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August 19, 2001 |
Speaking to SurvivalBy Diane R. Schulz |
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The media in recent years has kept us alert to details of global wars that involve "ethnic cleansing," as the term "attempted genocide" is currently euphemized. We tend to relegate such events to some place outside our own country, but here in our United States, many nations are facing extinction at the hands of industrial capitalist colonialism. For these nations live, or rather subsist, on lands where resources like oil and uranium generate a steady flow of dollars into the coffers of rich, white Americans. As pressure to flood, poison or eliminate huge tracts of inhabited Native lands continues, a number of tribal women have begun to speak out in resistance to the exploitation and pollution which directly affects their survival as sovereign nations. By re-claiming their traditional place as spokespersons and decision makers within their tribes, indigenous women are resisting on two fronts. As Native Americans, they are first and foremost conscious of their oppression as tribal people, as members of the Fourth world, the indigenous people, people who are deemed expendable in the ongoing destruction of the Earth's resources by the over consumption of urbanized, industrialized "First World" nations. The second area of women's resistance is cultural. The status of women in tribal nations within the U.S. has suffered tremendously because of the government's insistence on replacing the egalitarian structure of tribal politics with a male dominated model. The imposition of a Eurocentric patriarchal model, highly developed and transplanted on North American ground, has demanded that tribal people re-organize their entire way of life, including that of granting decision making power totally to the men, disregarding traditional tribal kinship organization and effectively silencing the women. Although women have never been totally silenced -- a fact that is supported by the very few but important books authored by Native American women, beginning with Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims in 1883, and continuing in the literary tradition in the 20th century -- until the 1960's, political activity was a male dominated sphere. In the atmosphere of that decade, preceded by the intensification of civil rights' struggles by African Americans in the 1950's, Native American women began to join in vocalizing and acting on their tribal need of human rights' protection, particularly around land rights and use, which included fishing and water rights, and now embraces protection from mining intrusions, hydroelectric projects, nuclear energy production and disposal of plutonium in "monitored retrievable storage" (MRS) sites. "Within this geopolitical charnel house, American Indian women struggle on every front for the survival of our children, our people, our self-respect, our value systems, and our way of life. The past five hundred years testify to our skill at waging this struggle; for all the varied weapons of extinction pointed at our heads, we endure," says activist Paula Gunn Allen. Story telling as a source of woman's power Storytelling has always been a means by which the history of the tribe is remembered and transmitted in societies where there is no writing . Among North American tribal peoples, the storytelling tradition has survived despite the combined threats of destruction and assimilation. Although many tribes have disappeared, those which survived have continued to rely on the ancient stories to illuminate what M.A. Jaimes Guerrero calls "female organic archetypes" including: Corn Daughter (Hopi); Changing Woman (Navajo/Dineh); First Woman (Abanaki); Sky Woman (Iroquois); Spider Woman (Navajo/Dineh and Hopi); Thought Woman (Laguna); White Buffalo Calf Woman (Lakota, Dakota); and…the traditional Cherokee…Beloved Woman of the Nation." Native North American cultures are characterized by mythological images of women that are complementary rather than subordinate to those of men." Maintaining harmony between human beings, the land, the plants and the animals is the guiding principle of the people, which includes maintaining the balance between perceived male and female principles, or energies, in the physical world and the psychic realm. This concern with harmonious lived reality translates into a view of human beings as gendered beings in a reciprocal relationship, neither enforcing strict bi-polar sexuality, nor a hierarchy of male superiority. Marilou Awiakta, a Cherokee poet and storyteller, further elucidates this concept in contrasting the Eurocentric view that nature is to be controlled by humans with the "the American Indian belief in the sacred tie to Mother Earth and to the universe as revelations of the wisdom of the Creator, who stands behind. Severance of the tie is basic to Western thought. It ranges God and man together; nature and all identified with it -- including indigenous peoples and wome -- are 'the other.'" Beginning with Columbus' "discovery of the New World" in 1492, the colonizers dichotomous ideology enabled the progressive annihilation of the inhabitants and the theft and exploitation of their land. Because they worshipped a monolithic Father God, they presumed the hierarchy of male over female to be the unquestionable "natural" order of the universe. The concept of women as equal partners in governance was simply unthinkable. The majority of tribal societies were matrilineal and matrilocal, with women in important decision-making positions, and even the minority of patrilineal tribes still accorded women an equal and respected place, not a subordinate one. Writes Paula Gunn Allen, "The tribes see