beginning with the Northern Paiute writer and
activist Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, have played a decisive role in
developing this new tool for indigenous utilization. Winnemucca's
autobiographical _Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims_,
first published in 1883, laid the groundwork for the subsequent
efforts of the Santee Dakota writer Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman),
whose early 20th-century books and articles yielded a significant
effect in terms of altering the assimilationist policies of the
federal government.
Winnemucca was hardly alone in her endeavor. Contemporaneous
to Ohiyesa -- and carrying a much sharper edge in both her writing
and her activism -- was Zitkala-sa (Gertrude Bonnin), a Lakota who
was the first to announce proudly and in print that she considered
her own traditions not simply the equal of anything Euroamerica had
to offer, but "superior to white ways and values." She was
followed by Ella Deloria, another Lakota author relatively
unequivocal in her affirmation of "Indianness." Together, these
early Indian women writers set in motion a dynamic wherein native
women reasserted their traditional role as "voice of the people,"
albeit through a much different medium than had historically
prevailed. By the late 1970s, Native American literature had
assumed a critical galvanizing role within indigenous liberation
struggles in North America, and women such as Leslie Marmon Silko
(Laguna), Wendy Rose (Hopi), Joy Harjo (Creek), Linda Hogan
(Chickasaw), and Mary TallMountain (Athabascan) were providing the
muscle and sinew of the effort. The female presence in native
literature has continued to increase in importance during the late
1980s and early 1990s, with the emergence of work by Louise Erdrich
(Turtle Mountain Anishinab?), Chrystos (Menominee), and others.
As noted earlier, translation of these literary sentiments
into serious confrontations began to occur in noticeable fashion
with the fish-in movement of the Pacific Northwest during the
1960s. This happened, in the words of Bobbi Lee, a Canadian M?tis
active in the fishing rights struggle, "when the women just became
fed up. They ran out of patience with what was going on and
decided it was time to change things." She describes her first
demonstration at the Washington state capitol building:
Most of the militants there at [the] demonstration in
Olympia...were women and three of them did most of the
speaking...They were traditionalists so there was nothing
unusual about women acting as spokes[people] for the group.
In fact, they told me they were having trouble getting the men
involved. The only man who spoke was Hank Adams, who's been
to a university and wasn't traditional.
The same sort of thing happened with the American Indian
Movement (AIM), an entity which received much of its early impetus
from the fishing rights movement and the examples set by Marie Lego
and others engaged in the Pit River land struggle. Mary Jane
Wilson, an Anishinab? activist, was -- along with Dennis Banks and
George Mitchell -- a founder of the organization in 1968. As AIM
began to grow, much of the grassroots membership which made it
successful was comprised of women. As was mentioned above, on the
Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, which became the focal point of the
movement's pitched battles with federal forces during the mid-'70s,
the staunchest and most active traditionalist support came from
elder Oglala women. Once again, those who established and
maintained the AIM survival schools during the latter part of the
decade were almost exclusively women.
When it came to repression, however, males bore the brunt.
Although female leadership had been readily apparent throughout the
confrontation at Wounded Knee, the government simply repeated its
historical pattern, targeting six Indian men -- Russell Means
(Oglala), Pedro Bissonette (Oglala), Leonard Crow Dog (Sicangu
Lakota), Dennis Banks (Anishinab?), Carter Camp (Ponca), and Stan
Holder (Wichita) -- to face up to triple-life plus 88 years
imprisonment in the so-called Wounded Knee Leadership Trials. To
be sure, AIM women WERE charged, brought to trial, and sometimes
convicted -- Kamook Nichols (Oglala), Joanna LeDeaux (Oglala), and
Nilak Butler (Inuit), to name but three examples, served
appreciable sentences -- but for every woman locked up, there were
a dozen or more men. Twenty-one women and two children were also
among the minimum of 69 AIM members and supporters killed by
government surrogates on Pine Ridge between med-1973 and mid-1976,
the peak period of the U.S. counterinsurgency warfare directed at
the organization. The proportionate emphasis placed by federal
authorities upon "neutralizing" AIM men is apparent in the fact
that the remaining 46 fatalities were adult males. As Madonna
Thunderhawk, a Hunkpapa Lakota AIM member and founder of WARN,
described it in 1980:
Indian women have HAD to be strong because of what this
colonialist system has done to our men...alcohol, suicides,
car wrecks, the whole thing. And after Wounded Knee, while
all that persecution of the men was going on, we women had to
keep things going.
Carrying the weight in this fashion instilled in a whole
generation of hard-line native women activists not only a strong
sense of confidence in their own ability to get things done (as
opposed to simply getting them started), but a deep sensitivity to
the unequal degree of risk incurred by Indian men fighting to throw
off the shackles -- both physical and psychological -- of
colonization. As veteran fishing rights activist Janet McCloud
asserted after a 1980 meeting in which AIM was harshly criticized
for its "male dominance" and the alleged "opportunism" of its more
celebrated men:
The tribal leaders and others who denounce AIM justify their
actions by pointing out the human weaknesses of individual AIM
people, with never a glance to their own...Indian people can
disagree till doomsday about which defensive strategy is best,
or whether we should even resist. If we continue to disagree
on politics, policy, philosophy, and enter into destructive
personality clashes, we will lose all...Few acknowledge that
real change began to take place only after the tremendous
sacrifices of the young [male] warriors of the American Indian
Movement. The beneficiaries of the Movement [accept the
gains] while the real warriors lie unrecognized in their
graves or in prison cells...We need our warriors, and where
are they? In prisons, in hiding, pursued relentlessly by the
FBI...How many [of us] will take the time to send a card or a
letter to the warriors rotting in prisons? It is time Indian
people, those who have received most from the American Indian
Movement, took some time t count their blessings, to give
credit where credit is due. Don't forget the warriors, we may
never see their like again.
