so I want to talk to you today about
something that I think goes unaddressed
in our everyday lives
that is that I want to talk to you about
intimate partner violence and sexual
violence against Native American men now
generally when we talk about these
things the narratives we construct
there’s kind of a nonspecific narrative
about the violence that women face and I
think this narrative is really important
and I don’t want this to compete with
that at all but what I’d like to do is
examine the ways in which when we don’t
take into account the intersections of
identity one’s race socioeconomic status
ability gender and sexuality we can
create harmful assumptions about the
ways that we act towards one another so
men who go through this experience
describe it as traumatic not just
because of the obvious nature of the
experience but because there’s this kind
of interesting framing of masculinity of
men as in volume are the ones who are
always perpetuating this violence so
when you have this you create these
narratives where the voices of Native
men often lost undocumented or forgotten
because in the narratives of masculinity
and femininity it is women who are raped
in men who do that raping so what the
problem here is though is that this
creates a unique violence and the way
that being framed as not only the
perpetrators of this violence but being
involved in a way that we often don’t
think about and this problem isn’t small
or inconsequential either the lifetime
rate for sexual and intimate partner
violence against Native American men is
roughly the same for Native American
women more than four and five which is
vastly more than the national average
more specifically one in four native men
will experience sexual violence
including being made to penetrate being
penetrated or being coerced into having
sex with another now in terms of
intimate partner violence 43% and 73% of
native men will experience physical or
psychological violence in their
lifetimes some of these rates are more
than two times the rate of men
nationally but when we look at lifetime
rates of violence they don’t encapsulate
how everyday in common this problem is
in fact every year more than one in
three native men will experience sexual
violence psychological or physical
intimate partner violence are stalking
now you know usually when these things
are going on people tend to ask you know
what’s happening in our communities
where are we going wrong and our
families and relationships but the
problem with this is that the majority
of this violence is not coming from our
communities more than nine in ten of the
perpetrators of this violence for both
Native American men and women are non
natives and for Native American men the
majority of these perpetrating these
violence are women what does it mean for
our narratives of sexual violence to
understand white womanhood as a threat
to native men in contrast to the
historical narratives which opposition
native men as savages who threaten the
livelihoods of white women the reverse
in our society seems to be true how do
we address problems like this when intra
community conversations aren’t grappling
with or addressing the majority of the
people who are perpetuating the problem
in order to grapple with this issue
somewhat I spent a summer at New York
University studying sexual violence and
the way that it impacts Native American
men and women now the first answer to
why this is happening is simple its
colonisation some of Christopher
Columbus’s first writings about Native
Americans describe the land as a woman’s
breasts calling for ravishment are
described Native American women as
particularly lascivious and this
certainly creates historical context for
Native American women’s violence but
colonial writings on Native American men
are somewhat stranger they seem to
oscillate between you know savages who
are coming to get every white woman and
as undersexed
whoo and failing to rape white women
captives have failed to truly be men
what does this mean for our collective
imaginaries and the way that we think
about Native men the first is that
Native American men get hyper-sexualized
the idea of Native Americans men and
women as primitive and savage put them
in this position of unconstrained
sexuality outside of taboo and always
ready to go and the Native Americans
became this taboo site of desire but a
sight of desire nonetheless and for
Native American women you know this took
and takes place in the sexual violence
that plagues our communities but this
added part of reluctance for native men
creates this strange position where
Native American men and colonial
writings not only need to rape but need
to be raped in order to become men and
so you get this really strange and
violent position that they’re placed
with them now you know even past early
colonial writings the way the law gets
written around Native Americans is
particularly problematic in 1885
Congress passed the Major Crimes Act
which took away the ability for tribes
to try perpetrators of serious assault
and rape now the responsibility to try
and investigate these things was
supposed to fall on the Department of
Justice but US attorneys declined to
investigate 75% of all crimes that fit
in these categories though on top of
that in 1978 the US Supreme Court ruled
in Oliphant V school Maj tribe of
Indians that Native governments cannot