women variously, but they do not question the power of femininity. Sometimes they see women as fearful, sometimes as peaceful, sometimes omnipotent and omniscient, but they never portray women as mindless, helpless, simple, or oppressed…My ideas of womanhood, passed on largely by my mother and grandmothers, Laguna Pueblo women, are about practicality, strength, reasonableness, intelligence, wit, and competence." It was the oral tradition that preserved the leadership of women in the past as a model that continues to inspire women's activism today. Beginning in the 1960's, "In Washington state, women such as Janet McCloud (Tulalip) and Ramona Bennett (Puyallup) had already assumed leading roles in the fishing rights struggles…efforts which…set in motion the 'hard-line' Indian liberation movements of the modern day. These were not political organizing campaigns of the ballot and petition sort. Rather, they were, and continue to be, conflicts involving the disappearance of entire peoples." As the American Indian Movement (AIM) began to establish itself in the 1970's, it was again women who rose to support their efforts. Madonna Thunderhawk, a Hunkpapa Lakota AIM member and founder of Women of All Red Nations (WARN), describes her reasons for active resistance: 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 [1973], while all that persecution of the men was going on, we women had to keep things going. Another founder of WARN, Phyllis Young, states: 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…[but] a common struggle for the liberation of our people and our land… Feminism re-defined Sally Roesch Wagner shows, in her meticulously documented article, "Iroquois Influence on Women's Rights," that two of the original women's rights activists of the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, became friends with tribal Iroquois women and "found a cosmological worldview which they believed to be superior to the patriarchal one of the white nation in which they lived." Stanton clearly understood her position as a person of no legal status, whereas Iroquois women "were the great power among the clan, as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, 'to knock off the horns,' as it was technically called, from the head of a chief and send him back to the ranks of the warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with the women." Unfortunately, these early white feminists, though they admired and borrowed ideas from Native American societies, did not fully understand the relationship between their own oppression as women and their compliance with the colonial imperative of what is known as Manifest Destiny. Like other women of color, Native American women have expressed: a lack of awareness by white feminists of the significant impact of race and class as more important determinates than gender in their oppression. In addition, most mainstream feminists seem unaware of the ongoing colonial exploitation and poisoning of Native American reservation land. Kate Shanley, an Assiniboine/Irish feminist academic, states that "too often Indian people, by being thought of as spiritual 'mascots' to the American endeavor, are seen more as artifacts than as real people able to speak for ourselves. Given the public's general ignorance about Indian people…it is possible that Indian people's real-life concerns are not relevant to the mainstream feminist movement in a way that constitutes anything more than a 'representative' façade." On a more condemnatory note, Pam Colorado, an Oneida scholar, is quoted in The State of Native America: It seems to me the feminist agenda is basically one of rearranging social relations within the society which is occupying our land and utilizing our resources for its own benefit. Nothing I've encountered in feminist theory addresses the fact of our colonization, or the wrongness of white women's stake in it…I can only conclude that, like Marxism, which arrives at the same outcome through class rather than gender theory, feminism is essentially a Euro-supremacist ideology and is therefore quite imperialist in its implications. This is not to say that all Native American women activists reject the idea of feminist ideology, but rather they urge that it be re-interpreted to include their own cultural position. Kate Shanely stresses that Indian women must "promote the survival of a social structure whose organizational principles are based on communal, kinship. She stresses the need "to maintain a vital legal and spiritual connection to the land, in order to survive as a people." As an alternative to feminism, M.A. Jaimes Guerrero suggests the concept of "native womanism." She borrows the term "womanism" from Alice Walker, who uses it to mean women who are 'committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.' She explains that native womanism is "primarily premised on kinship traditions and 'birthright' tied to indigenous homelands," again stressing connection to the land as a necessity for survival of indigenous tribal people. She explains that the term indigenous refers to "cultures among land based peoples who lived in reciprocal relationship with their environment," which can be conceptualized as 'ecocultures.' Indigenous people's spiritual relationship to the land is the basis of their resistance to the dominant U.S. notion of progress, which has always included the exploitation of natural resources regardless of the well-being of future generations. For the Indians, the cosmos is often referred to as a web, wherein all forms of life are seen as interdependent, including the Earth itself, which they revere as Mother, not as a lifeless, inorganic "it." Who speaks for the "American Indian/Native American" Sovereignty in Eurocentric terminology is "derived