Briggs: At United Nations, women speak out
Indigenous women from across the Americas used May's meeting of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to spotlight the unique violence that targets indigenous women, particularly in the border zones of nations and on the borders of race.
''It's in the border zones where everything that you can imagine happens,'' said Ana Maria Garcia Lacayo, of the Asociacion de Comunidades Indigenas in Bolivia, speaking through a translator. ''There is trafficking in boys and girls. Women come out of the farm fields and return sick with venereal disease.''
Although the agenda for the forum's two-week session in New York City focused on land, territories and natural resources, indigenous women used workshops and side panels to draw the attention of the international community to violence against indigenous women worldwide.
The forum occurred a few weeks after the release of the landmark report by Amnesty International, ''Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA,'' which reported on the vast number of rapes on reservations, on Indian lands in Oklahoman and in Alaska Native villages that go unadjudicated. The report told of rape victims on reservations and in Alaska Native villages, where a lack of law enforcement and substandard medical care re-victimizes survivors in ways that mainstream America banished decades ago.
''Think of violence in border communities,'' Charon Asetoyer, Comanche, and director of the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center in Lake Andes, S.D., told a side panel at the United Nations. ''In the U.S. alone, there are over 550 federally recognized tribes, not including the non-recognized tribes. We have to think about those borders.
''It is in those border communities where commerce takes place, where the banks are, where the bars are, where truckers, ranchers, miners come on Friday night to hoot and holler. It is in those places where men come off the oil rigs, looking for companionship, and not in a good way.''
The report went a long way in documenting the pervasiveness of sexual violence in a handful of tribal communities, and it enumerated the failures in the U.S. judicial and medical systems in helping victims. American Indian women are 3.5 times more likely to experience rape than other Americans. In other words, one-third of Native women will experience rape.
Asetoyer and others have been calling on the United States to take corrective steps for years. On June 11 at the National Congress of the American Indian mid-year convention in Anchorage, Alaksa, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski noted the many years since the Senate Indian Affairs Committee agenda focused on violence against tribal women. She told delegates, ''If an Amnesty International report was a wake-up call, then we're not listening enough.''
In May, indigenous women took their plight international, calling on the United Nations to be the agency that similarly begins documenting rape, sexual violence, prostitution and human trafficking of indigenous women and children. Without numbers, it remains hard to move nations to stop the violence, Garcia Lacayo said, and some of these have public and church officials actively participating or looking the other way when it comes to indigenous women. Indigenous women, she said, are deemed exotic merchandise for some sexual predators. In the United States, where 85 percent of predators are non-Indian, rape of Native women on reservation land may be a crime for which law enforcement and court practices have given offenders little reason to expect to pay for it.
During a panel discussion at the United Nations on May 18, some Native women from the United States disclosed in quiet dignity that they were raped as children and raped and beaten as women.
''I've been raped and beaten countless times,'' one woman said.
Read More
The pain of the beautiful women sent a chill through the institutional room. About 70 indigenous leaders, most of them women, represented most continents of the world.
One of the panelists, Lisa Brunner, White Earth Anishnabe, repeated a conversation that she'd had with a friend in which he told her of a brutal rape on the reservation, and asked, ''What are you women going to do about this?'' She let the brazen comment come to our awareness, then she told her reply: ''When are you men going to stand up and do something for our women?''
The history of widespread violence against indigenous women is rooted in colonial cultures, said Peggy Bird, Kewa-Santo Domingo, who works in the Native Women's Advocacy Center.
''Sometimes I look at my granddaughter and wonder what happened to us,'' Bird said. But then she knows what happened. ''The Spanish traded over 500 women and children to get a bell for their church. They traded them into sexual slavery, but these things we don't talk about.''
Today, Garcia Lacayo said that indigenous girls in Bolivia and Argentina are ''stolen, forced to drink alcohol, imprisoned, beaten and made prostitutes so they can pay rent every day on the room where they are imprisoned.
''Prostitution is said to be a choice, but it's a forced choice,'' she said.
Listening to the discussion, Tonya Gonnella Frichner, Onondaga, said that she wanted to look closely at the sexual violence against indigenous women next year when she takes office as the newly elected North American representative to the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
It will take this kind of international attention to turn the tide on sexual violence against indigenous women.
In time we know Amnesty International will move on to the next worthy and important human rights struggle. Who, outside the networks of Native women who've worked on this issue for decades, will step up? It remains unclear whether the U.S. Congress will make a significant commitment to ending the violence. But even if the United States did, this is a global matter. It's time for the United Nations to turn its resources to restoring this human right - the right to live free from sexual violation - to indigenous women and children internationally. Until then, we individuals also have a responsibility.
''If we don't talk about it,'' said Garcia Lacayo, ''if it's not important, if it's not a priority of nongovernmental organizations, if my sisters in other parts of society don't stand up to the violence against indigenous women, it will go on.''
Kara Briggs, Yakama and Snohomish, is editor and associate director of the American Indian Policy and Media Initiative and a columnist with Indian Country Today.
