In his essay “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” Scott Lauria Morgensen employs the concept of biopolitics to explore the way in which queer subjectivity, as it is articulated through settler homonationalism, too works to

“purify” the social body and mark certain populations for life and certain populations for death.

Building upon the work of Jasbir Puar, among others, Morgensen argues that colonial “settlement and its naturalization then conditioned the emergence of modern queer formations, including their inheritance and sustaining of colonial biopolitics in the form of settler homonationalism.”⁴⁴ In other words, the convergence of settler colonialism, modern biopolitics, and modern sexuality (which all marked Natives as sexually deviant and settlers as sexually proper) “produced Native peoples as queered populations marked for death, and settlers as subjects of life--including, at times, as homonationalists.”⁴⁵ Morgensen argues that the biopolitical production of queer and normative populations he identifies was/is, in part, enacted through the imposition of colonial heteropatriarchy. I expound upon this position to argue that colonial heteropatriarchy (particularly, for example, as it demands the segregation of peoples based upon race, gender, and nation and then fastens Native peoples to particular geopolitical spaces) has facilitated the biopolitical management of indigeneity in the way it queers urban Indians in general and urban Indian women in particular.

Thus, Un-Settling Questions intends to contribute to and be in dialogue with the conversation concerning biopolitics, colonialism, and indigeneity by focusing on the intersections between biopolitics and the discourse surrounding violence against Native women. I aim to explore the ways in which both the marginalization of Native women's voices/activism within this discussion and the construction of “authentic” indigeneity in federal legislation to address this problem serve to perpetuate and fulfill a settler colonial, biopolitical agenda to mark Native peoples for death, violence, and elimination. Furthermore, by positioning urban Indian women as the focal point of this exploration, I intend to demonstrate the degree to which Native nations and citizens themselves have become implicated in this processes.

Methodology/Methods

In designing and undertaking this project, I take seriously Linda Tuhiwai Smith's assertion that, “The methodologies and methods of research, the theories that inform them, the questions which they generate and the writing styles they employ, all become significant acts which need to be considered carefully and critically before being applied. In other words, they need to be 'decolonized'.⁴⁶ Therefore, I situate this dissertation as a decidedly indigenous research project that privileges indigenous concerns and practices and positions indigenous peoples as both researchers and the researched. I do so to disrupt mainstream and historical research tendencies to view Native peoples as objects of study rather than producers of knowledge, culture, and worldviews. My aim in conducting this project is not to paint a purportedly objective picture of urban Indian women's experiences with violence. Nor is it to create a study that primarily pathologizes urban Indian women.⁴⁷ Rather, I attempt to initiate dialogue and provide a venue through which Native activists (myself included and selfconsciously located within the project) can speak to violence against Native women as it intersects with settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and the construction of urban indigeneity.

With this understanding in hand, I have partly crafted Un-Settling Questions as an intellectual ethnography that employs Native feminisms and indigenous anti-violence advocates' voices as an analytic with which to interrogate the construction of urban indigeneity as it relates to violence against Native women. I follow in the footsteps of scholars such as Andrea Smith in my conviction that “rather than studying Native people so we can learn more about them, I wish to illustrate what it is that Native theorists have to tell us about the world we live in and how to change it.”⁴⁸ I refuse to simply observe and record the theory and practice of Native antiviolence activists in order for the non-Native world to understand their struggles, challenges, successes, etc. Instead, I collaborate with indigenous advocates in utilizing their experiences and knowledges to theorize the complexities of eradicating the violence that permeates our lives.

To accomplish this task, I have spent a considerable amount of time interviewing and working alongside Native anti-violence advocates from the Los Angeles, South Dakota, and Minneapolis/St. Paul areas. I have chosen to focus my ethnographic work in these three locations for distinct yet related reasons. Los Angeles was an obvious choice because of my own position as an urban LA Indian. I spend a great deal of my time, inside and outside of intellectual pursuits, within this community and am an active participant in a number of organizations concerned with strengthening the Native community in Los Angeles. I chose the Minneapolis/St. Paul region because it is the urban area with the longest and most developed history of Native anti-violence organizing in the United States. The women I interviewed there are affiliated with a variety of organizations such as the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center, Women of Nations, Eagle's Nest, Tribal Law and Policy Institute, and Mending the

Sacred Hoop. I chose South Dakota because it is a hub from which a great deal of the national Native women's activism against violence originates: South Dakota is home of the first shelter for Native women, White Buffalo Calf Woman Society, which is located on the Rosebud

Reservation; activist Tillie Black Bear helped found the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence from her home at Rosebud; and it was their work in South Dakota that some of the women critical to the development of Title IX credit.

