On November 25, 1960, the women known as the Mariposas - Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal - were stopped on a mountain road and assassinated by leading officers in the Dominican secret police on orders from the dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The sisters had been unable to end Trujillo’s murderous regime in life, but their deaths were too much for the nation and only six months later Trujillo himself was ambushed and killed. Since 1999, that anniversary has been recognized by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
This fall the #MeToo hashtag spread widely after charges emerged of serial sexual harassment and rape by Miramax Films executive Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was fired. Other offenders were named, including comedian Louis C.K., Senator Al Franken, TV anchor Matt Lauer, philosopher Tariq Ramadan, writer Leon Wieseltier, journalist Charlie Rose, and many, many others including President Donald Trump who famously boasted of being able to get away with sexual assaults.
But those are all famous people. What about violence against women who are not well known? What about violence against women by men who are not well known? What about the hugely disproportionate levels of violence against Native American women?
This fall, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp introduced S. 1942, also known as Savannah’s Act to provide protection for missing and murdered Native women. The bill is named for Savannah Greywind, a 22-year old Ojibwe woman who was kidnapped, murdered, and had her fetus stolen this summer by a white couple.
On some reservations the murder rate against women is TEN TIMES the national average. In North Dakota alone, there have been HUNDREDS of disappearances of Native women. The rapes, kidnappings and murders are fed by callous disregard for Native women and by racist sexual fantasies. It is protected by jurisdictional problems preventing Native police departments and courts from arresting and convicting white people for crimes on the reservation or against Native people. And it is multiplied by the presence of man camps serving extractive industries.
In the North Dakota petrostate, tens of thousands of out-of-state men live away from their families in barracks, working in the pipeline and fracking industries. These unconnected men are paid well enough to support flourishing organized crime in narcotics, gambling and prostitution. Prostitution means sex trafficking. Some kidnapped Native women are held by criminals who charge other men to rape them. Other Native women are kidnapped and murdered by men from the camps.
Senator Heitkamp makes none of these connections. She is a prominent supporter of extractive industries, especially oil. She served as a board member for the Dakota Gasification Company, which transforms lignite coal into synthetic natural gas. She supports the Keystone XL pipeline. She describes opposition to fracking as “junk science.” And she was one of only two Democratic senators to support Scott Pruitt, long-time enemy of the EPA, as Administrator for the EPA!
Senator Heitkamp’s connections to the energy industry mean that it doesn’t matter how serious she may be about her commitment “to combat crime, violence & human trafficking in Indian Country” and to the #NotInvisible hashtag. She can denounce violence against women, but cannot even see the man camps that incubate that violence. Nor can she see the underlying, toxic ideology that links extractive industry with rape culture: violence against Mother Earth and violence against women and girls are all features of toxic misogyny.
All this brings us back to President Donald Trump, the Racist/Rapist-in-Chief. This week he chose to wrap up Native Heritage Month by “honoring” Native code talkers in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, notorious for his murders of Creeks, Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws! Then he chose the occasion again mock Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas.” The historical Pocahontas was a teen victim of kidnap and rape by British colonists in Virginia. The imagined Pocahontas of US mythology was a beautiful young “princess”, the original model for the sex fantasy that continues today, FOUR HUNDRED YEARS after her abduction.
#EndViolenceAgainstWomenAndGirls has to be more than a severely-underfunded day on the calendar of the United Nations. It has to be every day. #MeToo has to be more than a campaign exposing celebrity predators in the news and entertainment industries. It has to protect all women in their homes and in their workplaces and on the streets. #NotInvisible has to be more than a way to call attention to the disproportionate levels of violence against Native women. It has to identify the sources of that violence in rape culture, in racism, and in extractive industry. We owe these things to our mothers. We owe these things to all women.
No comments:
Post a Comment