WOMEN IN THE INDIGENOUS RACIAL POWER MOVEMENT
STANDING ROCK
The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,172-mile-long underground oil pipeline project in the United States. The argument for its controversial implementation is that is it the most efficient and safe way to transport crude oil to refineries. The economic gains of the site remain elevated while the grave social and environmental injustices are federally under-assessed. Development of pipeline would be against the Sioux nation's treaty rights, destroy sacred historic sites to the Sioux Tribe, and the inevitable event of an oil spill puts the people at risk of poisoning the reservations water supply.
WOMEN LEADING THE MOVEMENT
Native women initiated the Standing Rock movement starting a prayer circle at Sacred Stones Camp. The women are known as the “water protectors,” protecting the people and the land from the pipeline, “the black snake.”
“One of the most beautiful things I feel right now, is that you see these amazing, empowered women who are stepping up and really reminding us young men, and men in general, that our role is to let the women lead, and yet, we’re their protectors and we stand side-by-side, but the women are supposed to lead with their hearts.” – Nahko Bear, speaking about Winona LaDuke and Indigenous women leaders at Standing Rock
FIGHT FOR LAND IS A FIGHT FOR BODY
“The land is our Mother, so when we lose value for the land...people lose value for the women.” -Vanessa Gray (Aamjiwnaang First Nation)
“The way we treat the earth is inseparable from the way our society treats women.” Tracy Rector (Seminole)
While the pipeline poses health and safety risks for the entire Lakota community its development raises additional specific concerns for Native women. Fracking emits air pollutants, toxic chemicals, and radioactive materials. Exposure to this poses many health risks but specifically for pregnant women creates higher risks of infertility, miscarriage or spontaneous abortion, impaired fetal growth, and low birth weight. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher discovered this interaction with nearby drilling is linked to high-risk pregnancies.
This is emblematic of historical reproductive oppression faced by Native women. From 1973 to 1976, more than 3,000 women were forcibly sterilized and between the 1970s and 1980s, that decreased the birth rate for the Native population in the United States of America from 3.8 percent to 1.8 percent. Further the history of colonization and forcible assimilation of Eurocentric way of life, included the separation of Native families.
In total, it is estimated that as many as 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976 and the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 American Indian women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. Further, they showed that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21 and they had purposefully singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.
NOTHING NEW HERE
American Indian Women’s Activism in the 1960s and 1970s
BLACK HILLS
“A nation is not dead until the hearts of its women are on the ground.”-old Cheyenne saying
“Women like Lizzy Fast Horse, a great grandmother, who scrambled up all the way to the tops of Mount Rushmore, standing right on the top of those gigantic bald plates, reclaiming Black Hills for their rightful owners. Lizzy who was dragged down the mountain by the trooper, handcuffed to her nine-year old greatgranddaughter until her wrist were cut, their blood falling in the drops on the snow. Its really true, the old Cheyenne saying: A nation is not dead until the hearts of its women are on the ground.”
FISH-INS
“No one is going to touch my son or I’m going to shoot them” (Jaimes 1992, 312).
Women were the key and prominent figures of the fish-in movement which resisted state restrictions on Indian fishing rights.
ALCATRAZ
“The name of the island is Alcatraz . . . it changed my life forever.”
—Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People
The women of Alcatraz received little attention in comparison to their male counterparts even though their role was essential. Their roles included running the community kitchen, school, and health center.
