5.5: Indigenous Feminism

Indigenous Feminism

While the mainstream feminism of the First and Second Waves focused on gaining legal rights for women and challenging the patriarchy, these issues have never really spoken to Native/Indigenous women. During the First Wave, Native women were focused on surviving the attacks perpetrated by the United States Army and Federal government during the so-called “Indian Wars,” which ultimately plundered Native American tribal land and autonomy by creating the reservation system. Once confined to reservations, the Federal government worked alongside churches and philanthropic organizations to strip Native people of their culture and heritage by stealing their children and forcing them into boarding schools. Indigenous women fought to preserve their language and lifeways by working with ethnographers and anthropologists who saw Native culture as a dying culture that needed to be preserved for future study, not to keep it from dying to begin with. Academics such as Alfred Kroeber and John Harrington recorded native languages and wrote about their lifeways with the help of Native peoples, particularly women such as Mary Yee of the Chumash. These and other academics applied a Eurocentric approach to studying Native peoples, which impacted the interpretation of their research.

During the Second Wave, Indigenous women worked within the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1960s and 70s on issues such as land rights, cultural survival, and forced sterilization. The first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, worked to expand self-determination for indigenous communities as well as deconstructing the often-paternal stereotypes of Native peoples. She was critical of the press when they asked her to wear “tribal” clothing or when advertisements used Native peoples as tropes but she noted that female leaders were also rare within Native communities.

Since the Second Wave, Indigenous feminists have emphasized that colonizing systems such as Christianity and Capitalism are the true oppressors of native women rather than patriarchy. They point out that theft of their cultural practices, language, religion, and social status within their respective tribes were all the result of European colonization. Native women have worked for decades to reclaim cultural practices such as their Rites of Passage, which were integral to their womanhood prior to Europeans. Cutcha Risling Baldy, in her book We are Dancing for You, discussed the renewal of women’s coming of age ceremonies among her tribal community, the Hoopa Valley, and other California Native communities over the last twenty years. Starting with the Gold Rush, most California tribal communities either hid or stopped these ceremonies because White miners regularly preyed upon Native girls and women, raping them and selling them into sex slavery. Reclaiming these ceremonies has empowered girls and women within Northern California tribal communities and has also provided men within these communities with a non-Western view of women that better aligns with traditional Indigenous culture.

Conclusion

Indigenous feminists believe colonization rather than patriarchy is the real source of the oppression of Native women. Native communities have experienced theft of their lands, autonomy, and cultural heritage since Europeans first colonized the Americas in the 16th century. Native women have been at the forefront of preserving their culture and heritage, and are continuing to organize and fight against the systems of oppression brought by colonization.

Question to Consider

Why do you think Indigenous women and girls are disappearing at such a high rate?