I would also like to note that it was extremely important to me to speak to women who were located both on and off reservation and who advocated for Native women in both urban and reservation contexts. I do not, however, intend for Un-Settling Questions to be a dichotomized, comparative analysis of on-reservation/off-reservation Native experiences of and responses to violence nor do I intend to position on and off reservation activists in opposition to one another. Instead, I chose to include indigenous voices from a variety of geopolitical locations in order to illuminate the ways in which settler colonialism has constructed indigeneity differently across time and space in ways that have severe and deadly consequences. I have made intentional efforts to resist naturalizing the reservation/urban binary that continues to influence our understanding of Nativeness even as I interrogate the ways in which reservation and urban spaces have been constructed in juxtaposition to one another.

Again, as I have already mentioned, the interviews and informal conversations I conducted with the indigenous advocates in these various locations are not the focal point of this project per say. I am not interested in producing a traditional ethnographic study that operates as a “form of culture collecting” in its gathering, categorizing, and archiving of “othered” experiences and voices.⁴⁹ Rather, I have attempted to employ the voices and experiences shared with me in an attempt to theorize and interrogate the marginalization of indigenous mobilization, the construction of indigeneity, and violence against Native women from the perspective of Native women. Thus, the interviews have been woven throughout the text and some chapters include more interview material than others depending on their respective foci and the degree to which the interviewees spoke about the topic explored therein.

Additionally, some of the chapters (two and three in particular) analyze specific pieces of federal legislation as a way to demonstrate the arguments I posit within this dissertation. However, even as these laws are a primary focus of my project, this dissertation is not a legislative history or case study of the laws I write about. Instead, I follow in the footsteps of scholars such as Joanne Barker who perceive of “the law as a discourse” that “work[s] in the ongoing processes of social formation” as they pertain to Native peoples⁵⁰ and, thus, utilize the law as a site through which we are able to witness the intricacies of settler colonialism.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I urge my readers to think of Un-Settling Questions as a prolineal genealogy of the relationship between violence against Native women, marginalization, the construction of indigeneity, and geopolitics. That is, I have attempted to craft a project that moves beyond exploring what this relationship currently looks like and toward what this relationship could become. In the words of Andrea Smith, “I seek to answer the question of not “what is?” but `what could be?'”⁵¹ For if I return again to my particular identity as an urban, mixed-blood Muscogee woman whose own Native roots have been fertilized more often with the colonial and internalized poisons of hatred, violence, alcohol, etc. than with life sustaining nutrients, I certainly recognize my own need for the restorative, recovering, and healing potential that a contemporary, critical, decolonial, Native feminist analytic has to offer both myself and future generations of Native peoples.

The Chapters

Chapter one of this project most heavily incorporates the ethnographic interviews I have conducted and attempts to illuminate and explore the marginalization and elimination of indigeneity, especially as it has manifested in settler colonial accounts of anti-violence organizing. In “Visible Violence: Marginalization and The South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault,” I employ the voices and experiences of the Native women instrumental in the birth and development of the SDCADVSA in the late seventies in order to make such work visible and to explore the violence of marginalization. This indigenized history is extremely significant as it serves as the foundation from which more contemporary federal legislative efforts build upon, as will be explored in the later chapters.

Additionally, and as I suggested in the opening of this introduction, this chapter serves as a springboard for interrogating the construction of indigeneity as it intersects with violence against Native women. I argue that although early indigenous anti-violence mobilization accomplished a variety of critical goals, made considerable headway in beginning to address violence against Native women, and saved the lives and spirits of a significant number of Native women, it also shaped the way in which violence against Native women and indigeneity was conceptualized and would later become utilized by the settler state. I make these claims not to dishonor the advocates or their work, but rather to situate their mobilization as one strategy particularly suited to a certain time and place and not the full extent of efforts needed to combat the ever-shifting settler colonial apparatus. In other words, I argue that while it is critical and immensely insightful to explore what some refer to as the modern “origins” of the Native women's movement to end violence, such tactics and strategies should not be canonized in a way that limits our understandings and future imaginings of anti-violence advocacy.

