Women and Genocide

Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators

Elissa Bemporad, Joyce W. Warren, Elissa Bemporad, Joyce W. Warren

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253033826
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Völkermord & Kriegsverbrechen

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

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 genocide”³ 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 u...