try non-natives at all on reservations
so with a problem where nine and ten of
the perpetrators are not from our
communities this is a huge problem so
how is this going on and how do we
grapple with this now you see in 2013
Congress tried to address this and
something called the reauthorization of
the Violence Against Women Act it was
supposed to expand protections to Native
women and defer some Authority to tribes
and grappling with this this was an
apparently good move but
had a lot of problems first and foremost
for it to be domestic violence or for it
to be stalking the perpetrator had to
have cohabitated with the victim at one
point and be described as an intimate
partner a second problem with this was
that for it to be domestic violence
there had to be proof of serious bodily
injury a term that’s not defined in the
act and when less than half of Native
women are described as needing medical
services this is a huge problem for it
to be considered stalking for example
there had to be a violation of a formal
protection order but those are expensive
and difficult to get and often worlds
away for Native people and finally you
know none of this Act addresses any of
the things that happen to Native men
less than one-fourth of Native men are
described as needing medical services or
have been seriously injured in reports
the definition for rape in this act does
not include being made to penetrate and
fundamentally it doesn’t address these
structural characteristics of how sexual
violence gets talked and approached by
officers of the law
so while it appears to do something good
it really isn’t doing much for our
communities it just creates the solution
that the u.s. government is tackling a
problem that itself is kind of
responsible for so what do we do how do
we handle this you know at the broadest
level will mean we need to be
dismantling the laws and practices that
have made this policy come into being we
need to be overturning and making undone
court cases that you know are based on
100 year old racist ideas about native
incompetency as students and scholars we
need to be changing the way that we’re
talking about masculinity we need to be
changing the way that we’re approaching
sexual violence and we need to be
directing our time energy and resources
to Native struggles because everything
that takes powers away from native
people feeds back into this very problem
this is not what our communities are
doing native feminists have been
grappling with this issue for decades
it’s what non natives have been doing to
us which means it is the onus is on them
to change their behavior their
communities and the way their answer
acting with Native Americans thank you
[Applause]
something that I think goes unaddressed
in our everyday lives
that is that I want to talk to you about
intimate partner violence and sexual
violence against Native American men now
generally when we talk about these
things the narratives we construct
there’s kind of a nonspecific narrative
about the violence that women face and I
think this narrative is really important
and I don’t want this to compete with
that at all but what I’d like to do is
examine the ways in which when we don’t
take into account the intersections of
identity one’s race socioeconomic status
ability gender and sexuality we can
create harmful assumptions about the
ways that we act towards one another so
men who go through this experience
describe it as traumatic not just
because of the obvious nature of the
experience but because there’s this kind
of interesting framing of masculinity of
men as in volume are the ones who are
always perpetuating this violence so
when you have this you create these
narratives where the voices of Native
men often lost undocumented or forgotten
because in the narratives of masculinity
and femininity it is women who are raped
in men who do that raping so what the
problem here is though is that this
creates a unique violence and the way
that being framed as not only the
perpetrators of this violence but being
involved in a way that we often don’t
think about and this problem isn’t small
or inconsequential either the lifetime
rate for sexual and intimate partner
violence against Native American men is
roughly the same for Native American
women more than four and five which is
vastly more than the national average
more specifically one in four native men
will experience sexual violence
including being made to penetrate being
penetrated or being coerced into having
sex with another now in terms of
intimate partner violence 43% and 73% of
native men will experience physical or
psychological violence in their
lifetimes some of these rates are more
than two times the rate of men
nationally but when we look at lifetime
rates of violence they don’t encapsulate
how everyday in common this problem is
in fact every year more than one in
three native men will experience sexual
violence psychological or physical
intimate partner violence are stalking
now you know usually when these things
are going on people tend to ask you know
what’s happening in our communities
where are we going wrong and our
families and relationships but the
problem with this is that the majority
of this violence is not coming from our
communities more than nine in ten of the
perpetrators of this violence for both
Native American men and women are non
natives and for Native American men the
