Native Women More Often Victims of Assault [with comment by me on alcohol etc -- H]
Note by Hunterbear: This attached short AP piece is a significant and deeply disturbing note -- but for Native people it's not a surprising one. On the other hand, the article is certainly not as full as it could have been. But, first: For much of my life, I've lived and worked in and around reservation settings -- and also in urban Indian communities. For most of the '70s, I was chair of the all-Indian Native American Community Organizational Training Center which, based at Chicago [with a Native population in its own right of almost 25,000 people from a 100 different tribal nations] covered a broad piece of the Middle West. The Center became inevitably involved in the plight of Native women -- as did a good number of other Native programs nationally [and in Canada as well.] In addition to various reservations, I know many problematic "border towns" all too well: Gallup, New Mexico -- and certainly my home town of Flagstaff, Arizona. Grand Forks, North Dakota is no stranger to these situations -- nor is Pocatello, Idaho [where I am now.] This Lair of Hunterbear website link of ours gives a quick sketch of the Training Center's nature and programs and inter-tribal focus: http://www.hunterbear.org/training%20center.htm One of the major factors, not indicated in this AP article, is the high rate of alcoholism in the Native American world. And this leads, in the case of many Native people -- and certainly many Native women -- to a high level of personal vulnerability. More recently, drugs have certainly entered the picture -- but in the Native world alcohol is still the primary escape. Whether on-reservation or off, such very basic factors as economic poverty [extremely high unemployment and sub-employment], poor health conditions, oft sub-standard education -- and Anglo racism and cultural ethnocentrism -- are the causal factors of Native alcohol problems. There is NO evidence whatsoever that Native Americans as a people are genetically vulnerable to alcohol -- and there is a vast amount of evidence to the contrary. [As with all "races" and "ethnicities," there do seem to be individual family lines that are individually vulnerable.] But there is every evidence that the high rate of Native alcoholism comes directly from a headwaters fraught with socio-economic crises and disasters. And these didn't exist in the pre-Columbian period. Alcoholism cut short my Native father's life -- and afflicted my Anglo mother as well. I've spent a fair amount of my volunteer life working with individuals and families who face these problems. And I also work with AA and any other responsible program. This is an excerpt from something on Natives and alcohol that I wrote and posted and which is published on our Hunterbear website. [My piece also discusses the very careful, always respectful and sacramental usage of peyote in the context of one of the major Native theological perspectives: that of the Native American Church.] http://www.hunterbear.org/alcohol_and_peyote_and_native_am.htm >From me: "In "Pre-Columbian" times there were, of course, many thousands of Native tribal nations in the Western Hemisphere -- each a sovereign entity with its own distinctive national culture [total way of life.] Today, after what could be almost a hundred million Native deaths, between 1500 and 2000, as a result of the European incursion, there are still thousands of very solid and stable Native tribal societies in the Hemisphere which rightly perceive of themselves as sovereign [although much of this sovereignty has been functionally eroded by the Euro-Americans]; and whose basic cultures are still, despite considerable acculturation, essentially intact. This is the case in the United States where there are presently about 600 tribal nations. There is no evidence that use of alcoholic beverages was either widespread or frequent in the "old time." Some tribes, a minority as far as we know, did have very weak alcoholic beverages [ e.g., Apache "tiswin".] But these were tantamount to 3.2 beer and nothing stronger. When the Europeans came, with really strong stuff -- e.g., rum -- the Natives had no cultural controls in place for its usage and things for them moved into disastrous realms, liquor-wise. This was especially the case when strong alcohol was so frequently used by the Whites in a deliberately Machiavellian -- genocidal -- fashion: given to the Indians in order to kill, subdue, or cheat them. I certainly hold the European incursion "and all its works" directly responsible for Native alcohol problems in the First Cause sense. I do, of course, recognize that individuals [Native and otherwise] have a clear responsibility to avoid this disastrous canyon plunge or/and to return from it. I should add that, assisting Native people in dealing with alcohol, has been something on which I've been focused for almost my entire life -- wherever I've been. In some instances this has involved formal programs [e.g., I was Vice-Chair for a long time of the all-Indian Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Treatment Program [ADAPT] at Chicago] -- and this work has also involved a vast amount of my volunteer time [ much at night.] And, in situations where tribal nations were and are going through a very difficult period of adjustment vis-a-vis the increasingly looming Anglo world [e.g., the Iroquois in the latter 1700s into the first part of the 1800s, or the Navajo of today] alcohol usage can be heavy and catastrophic. To a great extent, the Iroquois pulled out of this -- very much via cultural revival and especially the rejuvenation of the traditional Longhouse religion through the teachings of the Seneca prophet, Handsome Lake -- and also by finding meaningful and challenging work in, among other things, the Western fur trade and then in the still very wide-spread high steel construction trade. [Always very good union activists!] The most sedate bar in Rochester, New York, in the latter 1970s, was the Blue and White -- an all-Indian [mostly Mohawk] establishment. I often did much of my paperwork, as Diocesan director of social justice, in that always quiet, pleasant setting where the only music was traditional Iroquois and where only once do I recall a voice being raised. The Navajo are working through things at this present moment and it's been very tough and tragic. But they -- the Navajo -- or Dine' [as they call themselves, meaning "The People"] -- are making it right along. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Native Americans are racially vulnerable to alcohol in the genetic sense." http://www.hunterbear.org/alcohol_and_peyote_and_native_am.htm "American Indian Women More Often Victims of Assault," Renne Ruble, The Associated Press State & Local Wire, November 14, 2002. FROM MINNEAPOLIS: On a reservation or in the middle of a city, American Indian women are more likely to be raped than other women. That fact is behind this autumn's creation of the Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition - one of only a handful in the nation - that wants to change a system many Indian victims don't trust and to open up communities that tend to keep quiet about sexual assault. 'We are taught Indian women and children are sacred, and they are not being treated that way,' said Nicole Matthews, coordinator of the coalition that is based at the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center in downtown Minneapolis. American Indians are more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than blacks, Asians or whites. And in nine out of 10 cases the assailants were white or black, according to 1999 statistics by the U.S. Justice Department, the latest figures released. . . . According to the federal figures, 98 out of every 1,000 American Indian women are victims of violent crime, which includes rape, sexual assault, assault and robbery. The rate is considerably higher than for white women (40 per 1,000) and black women (56 per 1,000). . . . The immediate goal of the Minnesota coalition is to hold community training and education forums around the state. Eventually, it hopes to team with other women's groups to push legislative issues, Matthews said. 'It's about one thing: Indians and non-Indians working together to protect women and children.'"] Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ and Ohkwari' _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
