How Colonialism and Patriarchy Create Enduring Misery for Native American Women
Published in LitHub, Jul 27, 2022
“The irony is that I am, ethnically, the kind of Indian early European settlers in the Americas thought they were encountering—the kind from what they called India, before it also became Pakistan and Bangladesh. And in an even further irony, the India of Asia before the British arrived was not India at all, but more than a dozen separate kingdoms, robbed of a future in which their distinct languages, politics, and cultures could coalesce into nation-states. In some sense, “Indian,” whether in America or in Asia, is a figment of the colonial imagination; it is the name of a lens through which White colonizers see us, and, as a result, how we sometimes come to see ourselves. In both places, it is arguably a synonym for savage.
Maybe it stands for the savagery ascribed to us, or maybe it identifies us as the objects of savagery. The truth is that none of us is Indian. Importantly, we are separate people, diverse from one another, whether native to South Asia or to the Americas, with many complex cultures and faiths that endured for thousands of years prior to European colonization. Our groups have names and languages, and ways of being that are often derived from, and tied intimately to, a specific ecology. These are obscured in a colonial context, where we are renamed by whatever colonial authority there is. The colonized everywhere are assessed only for whatever value, labor, or service we might provide, then assimilated or destroyed.
As I looked at the history of Sioux Falls, I began to better understand my experience on that bus from Flagstaff. My route that summer had taken me through five of the ten states identified by the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI)’s 2017 report as those with the most reported incidence of MMIWG. I’d traveled through Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and along the border of Nebraska and Minnesota, the locations of 40 percent of cases cited.”