Chapter two of my dissertation, titled “(Re)Locating Violence: Title IX of the Violence Against Women Act,” builds upon chapter one by examining the degree to which Native women were instrumental in the passing of Title IX, the Safety for Indian Women Title, of the 2005 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act but also examines the multifaceted ways in which the colonial spatialization found within this legislation facilitates the biopolitical management of Native peoples. Informed by feminist and postcolonial geography, this chapter articulates the relationship between space, race, gender, and colonialism as it relates to violence against Native women. In particular, I examine the way in which colonial mapping constructs, naturalizes, and reproduces spatial injustice. To accomplish this, I unpack the ideological (and literal) violence enacted by Title IX and argue that not only does Title IX situate indigenous women in particular locales as more indigenous, and thus more deserving of protection from violence, than other women, but it also regulates our understanding of the spatiality of violence (i.e. our conceptualization of the spaces within which violence occurs).

In the third chapter of my dissertation, “Unidentified Bodies: The Tribal Law and Order Act,” I continue to explore the ways in which Native anti-violence advocates have contributed to federal legislation (seemingly) aimed at eradicating violence against Native women. Additionally, though, I continue to investigate the ways in which colonial apparatuses utilize biopolitical logics to regulate and eliminate Native peoples, yet here I focus on the construction of identity. Through a critical analysis of the recently signed Tribal Law and Order Act, which has been hailed by many as an unprecedented effort to combat violence in the lives of Native women, I explore the extent to which liberal legislative measures work to further solidify the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal ideologies and constructions of Nativeness that cause violence against Native women in the first place. I suggest that rather than redress violence against Native women, the TLOA actually perpetuates violence in the way it shapes perceptions of Indian peoples, regulates the boundaries of Indian identity, and limits our understanding of violence.

In the concluding chapter of Un-Settling Questions, titled “Unchartered Territory: Native Feminist Reconceptualizations,” I briefly consider the degree to which Native communities have themselves reproduced the biopolitical logics that work to limit and eliminate indigeneity. I broach this subject not to embark on an entirely different, yet related, dissertation (for this topic certainly deserves an equally comprehensive investigation) but to signal the dangers of continuing to allow indigenous anti-violence organizing/theorizing to be dictated by the needs and desires of settler colonialism. I also utilize a prolineal genealogical method to depart from my previous descriptions of what the relationship between violence against Native women and the construction and marginalization of indigeneity is and toward an imagining of what the relationship could be. That is, I apply a native feminist analytic to the prevalence and conceptualization of violence against Native women in order to present the potential for such theorizations/methodologies to alter our understanding of and fight against said violence.

In the end, Un-Settling Questions is an attempt to do exactly that which its title suggests.

It is an attempt to pose questions that un-settle our current understandings of the relationship between indigeneity, violence against Native women, biopolitics, and geopolitics. It is an attempt to illuminate complexity - the complexity of violence, of settler colonialism, and of indigenous survivance in the face of colonialism. It is an attempt to theorize “off the reservation” and beyond the boundaries of federal recognition. And it is an attempt to speak in conversation with indigenous “mavericks, renegades, [and] queers”⁵² because it emerges from a conviction that “to speak, at whatever the cost, is to become empowered rather than victimized by destruction.”⁵³

I use the term “Native” as inclusive of American Indian, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, First Nation, south/central/Mexican American, and Native Pacific peoples, however since my analysis primarily focuses on the continental United States, I signal the reader when I refer to Native peoples living outside of this terrain. I also use the terms “Native,” “Indian,” and “indigenous” interchangeably throughout the text.

Sarah Deer, Bonnie Clairmont, Carrie Martell, and Maureen White Eagle, eds. Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (New York: Altamira Press, 2008).