majority of these perpetrating these
violence are women what does it mean for
our narratives of sexual violence to
understand white womanhood as a threat
to native men in contrast to the
historical narratives which opposition
native men as savages who threaten the
livelihoods of white women the reverse
in our society seems to be true how do
we address problems like this when intra
community conversations aren’t grappling
with or addressing the majority of the
people who are perpetuating the problem
in order to grapple with this issue
somewhat I spent a summer at New York
University studying sexual violence and
the way that it impacts Native American
men and women now the first answer to
why this is happening is simple its
colonisation some of Christopher
Columbus’s first writings about Native
Americans describe the land as a woman’s
breasts calling for ravishment are
described Native American women as
particularly lascivious and this
certainly creates historical context for
Native American women’s violence but
colonial writings on Native American men
are somewhat stranger they seem to
oscillate between you know savages who
are coming to get every white woman and
as undersexed
whoo and failing to rape white women
captives have failed to truly be men
what does this mean for our collective
imaginaries and the way that we think
about Native men the first is that
Native American men get hyper-sexualized
the idea of Native Americans men and
women as primitive and savage put them
in this position of unconstrained
sexuality outside of taboo and always
ready to go and the Native Americans
became this taboo site of desire but a
sight of desire nonetheless and for
Native American women you know this took
and takes place in the sexual violence
that plagues our communities but this
added part of reluctance for native men
creates this strange position where
Native American men and colonial
writings not only need to rape but need
to be raped in order to become men and
so you get this really strange and
violent position that they’re placed
with them now you know even past early
colonial writings the way the law gets
written around Native Americans is
particularly problematic in 1885
Congress passed the Major Crimes Act
which took away the ability for tribes
to try perpetrators of serious assault
and rape now the responsibility to try
and investigate these things was
supposed to fall on the Department of
Justice but US attorneys declined to
investigate 75% of all crimes that fit
in these categories though on top of
that in 1978 the US Supreme Court ruled
in Oliphant V school Maj tribe of
Indians that Native governments cannot
try non-natives at all on reservations
so with a problem where nine and ten of
the perpetrators are not from our
communities this is a huge problem so
how is this going on and how do we
grapple with this now you see in 2013
Congress tried to address this and
something called the reauthorization of
the Violence Against Women Act it was
supposed to expand protections to Native
women and defer some Authority to tribes
and grappling with this this was an
apparently good move but
had a lot of problems first and foremost
for it to be domestic violence or for it
to be stalking the perpetrator had to
have cohabitated with the victim at one
point and be described as an intimate
partner a second problem with this was
that for it to be domestic violence
there had to be proof of serious bodily
injury a term that’s not defined in the
act and when less than half of Native
women are described as needing medical
services this is a huge problem for it
to be considered stalking for example
there had to be a violation of a formal
protection order but those are expensive
and difficult to get and often worlds
away for Native people and finally you
know none of this Act addresses any of
the things that happen to Native men
less than one-fourth of Native men are
described as needing medical services or
have been seriously injured in reports
the definition for rape in this act does
not include being made to penetrate and
fundamentally it doesn’t address these
structural characteristics of how sexual
violence gets talked and approached by
officers of the law
so while it appears to do something good
it really isn’t doing much for our
communities it just creates the solution
that the u.s. government is tackling a
problem that itself is kind of
responsible for so what do we do how do
we handle this you know at the broadest
level will mean we need to be
dismantling the laws and practices that
have made this policy come into being we
need to be overturning and making undone
court cases that you know are based on
100 year old racist ideas about native
incompetency as students and scholars we
need to be changing the way that we’re
talking about masculinity we need to be
changing the way that we’re approaching
sexual violence and we need to be
directing our time energy and resources
to Native struggles because everything
that takes powers away from native
people feeds back into this very problem
this is not what our communities are
doing native feminists have been
grappling with this issue for decades
it’s what non natives have been doing to
us which means it is the onus is on them
to change their behavior their
communities and the way their answer
acting with Native Americans thank you
[Applause]
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