[m2c] Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide by Andrea Smith (part 1)

[usman x]

Chpater 1 from "Conuest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide"
by Andrea Smith. 2005. pgs 7-34

Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide

   "[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of
   intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."1

Rape as "nothing more or less" than a tool of patriarchal control
undergirds the philosophy of the white-dominated women's antiviolence
movement. This philosophy has been critiqued by many women of color,
including critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, for its lack of
attention to racism and other forms of oppression. Crenshaw analyzes
how male-dominated conceptions of race and white-dominated conceptions
of gender stand in the way of a clear understanding of violence
against women of color. It is inadequate, she argues, to investigate
the oppression of women of color by examining race and gender
oppressions separately and then putting the two analyses together,
because the overlap between racism and sexism transforms the dynamics.
Instead, Crenshaw advocates replacing the "additive" approach with an
"intersectional" approach.

     The problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of
     color by not acknowledging the 'additional' issue of race or of
     patriarchy but, rather, that the discourses are often inadequate
     even to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of
     racism and sexism.2

Despite her intersectional approach, Crenshaw falls short of
describing how a politics of intersectionality might fundamentally
shift how we analyze sexual/domestic violence. If sexual violence is
not simply a tool of patriarchy but also a tool of colonialism and
racism, then entire communities of color are the victims of sexual
violence. As Neferti Tadiar argues, /colonial relationships are
themselves gendered and sexualized./

     The economies and political relations of nations are libidinally
     configured, that is, they are grasped and effected in terms of
     sexuality. This global and regional fantasy is not, however, only
     metaphorical, but real insofar as it grasps a system of political
     and economic practices already at work among these nations.3

Within this context, according to Tadiar, "the question to be
asked...is, Who is getting off on this? Who is getting screwed and by
whom?"4 Thus, while both Native men and women have been subjected to a
reign of sexualized terror, sexual violence does not affect Indian men
and women in the same way. When a Native woman suffers abuse, this
abuse is an attack on her identity as a woman and an attack on her
identity as Native. The issues of colonial, race, and gender
oppression cannot be separated. This fact explains why in my
experience as a rape crisis counselor, every Native survivor I ever
counseled said to me at one point, "I wish I was no longer Indian." As
I will discuss in this chapter, women of color do not just face
quantitatively more issues when they suffer violence (e.g., less media
attention, language barriers, lack of support in the judicial system)
but their experience is qualitatively different from that of white
women.

Ann Stoler's analysis of racism sheds light on this relationship
between sexual violence and colonialism. She argues that racism, far
from being a reaction to crisis in which racial others are scapegoated
for social ills, is a permanent part of the social fabric. "Racism is
not an effect but a tactic in the internal fission of society into
binary opposition, a means of creating 'biologized' internal enemies,
against whom society must defend itself."5 She notes that in the
modern state, it is the constant purification and elimination of
racialized enemies within the state that ensures the growth of the
national body. "Racism does not merely arise in moments of crisis, in
sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the biopolitical state, woven
into the web of the social body, threaded through its fabric."6

Similarly, Kate Shanley notes that Native peoples are a permanent
"present absence" in the U.S. colonial imagination, an "absence" that
reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed
vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified. Ella
Shohat and Robert Stam describe this absence as,

     an ambivalently repressive mechanism [which] dispels the anxiety
     in the face of the Indian, whose very presence is a reminder of
     the initially precarious grounding of the American nation-state
     itself...In a temporal paradox, living Indians were induced to
     'play dead,' as it were, in order to perform a narrative of
     manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to
     disappear.7

This "absence" is effected through the metaphorical transformation of
Native bodies into a pollution of which the colonial body must
constantly purify itself. For instance, as white Californians
described them in the 1860s, Native people were "the dirtiest lot of
human beings on earth."8 They wear "filthy rags, with their persons
unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin."9 The following 1885
Procter & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap also illustrates this equation
between Indian bodies and dirt.

     We were once factious, fierce and wild,
     In peaceful arts unreconciled
     Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
     From buffalo meat and settlers' veins.
     Through summer's dust and heat content
     From moon to moon unwashed we went,
     But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
     Of light across our darkened way
     And now we're civil, kind and good
     And keep the laws as people should,
     We wear our linen, lawn and lace
     As well as folks with paler face
     And now I take, where'er we go
     This cake of IVORY SOAP to show
     What civilized my squaw and me
     And made us clean and fair to see.10

In the colonial imagination, Native bodies are also immanently
polluted with sexual sin. Theorists Albert Cave, Robert Warrior, H. C.
Porter, and others have demonstrated that Christian colonizers often
likened Native peoples to the biblical Canaanites, both worthy of mass
destruction.11 What makes Canaanites supposedly worthy of destruction
in the biblical narrative and Indian peoples supposedly worthy of
destruction in the eyes of their colonizers is that they both
personify sexual sin. In the Bible, Canaanites commit acts of sexual
perversion in Sodom (Gen. 19:1-29), are the descendants of the
unsavory relations between Lot and his daughters (Gen. 19:30-38), are
the descendants of the sexually perverse Ham (Gen. 9:22-27), and
prostitute themselves in service of their gods (Gen. 28:21-22, Deut.
28:18,1 Kings 14:24, 2 Kings 23:7, Hosea 4:13, Amos 2:7).

