The plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women has only recently entered the national collective consciousness. The violence that Indigenous women face on a daily basis is connected to the forms of marginalization and violence that they experience as a result of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is embedded within ideologies of white supremacy, and the violence that settler colonialism continues to enact upon Indigenous bodies. In my research project, I examined the media response to the case of Cindy Gladue. Gladue was an Indigenous woman who was murdered in Edmonton. On the night she died, a truck driver named Bradley Barton hired her for sex work. The cause of Gladue’s death was an eleven-centimetre wound in her vagina, through …show more content…
Indigenous women have often lacked representation in the media, or been represented utilizing colonial language that continues to enact violence. Before examining Indigenous women’s representation in media, I find it relevant to define and address the role of settler colonialism. According to Augustine Park, settler colonialism utilizes the logics of elimination and disappearance to create societies that protect and preserve settler interests on expropriated land. This results in policies that aim to make Indigenous population “disappear” either through assimilation or genocide. Andrea Smith examines settler colonialism through the lens of white supremacy. She argues that the logic of genocide is embedded with settler colonial narratives because “it is what allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. It is acceptable exclusively to possess land that is the home of indigenous peoples because indigenous peoples have disappeared.” We cannot forget that the act of assuming that this land could be claimed or empty of existence was a form of colonial violence in and of itself according to Julie Kay. More specifically, Kaye states that colonial violence began with the assumption of emptiness and then perpetuated “logic of dehumanization: of …show more content…
Sherene Razack examined the case of Cindy Gladue through the lens of Indigenous women’s disposability. More specifically, she examined how the introduction of Gladue’s vagina as evidence is connected to colonial violence and disposability. She proposes that “we understand this violence as colonial terror and the introduction of her vagina as evidence in the courtroom as a memorialization of terroristic death.” Razack argues that the evidence memorialized a terrible, sexualized violence directed at an Indigenous woman. Crucially, the visual imprint of power on her body was displayed in a courtroom, the very place where that violence has for too long gone
Sherene H. Razack’s article The Murder of Pamela George introduces the idea of colonial violence within a spatialized justice system by exploring the trial of a murder of a native woman who worked as a prostitute.
Her book focuses on the myriads of issues and struggles that Indigenous men and women have faced and will continue to face because of colonialism. During her speech, Palmater addressed the grave effects of the cultural assimilation that permeated in Indigenous communities, particularly the Indian Residential School System and the Indian Act, which has been extensively discussed in both lectures and readings. Such policies were created by European settlers to institutionalize colonialism and maintain the social and cultural hierarchy that established Aboriginals as the inferior group. Palmater also discussed that according to news reports, an Aboriginal baby from Manitoba is taken away every single day by the government and is put in social care (CTVNews.ca Staff, 2015). This echoes Andrea Smith’s argument in “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing” that colonialism continues to affect Aboriginals through genocide (2006, p. 68). Although such actions by the government are not physical acts of genocide, where 90% of Aboriginal population was annihilated, it is this modern day cultural assimilation that succeeded the Indigenous Residential School System and the Indian Act embodies colonialism and genocide (Larkin, November 4,
A non-guilty verdict in the murder trial of Bradley Barton accused of killing Cree mother of three Cindy Gladue who bled to death from an eleven centimetre internal laceration argues that the wound was the result of rough sex. Gladue known in Edmonton as a sex worker spent two night with Barton in an Edmonton hotel room in June 2011. This essay will argue the appeal that was warranted through looking firstly at feminist analyses of sexual assault and legal consent, secondly, the contexts of intersectional power relations/ interlocking oppressions such as Gladue being a women from a Cree nationality who works as a sex worker, thirdly the problematic notion of Gladue being the bearer
The depiction of Native Americans to the current day youth in the United States is a colorful fantasy used to cover up an unwarranted past. Native people are dressed from head to toe in feathers and paint while dancing around fires. They attempt to make good relations with European settlers but were then taken advantage of their “hippie” ways. However, this dramatized view is particularly portrayed through media and mainstream culture. It is also the one perspective every person remembers because they grew up being taught these views. Yet, Colin Calloway the author of First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, wishes to bring forth contradicting ideas. He doesn’t wish to disprove history; he only wishes to rewrite it.