Lawrence A. Greenfield and Steven K. Smith, American Indians and Crime (Washington, DC:

Bureau of Justice Statistics, USDOJ, February 1999); Steven W. Perry, American Indians and

Crime (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, USDOJ, December 2004); Ronet

Bachman, National Crime Victimization Survey Compilation (Washington, DC; Bureau of

Justice Statistics, USDOJ, 2004); Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, Full Report of the

Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey (Washington DC: National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USDOJ, November 2000).

The “trust responsibility” that the U.S. government purportedly has to Native nations emerges from a number of Federal Indian law and policies. In Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), Joanne Barker describes it accordingly: Through its commerce, taxation, and supremacy clauses, the U.S. Constitution initially defined Native nations as possessing a government-to-government relationship with the United States. However, when Congress defined this relationship it also extended its law over tribes. The three Supreme Court decisions that came to be known as the Marshall Trilogy further solidified this authority by conceptualizing Indian tribes as uncivilized and inferior peoples in need of “the plenary power, care, and protection of the United States.” (31).

Significant to the project at hand is that the “trust responsibility” the U.S. government has defined as its relationship with Native peoples is frequently invoked to call for better

“protection” and treatment of Native peoples by the settler state. Rarely discussed, however, are the colonial ideologies at play in a relationship that defines the United States as the “guardian” of the Native “ward” or that situates indigenous communities as inferior to and under the eye of the settler state in their position as “domestic dependent Nations.” When considered in this context, the “trust responsibility” of the United States is not misrecognized as a responsibility to ensure that Native peoples are treated equally under the law but rather understood as a responsibility to maintain the unequal and inferior position of Native peoples in relation to the settler state.

Amnesty International, Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA: One Year Update (New York: Amnesty International USA, 2008),

Among others, these included N. Scott Momaday, Bruce King, Paula Gunn Allen, Hanay Geiogamah, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, Elizabeth Woody, James Welch, Sherman Alexie, Simon Ortiz, and Lucy Tapahanso.

U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000.

The foundation of this argument (i.e. the distinction between Native women and so-called women of color) can, again, be traced back to the unique legal relationship the United States has with Native nations. As contemporary indigenous studies scholars and Native communities emphasize that Native identity is not an ethnic identity but rather a political one, many indigenous women argue that Native women are not women of color but rather women belonging to various Native nations. This distinction has not entirely prevented collaboration and coalitional work between Native women and women of color, but it has been a contentious issue.

For examples of women of color contributions to the field of anti-violence theorization, see texts such as: Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Mapping at the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color" in The Public Nature of Private Violence: The

Discovery of Domestic Abuse, eds. M.A. Fineman and R. Mykitiuk (New York: Routledge, 1994), 93-118; Natalie Sokoloff and Christina Pratt, eds., Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,

2005); Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, eds., Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (Cambridge: South End Press, 2006); and Maria Ochoa and Barbara Ige, eds., Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2007).

Sarah Deer, Bonnie Clairmont, Carrie Martell, and Maureen White Eagle, eds. Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (New York: Altamira Press, 2008).

Naomi Littlebear, “Dreams of Violence” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 16-17; Chrystos, “He Saw” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 1819; Barbara Cameron, “Gee, You Don't Seem Like an Indian From the Reservation” in This

Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 46-52; Chrystos, “I Walk in the History of

My People” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 57; Jo Carrillo, “Beyond the Cliffs of Abiquiu” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981), 65-67.

Beth Brant, ed. A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Women (Rockland: Sinister Wisdom, 1984), dedication page.

Examples of this include lack of discussions regarding settler state colonialism, lack of recognition and promotion of Native sovereignty, the difference in familial structures between white middle-class women and Native women, and a general ignorance of Native peoples beyond tokenization.

Kate Shanley, “Thoughts on Indian Feminism” A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Women, ed. Beth Brant (Rockland: Sinister Wisdom, 1984), 215.

Paula Gunn Allen, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism” in The Sacred

Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986),

54-75; Paula Gunn Allen, “Angry Women are Building: Issues and Struggles Facing American

Indian Women Today” in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian

Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 189-193; Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1996); Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, eds., Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings on North America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997).

Andrea Smith and Luana Ross, eds. “Native Women and State Violence.” Special Issue, Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, & World Order 31, no. 4 (2004).

Ibid., 1.

Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005), 1.

Ibid., 8.

Andrea Smith and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds. “Forum: Native Feminisms Without Apology.” Special Issue, American Quarterly 60, no.2 (2008).

Mishuana Goeman and Jennifer Denetdale, eds. “Native Feminisms: Legacies, Interventions, and Indigenous Sovereignties.” Special Issue, Wicazo Sa Review 24, no.2 (2009).

For examples of this work, see texts such as Donald Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in

America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Joan Weibel-Orlando, Indian

Country L.A.: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Complex Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); James LaGrand, Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Troy Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-determination and the Rise of Indian Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

Examples of such practices include the forced removal of Native peoples from their lands, displacement through boarding schools and adoption, the introduction of the federal relocation program after World War II, and the termination of Native tribes in the seventies.

Susan Lobo, “Is Urban a Person or a Place? Characteristics of Urban Indian Country” in American Indians and the Urban Experience, eds. Susan Lobo and Kurt Peters (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2001), 75.

Ibid., 77.

Renya Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 4.

Ibid., 1.

Ibid., 2.

Although there are a number of similarities, the legal apparatus regulating the political/legal relationship the United States government has to Native nations within its borders differs from the techniques of colonialism employed by the settler states that occupy other parts of the Americas. Thus, although my theoretical framework will certainly be informed by Native activists/scholars writing about other nation-states, they will not be the focus of my analysis.

Bonita Lawrence, “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 25.

Much like what we call “Federal-Indian law” in the United States, the Indian Act of Canada is the body of laws that regulates Canada's relationship to the indigenous peoples living within the Canadian borders. Located within the Indian Act are legislative attempts to define Indian identity in ways that disempower Native peoples and force them to comply to settler colonial definitions of Indianness that rely on racist and patriarchal ideologies. One of the most controversial aspects of the Indian Act is the way in which the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act differentiated between “status” and “non-status” Indians in order to restrict the number of individuals who had a “nation-to-nation” relationship with the Canadian government. Based on (the highly flawed) blood quantum concept, this legislation mandated that Indian status was determined by one's relation to a male who already had Indian status and stipulated that any Indian woman who married a non-status Indian lost her status while non-status women who married status Indian men gained status.

Lawrence, 25.

Ibid., 26.

Ibid., 81.

Sherene Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” in Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, ed. Sherene Razack (Toronto: Between The Lines, 2002), 144.

Ibid., 129.

Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1975-1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

Ibid., 254.

Ibid., 255.

Ibid., 256.

Please see Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) and Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) respectively.

Smith, Conquest, 9.

Ibid.

Scott Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no.1-2 (2010): 110.

Ibid., 111.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 1999), 39.

I provide a greater discussion of the prevalence and danger of “damage-centered” research, as it is articulated by Eve Tuck, in chapter three of this project.

Andrea Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), xxiv.

Linda Smith, 61.

Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 7-8.

Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right, xxii.

Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing, Loose Canons (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 6.

Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, eds., Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 21.

Chapter one. Visible Violence: Marginalization and the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault

One early afternoon in February of 2012, I sat down at my computer to browse my Facebook account when I came across a Chris Rock comedy clip that was being bounced around my circle of family, friends, and colleagues. A long-time Rock fan, I clicked on the clip and was taken to the YouTube website where, within seconds, Rock's loud and boisterous voice trumpeted from my computer speakers: “Racism everywhere. Everybody pissed off. Black people yelling racism. White people yelling reverse racism. Chinese people yelling sideways racism. And the Indians ain't yelling shit `cause they dead. So everybody bitch about how bad they people got it. Nobody got it worse than the American Indian. Everybody need to calm the fuck down. Indians got it bad. Indians got it the worst. You know how bad the Indians got it? When's the last time you met two Indians? You ain't never met two Indians. Shit, I have seen a polar bear ride a fucking tricycle in my lifetime. I have never seen a Indian family just chillin' out at Red Lobster. Never seen it. Everybody want to save the environment. Shit I see trees every fucking day. I don't never see no Indians.”¹

As soon as the segment began to play, I recognized it. I had heard it a trillion times since it first aired in Rock's “Bigger & Blacker” HBO special in 1999. But I still laughed. Hard. There is something about Rock's impassioned delivery, his absolute assuredness of Indian invisibility, and the reference to Red Lobster (a restaurant that this Indian, for one, has a not sosecret obsession for) that makes this bit so effective for me and, according to Facebook, a good deal of my Native friends and family. After I stopped laughing and clicked through a few more excerpts from “Bigger and Blacker,” I began to wonder about the power of Rock's diatribe on racism and the American Indian. What is it about this joke that makes it as poignant in 2012 as it was in 1999?