The AIM women's response to the sexism internalized by their
male counterparts as part of the colonizing process was to resume
the time-honored practice of establishing the political equivalent
of traditional women's societies. WARN was first, initiated in
1974. It was followed by McCloud's Northwest Indian Women's Circle
in 1981 and, more lately, the Indigenous Women's Network (IWN).
Formed by Winona LaDuke and Ingrid Wasinawatok-El Issa (Oneida), a
long-time AIM member and mainstay of the International Indian
Treaty Council, IWN has lately begun to publish a journal entitled
"Indigenous Woman". The purpose of such organizations has been
explained by WARN founder Phyllis Young (Hunkpapa Lakota):
What we are about is drawing on our traditions, regaining our
strength as women in the ways handed down to us by our
grandmothers, and their grandmothers before them. Our
creation of an Indian women's organization is not a criticism
or division from our men. In fact, it's the exact opposite.
Only in this way can we organize ourselves as Indian women to
meet our responsibilities, to be fully supportive of the men,
to work in tandem with them as partners in a common struggle
for the liberation of our people and our land...The men
understand this, and they support our effort. So, instead of
dividing away from the men, what we are doing is building
strength and unity in the traditional way.
Correspondingly, the power and presence of women within the
Indian liberation movement, already strong, has if anything
increased since the 1960s and '70s. During the 1980s, aside from
the earlier-mentioned leadership of elder Din? women in the
sustained resistance to forced relocation at Big Mountain, a
comparable function has been assumed by the Western Shoshone
sisters Mary and Carrie Dann in Nevada vis-?-vis a federal drive to
take their people's homeland. In northern California, it was Abby
Abinanti, a Yurok attorney, who led the legal defense against a
government/corporate plan to desecrate the "High Country", a locale
sacred to her own and several other peoples in the area. Anywhere
confrontations over Indian rights are occurring in the United
States, native women are playing crucial roles. Moreover, by the
early '80s, women had (re)assumed the primary leadership position
in sixty-seven of the 304 remaining reservation-based indigenous
nations within the forty-eight contiguous states, and the number is
growing steadily.
The struggle has also ben sharp in Canada, where, under
provision of Section (12) (1) (b) of the 1876 Indian Act (amended
in 1951), a particularly virulent form of patrilineage was built
into the definition of "Indian-ness." Under the act, a woman who
married, not only a non-Indian but anyone outside her "tribe," was
herself (along with her children), legally and automatically
deprived of her "Indian Status." Such reversal of traditional
matrilineage principles -- not to mention the overt racism and
sexism involved -- had been challenged from 1952 onward, notably by
Mohawk leader Mary Two-Axe Early of the Caughnawaga Reserve in
Qu?bec. After losing several cases on the issue in Canadian courts
during the early '70s, a group of Maliseet women from the Tobique
Reserve in New Brunswick decided to place the situation of one of
their number, Sandra Lovelace Sappier, before the United Nations.
The Tobique women's strategy of going to the United Nations
did exert tremendous pressure on the [Ottawa] government to
change the Indian Act. On December 29, 1977 the complaint of
Sandra Lovelace against the Canadian government was
communicated to the United Nations Human Rights Committee in
Geneva, Switzerland. Because of delays by the Canadian
government in responding to the Human Rights Committee's
request for information, the final verdict was not made until
July 30, 1981. The decision found that Canada was in
violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. Canada was in breach of the Covenant because the
Indian Act denied Sandra Lovelace the LEGAL right to live in
the community of her birth.
As a result of the Lovelace case, the Canadian government was
forced to make a further revision to the Indian Act in 1985 which
eliminated discrimination against women, opening the way for
resumption of traditional matrilineal/matrilocal expression among
indigenous societies across the country. Along the way, the
"Tobique Women's Political Action Group" was forced to confront the
broker class of their own male population -- placed in positions of
"leadership" by the Canadian rather than their own governing
system, and thus threatened by the women's actions -- physically
occupying tribal office buildings and effectively evicting the men,
beginning in September 1977. Their actions had considerable
ramifications, as is witnessed by the fact that at the present
time, native women in Canada often serve as chief spokespersons for
their peoples. One example is that of Sharon Venne, a Cree
attorney selected during the '80s to represent the Treaty Six
nations of Alberta in international forums. Another illustration
is Norma Kassi, official spokesperson for the Swich'in Nation,
elected member of the Yukon Legislative Assembly, and organizer of
a broad coalition to oppose oil and gas development on the North
Slope of Alaska.
Thus, both north and south of the Euroamerican border
separating the United States and Canada, intense struggles have
been waged by indigenous people over the past three decades against
the sorts of conditions depicted in the preceding section. While
it is obvious that the problems confronted have not been solved, it
is equally plain that substantial gains have been made in terms of
positioning Native North America to change these circumstances
through decolonization and reassertion of its self-determining,
self-defining, and self-sufficient existence. In each instance,
native women -- as INDIANS, first, last, and always -- have
asserted their traditional right and assumed their traditional
responsibility of standing at the very center of the fray.
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Taken from _The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization
and Resistance_, Edited by M. Annette Jaimes, South End Press 1992.
ISBN 0-89608-424-8
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