In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s reexamines the American historical record and moves it passed the typical narratives of colonialism, revolution, and American exceptionalism. Dunbar-Ortiz’s analysis will impact the field of Native Studies and even general United States history with its examination and focus on settler colonialism as a genocidal policy. It is, as Dunbar-Ortiz argues, impossible to write American history without the acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples. Dunbar-Ortiz shatters the myth of “free land” and conquered Natives. She instead focuses on “the absence of a colonial framework (7),” which she believes is the reason that most historians overlook Indigenous history. In other words, historians need to view colonization as an ongoing process and not a
In a forthright manner, Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lyn Young examine the "discursive practices used by the news media" (897) in relationship to the missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) in Canada. Opening their argument, the authors outline their mode of discussion by stating that their paper will look through a feminist lens at the radicalized and sexualized violence that has become nothing short of an epidemic. By specifically focusing their attention towards to MMIW, Jiwani and Young structure their investigation in a documentary-style discussion, which reveals the ideological and systemic racism and sexualisation embedded within North American culture and media towards Aboriginal women. Their mode of appeal explicitly lays out, in a
When an individual belongs to two different disadvantaged classes, the risk of abuse and discrimination multiplies. Thus, Native American women are at a very high risk of violence and sexual abuse. As of 2007, “One in three Native American women will be raped at some point in their lives, a rate that is more than double that for non-Indian women, according to a new report by Amnesty International” (Fears and Lydersen 1). This is exemplified in the novel in the rape, murder and mutilation of Evelyn Rose McCrae and Madeline Jeanette Lavoix. There was the possibility of a third assault and it occurs in front of the two brothers on New Year’s Eve. A car full of white men, one of which Jeremiah believes to be in his history class, pulls up in front of a young pregnant woman whom the young men jeer and proposition. All three women were Native American and in seedy neighbourhoods at the time that they were offered a ‘good time’, and the two were assaulted and murdered. The two assaults and murders were perpetrated by young men, and to be assumed as young white men. Through these encounters we can see how Native women were treated in the city as a twofold minority. In the setting of the city, Native American women are treated as lowly sex objects by the young men in all three instances. They had a lower social status as being both women and Native...
In this proposal our team seeks to explore the injustices within the Indian Act. To achieve this our proposed research will examine the target population being the aboriginal woman. The paper will further explore the oppressions faced by the aboriginal women within the Indian Act. In conclusion, this proposal will sum up the negative impact that the Indian Act had on aboriginal women and how it continues to oppress this population within the Canadian National discourse.
However, in Western government, “native peoples are in the way because they are thought to undermine the state- whichever state they find themselves in- because of their struggle to maintain their own ways of life” (Wolfe, “Tribes”). Because they present economic challenges to land use and resource exploitation, indigenous peoples share sufferings under political oppression, deracination and racism and are, as in the case of Australian Aborigines, the “poorest of the poor.” Destroyed by a “rhetoric of hate,” genocide and mass murder are the tools of nation states to control the unwanted obstacles in economic development (Niezen 55).
Feminism and Indigenous women activism is two separate topics although they sound very similar. In indigenous women’s eyes feminism is bashing men, although Indigenous women respect their men and do not want to be a part of a women’s culture who bring their men down. Feminism is defined as “The advocacy of women 's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.” In theory feminism sounds delightful despite the approaches most feminists use such as wrong-full speaking of the opposite gender. Supposedly, feminism is not needed as a result of Indigenous women being treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native woman who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being “white”. This essay argues that Indigenous women may
According to LaRocque (1994), there is a distinct connection here between the effects of colonization and the decreased well being of Aboriginals, with the greatest impact noticed upon Aboriginal women.
According to Smith, sexual violence “is not simply a tool of patriarchy, but also a tool of colonialism and racism” (Smith 2005, 8). As a result, women are being forced to suffer abuse, which damages their identity. Because of colonialism, Native women often find themselves forced into silence around sexual and domestic violence in their communities. By staying silent about sexual and domestic violence, Native communities are “able to maintain a united front against racism” (Smith 2005, 1). Accordingly, Native women are constantly being marginalized in patriarchal discourses regarding racism, colonialism, and white supremacy discourses. Historically, it is mentioned that sexism is the inability of both patriarchy and white supremacy discourses,
Today, Native American women continue to be victimized and remain vulnerable targets within, their communities, reservations, tribal law enforcement agencies, and federal law enforcement agencies. In order to restore peace and justice for Native women we first need to have critical and substantive discussion regarding all aspects of sexual assault on r...
For example, in the local school, stereotypes such as the image of the ‘wild man’ are consolidated by claiming that there was cannibalism among the indigenous people of the northwest coast (Soper-Jones 2009, 20; Robinson 2010, 68f.). Moreover, native people are still considered to be second-class citizens, which is pointed out by Lisamarie’s aunt Trudy, when she has been harassed by some white guys in a car: “[Y]ou’re a mouthy Indian, and everyone thinks we’re born sluts. Those guys would have said you were asking for it and got off scot-free”
Similar to other marginalized groups affected by colonialism due to the government in power, the Indigenous peoples of Canada have struggled as a nation due to the unequal treatment they have encountered in the past. The governing bodies that control these Indigenous communities have continued to have colonialistic tendencies that attempt to put the ‘white man’s’ needs before the Indigenous peoples.