from the…notion of 'the divine right of kings' to 'uphold monarchy,' meaning nationalism today." As such, "it is not historically applicable to the concept of nationhood among indigenous peoples." Guerrero explains the difference between nationalism and indigenous nationhood as one between (supposedly) representative democracy and kinship reciprocity, again based on an understanding of the interrelatedness of human beings and their environment. She decries the failure of the English language to properly express the "concept of identity with a bioregional homeland in its inherent beliefs and values," that fully embraces the lived reality of indigenous peoples. Indeed, without a concept of the spiritual basis of life, it is very difficult to communicate the immediacy of Native American concern over the destruction of the environment, or the Mother Earth, as all women writers and activists call Her. Despite their historic loss of status, there are many women who continue to identify themselves as traditional tribal spokespersons. They have to deal with the sexism of male-dominated tribal councils, as well as common social problems that accompany the imposition of the white patriarchal paradigm during colonialism. Because of their experience of extreme loss -- of land, language, traditional culture and economy -- problems such as alcoholism, family abuse, and suicide are rampant on reservations. Extremely high unemployment and resultant poverty add to the problems these women face. Nonetheless, they are trying to alert the rest of the population to the futility of continuing to rape and poison their Mother. Carol Lee Sanchez (Laguna/Sioux/Lebanese), a poet, painter, playwright and mother of three, expresses the problem succinctly: Those of you who are socialists and Marxists have an ideology, but where in this country do you live communally on a common land base from generation to generation?…Radicals look at reservation Indians and get very upset about their poverty conditions. But poverty to us is not the same thing as poverty is to you. Our poverty is that we can't be who we are. We can't hunt or fish or grow our food because our basic resources and the right to use them in traditional ways are denied us. …You want us to act like you, to be like you so that we will be more acceptable…You should try to be more like us regarding communal co-existence; respect and care for all living things and for the earth, the waters, and the atmosphere… Conscious resistance to "environmental racism" The form of resistance usually employed by Native American women is grassroots organizing. They have formed organizations to address specific injustices as the need has arisen. These organizations reassert native women's rights, reclaim matrilineal and matrifocal traditions, and demand self determination as a way of regaining lost sociopolitical status. Among these organizations are WARN [Women of All Red Nations], the Indigenous Women's Network in the U.S. and Canada, the Native Women's Association of Canada, and the women of the Metis Nations in Alberta." In the introduction to a collection of essays on environmental racism, editor Robert Bullard also discusses grassroots activism: It is clear that the local grassroots activists in the impacted communities provided the essential leadership in dealing with the disputes. The typical grassroots leader was a woman. Winona LaDuke has emerged as the most prominent Native American spokeswoman in recent years. Although she was not featured in public debate, she was the vice-presidential running mate of Ralph Nader on the Green Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election campaign. She is also one of the founders of the Indigenous Women's Network, an important vehicle for resistance. Her recent book, All Our Relations, Native Struggles for Land and Life, profiles leading women activists of various indigenous nations of North America and their specific struggles against environmental destruction on tribal land. We organize in small groups, close to 200 of them in North America, with names like Native Americans for a Clean Environment, Dine CARE (Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment), Anishinaabe Niijii, and the Gwichin Steering Committee. We are underfunded at best, and more often not funded at all, working out of our homes with a few families or five to ten volunteers. We coalesce in national or continental organizations such as Indigenous Environmental Network, …which, through a diverse agenda of providing technical and political support to grassroots groups seeking to protect their land, preserve biodiversity, and sustain communities, seeks ultimately to secure environmental justice. Other such groups include the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, Honor the Earth, Indigenous Women's Network, Seventh Generation Fund and others." LaDuke's study addresses a variety of environmental issues, such as coal mining, dam building and PCB contamination. But her chapter on the poisonous results of uranium mining, milling and bomb testing reveals the most frightening example of U.S. national policy at its worst. In addition, tribes are now being offered the dregs of the nuclear industry, with the lure of lucrative government offers of money for studies on the feasibility of locating MRS sites on reservation land. Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Cherokee) specifically addresses this "radioactive colonization" in a 1999 article for American Indian Culture and Research Journal. He meticulously documents the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) deliberate withholding of information on the connection between radioactivity and cancer, specifically when that information was pertinent to uranium mining, milling and bomb testing on reservation land. Navajo men were recruited to work in the mines and mills "to support the country's war effort" beginning in the mid-1940's. The poisoning of Navajo (Dine) and Laguna people, their land, and water has been accomplished. Although only about 60 percent of uranium deposits in the United Sates are situated on American Indian reservations -- most of it in the so-called Grants Uranium Belt of northern New Mexico and Arizona -- well over 90 percent of all the uranium ever mined in the United States [beginning in the early 1950's] had been taken from such sources by the time the AEC's domestic ore-buying program was phased out in 1982." In 1980, at one site alone, more than 80,000 gallons of irradiated water a day from the mine was being flushed into the surface water of the surrounding community. While the miners began to suffer from lung cancer at high rates, the women and children of their communities were also affected. Birth defects and cancer rates have continued to increase at an alarming rate, with "ovarian cancers at an astonishing seventeen times the norm." Winona LaDuke, in one of many interviews, describes the situation at the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, where uranium from an abandoned mill was found to be leaking into the water supply. "In December of 1979, 38 percent of all pregnancies on Pine Ridge resulted in miscarriages before the fifth month, or excessive hemorrhaging, and 60-70 percent of the children who were born suffered breathing problems caused by underdeveloped lungs and jaundice." It was the women of WARN who exposed the extent of the problem through research of Indian health records and other documents. The entire scenario is nightmarish, but little has been done to remedy the situation. When native people speak in terms of genocide, they are speaking to the truth of their lived reality, now and historically. Grace Thorpe (Sac/Fox), a veteran of WWII, has been a Native Rights activist for the past 35 years. In September of 1999, Thorpe was given a "Resistance Award" by the Nuclear-Free Future environmentalist group. Her specific focus is on the issue of MRS sites. In 1991, she discovered, from reading her local paper, that her tribe had signed up for an MRS nuclear dump grant. She immediately began to study radioactivity and used her position as a member of the tribal health council and part-time district court judge of the tribal court to inform people of the insanity of entertaining this avenue of government "help." She went on to found NECONA (National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans) in 1993, and through speaking and writing has convinced 14 of the original 17 tribes targeted by the U.S. government to withdraw from their initial $100,000 study grants. "I thought about all that has happened to our people over the years. Every treaty we have made has been broken." Grace's Indian name is No Ten O Quah, which means the "Woman of Power of the Wind that Blows Up Before a Storm" -- a name that fits her well. The mission of NECONA is simple. Keep the nuclear waste where it is, and stop making more of it. In addition, scores of tribes are declaring themselves as "Nuclear Free Zones." All of the women activists' writing and speeches refer to the sacred quality of the Earth as Mother, and reverence for "all our relations", the title of Winona LaDuke's book on women's resistance. Novelist/activist Leslie Marmon Silko goes further in prophesizing about the "fifth world": The fourth world now is the disenfranchised, and the fifth world is different. The world that the capitalists envision is the one-world economy, that is their fifth world. But the fifth world is a new consciousness in the hearts of all human beings, the idea that the earth is shared and finite, and that we are naturally connected to the earth and with one another. Of Karl Marx she says: So I decided to make this joke [in Almanac] that Karl Marx was on the right track when he was studying Native American communities practicing their communism. Well, he got it wrong because he missed the spiritual part." In their ultimately "radical democratic" stance, Native American women are able to articulate the guiding principles of tribal knowledge handed down to them by their grandmothers -- Respect for Mother Earth, and all her children, including the plants and animals, the air and water, all that makes up the intricate web of life. The idea is restore harmony, and take responsibility for the basis of human life, the Earth. The idea is simple, but the struggle to articulate, and even more to implement, the concept of the sacredness and interconnectedness of our biosphere is the most difficult challenge in the years ahead. In her address before the fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995, Winona LaDuke speaks for the Indigenous Women's Network about "Our Future, Our Responsibility": A primary and central challenge impacting women as we approach the 21st century will be the distance we collectively as women and societies have artificially placed ourselves from our Mother the Earth, and the inherent environmental, social, health and psychological consequences of colonialism, and subsequently rapid industrialization on our bodies, and our nations… Indigenous women come from a tradition that supports their position, not one that requires them to invoke an ancient Goddess or re-construct a past out of fragments of history, but a vital, spiritual and fully lived reality that traditionally embodies the sacred feminine. I hope other feminists can learn from them about female-centered consciousness and resistance. For more information, please see Works Cited, a list of valuable resource books on Native American women and issues. |