"Not Traditional"

Sacred Circle, a national resource center for healing violence against Native women, often insists:


Violence Against Native Women Is Not Traditional.


Indeed, though few Euro-American feminists realize it today, the women's rights movement in this country, including the struggle to abolish and heal violence against women, has direct roots in at least one group of First Nations, the Haudenosaunee ("People of the Long House") Six Nations Confederacy of Upstate New York (the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora).

Anglo early feminists like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were both astounded and inspired by the much greater freedoms that Haudenosaunee women enjoyed within their own cultures, not the least of which was freedom from sexual coercion.

To learn more about Native American beliefs in everyone's right to bodily integrity, and about this underrecognized origin of US feminism, you can:

--Read ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, which thoroughly documents these matters.

--Visit the website of Sacred Circle and order from their publications catalog, which offers educational materials for both Native and non-Native people who want to both understand and take action on the current horrific problems of violence against Native women.

Violence Against Native American Women

The freedom to live without sexual assault is one of the most basic nonviolent choice rights.

Amnesty International USA recently published the report Maze of Injustice--the Failure to Protect Indigenous Women Against Sexual Violence in the USA. It found that Native American women were 2.5 times more likely than other American women to have sexual violence inflicted on them. Yet perpetrators of violence against Native women were far less likely to be brought to justice.

Why is this so? Along with the pervasive denial in Anglo-dominant US culture that women are human, Native American women are struggling with the fallout from centuries of colonial occupation and racism.

To read the Amnesty report and take action:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/Womens_Human_Rights/Join_Voices_with_Native_American_and_Alaska_Native_Women/page.do?id=1021163&n1=3&n2=39&n3=1410

The Amnesty materials include links to Native American shelters and efforts to end violence against women. Here are two ways you can aid their work most effectively:

1. Donate generously and regularly to one or more of these courageous but chronically underfunded organizations.
2. Write your representatives (Amnesty has a sample letter) to demand an increase in funds under the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).