Similarly, Native peoples, in the eyes of the colonizers, are marked
by their sexual perversity. Alexander Whitaker, a minister in
Virginia, wrote in 1613: "They live naked in bodie, as if their shame
of their sinne deserved no covering: Their names are as naked as their
bodie: They esteem it a virtue to lie, deceive and steale as their
master the divell teacheth them."12 Furthermore, according to
Bernardino de Minaya, a Dominican cleric, "Their marriages are not a
sacrament but a sacrilege. They are idolatrous, libidinous, and commit
sodomy. Their chief desire is to eat, drink, worship heathen idols,
and commit bestial obscenities."13

Because Indian bodies are "dirty," they are considered sexually
violable and "rapable," and the rape of bodies that are considered
inherently impure or dirty simply does not count. For instance,
prostitutes are almost never believed when they say they have been
raped because the dominant society considers the bodies of sex workers
undeserving of integrity and violable at all times. Similarly, the
history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it
clear that Indian people are not entitled to bodily integrity.

     I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I
     heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco-pouch out of
     them.14

     At night Dr. Rufus Choate [and] Lieutenant Wentz C. Miller...went
     up the ravine, decapitated the dead Qua-ha-das, and placing the
     heads in some gunny sacks, brought them back to be boiled out for
     future scientific knowledge 15

     Each of the braves was shot down and scalped by the wild
     volunteers, who out with their knives and cutting two parallel
     gashes down their backs, would strip the skin from the quivering
     flesh to make razor straps of.16

     Dr. Tuner, of Lexington, Iowa, visited this solitary grave [of
     Black Hawk] and robbed it of its tenant...and sent the body to
     Alton, Ill., where the skeleton was wired together. [It was later
     returned] but here it remained but a short time ere vandal hands
     again carried it away and placed it in the Burlington, Iowa
     Geographical and Historical Society, where it was consumed by
     fire in 1855.17

     One more dexterous than the rest, proceeded to flay the chief's
     [Tecumseh's] body; then, cutting the skin in narrow strips...at
     once, a supply of razor-straps for the more "ferocious" of his
     brethren.18

     Andrew Jackson...supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek
     Indian corpses — the bodies of men, women and children that he
     and his men massacred — cutting off their noses to count and
     preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from
     their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins.19

     A few nights after this, some soldiers dug Mangus' body out again
     and took his head and boiled it during the night, and prepared
     the skull to send to the museum in New York.20

In 1990, Illinois governor Jim Thompson echoed these sentiments when
he refused to close down an open Indian burial mound in the town of
Dixon. The State of Illinois had built a museum around this mound to
publicly display Indian remains. Thompson argued that he was as much
Indian as current Indians, mid consequently, he had as much right as
they to determine the fate of Indian remains.21 The remains were
"his." The Chicago press similarly attempted to challenge the identity
of Indian people protesting his decision by asserting that they were
either only "part" Indian, or merely claiming to be Indian.22 In
effect, the Illinois state government conveyed the message to Indians
that being on constant display for white consumers, in life and in
death, is acceptable. Furthermore, Indian identity itself is under the
control of the colonizer, and subject to challenge or eradication at
any time.

In 1992, Ontario finance minister Jim Flaherty argued that the
Canadian government could boost health-care funding for "real people
in real towns" by cutting the bureaucracy that serves /only/ Native
peoples.23 The extent to which Native peoples are not seen as "real"
people in the larger colonial discourse indicates the success of
sexual violence, among other racist and colonialist forces, in
destroying the perceived humanity of Native peoples. As Aime Cesaire
puts it, colonization = thingification.24 As Stoler explains this
process of racialized colonization:

     The more "degenerates" and "abnormals" [in this case Native
     peoples] are eliminated, the lives of those who speak will be
     stronger, more vigorous, and improved. The enemies are not
     political adversaries, but those identified as external and
     internal threats to the population. Racism is the condition that
     makes it acceptable to put [certain people] to death in a society
     of normalization.25

The project of colonial sexual violence establishes the ideology that
Native bodies are inherently violable — and by extension, that Native
lands are also inherently violable.

As a consequence of this colonization and abuse of their bodies,
Indian people learn to internalize self-hatred, because body image is
integrally related to self-esteem. When one's body is not respected,
one begins to hate oneself.26 Anne, a Native boarding school student,
reflects on this process:

     You better not touch yourself...If I looked at somebody...lust,
     sex, and I got scared of those sexual feelings. And I did not
     know how to handle them... What really confused me was if
     intercourse was sin, why are people born?...It took me a really
     long time to get over the fact that...I've sinned: I had a
     child.27

As her words indicate, when the bodies of Indian people are designated
as inherently sinful and dirty, it becomes a sin just to be Indian.
Native peoples internalize the genocidal project through
self-destruction. As a rape crisis counselor, it was not a surprise to
me that Indians who have survived sexual abuse would often say that
they no longer wish to be Indian. Native peoples' individual
experiences of sexual violation echo 500 years of sexual colonization
in which Native peoples' bodies have been deemed inherently impure.
The Menominee poet Chrystos writes in such a voice in her poem "Old
Indian Granny."

     You told me about all the Indian women you counsel
     who say they don't want to be Indian anymore
     because a white man or an Indian one raped them
     or killed their brother
     or somebody tried to run them over in the street
     or insulted them or all of it
     our daily bread of hate
     Sometimes I don't want to be an Indian either
     but I've never said so out loud before...
     Far more than being hungry
     having no place to live or dance
     no decent job no home to offer a Granny
     It's knowing with each invisible breath
     that if you don't make something pretty
     they can hang on their walls or wear around their necks
     you might as well be dead.28

-- 
"Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted 
with enslavement." Lee Maracle
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