The most obvious answer lies in Rock's delivery and his juxtaposition of American Indians with tricycle-riding polar bears, Red Lobster customers, and save-the-environment campaigns. He positions the “sighting” of an American Indian as less common and more absurd than the witnessing of circus feats. Likewise, he evokes the “absurd” image of plains-feathered and war-bonneted Indians dining at a mainstream chain restaurant in order to profess his opinion that American Indians no longer exist. Of course, this entire joke is based upon stereotypes of Native peoples that have been constructed by the settler colonial imagination. If we were to consider the fact that very few Native peoples resemble the Indian of settler colonial fantasies, then Rock's joke would fall short for we would have to acknowledge that, in fact, a good number of Native peoples likely do dine at Red Lobster and Rock, as well as the rest of the non-Indian U.S. citizenry, actually do encounter Native peoples “every fucking day.”

Arguably, the evocation of stereotypical images of Native peoples is both predictable and trite at the beginning of the twenty-first century though. After centuries of Disney films, Halloween costumes, product branding, sports-team mascots and the like, such images have lost a certain degree of their impact. Why, then, is Rock's joke still so funny? And what point might he, well-known for the social commentary embedded in his humor, be trying to make through this joke? I'd like to suggest that perhaps the significance of Rock's diatribe lies not in his evocation of stereotypical Indians but rather in his suppression of “everyday” Indians. The marginalization and erasure of Native peoples as contemporary subjects and agents of social action that Rock inadvertently draws attention to might be the place from which his humor delivers the most powerful punch. For myself at least, like most politically-conscious comedy, this bit is humorous because it seems absurd but also because it hints at a reality I am all too familiar with. In other words, in its fantastical imagery also lies a depressing reality that laughter and humor help to mitigate, for, in all actuality, the marginalization and erasure of Native peoples is far from funny. It is both a violent tactic and outcome of settler colonialism.

Although significantly departing from Rock's comedic delivery, this chapter intends to engage that which Rock's Indian joke calls forth - the marginalization and erasure of indigeneity, particularly as it has manifested in settler colonial narratives of anti-domestic/sexual violence organizing. For centuries now, Native peoples have been actively engaged in struggles against settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, yet much of this mobilization has been suppressed and ignored by settler state accounts of historical moments and social movements. This has especially been the case in regards to the narration of anti-violence organizing. From the so-called “beginning” of the movement to organize against domestic/sexual violence in the 1970s to the present day, Native women have been situated as victims of violence but never as social agents capable of or invested in combating that violence. Rather, white supremacy and settler colonialism have ensured that whiteness and the state itself have been credited with the efforts to halt violence against Native women and in indigenous communities.²

This chapter attempts to address and counteract the violence of marginalization through the documentation of the emergence, development, and eventual splintering of the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (SDCADVSA) from the perspective of the Native women instrumental in its existence. My primary objective here is to rewrite/reright³ the position of Native women in anti-violence discussions by centering the voices and concerns of Native women and, accordingly, by decentering the mainstream, colonialist narrative that typically frames such narrations. For as the following indigenized history demonstrates, although the issue of violence against Native women has only recently garnered mainstream attention, Native women have been addressing this problem at local, national, and international levels for centuries. It is this mobilization that the federal government builds upon when finally considering the extent and significance of violence in the lives of Native women who have faced the unique challenge of combating racism in the anti-violence movement, sexism in their own communities, and marginalization in society as a whole when attempting to render this violence visible.

In addition, I aim to recount this early attempt on behalf of the state, Native communities, and white citizenry to work together in eradicating violence against Native women in order to glean further insights about the insidious nature of settler colonialism. For an indigenized history of the SDCADVSA is not critical solely because it renders visible Native women's engagement with anti-violence mobilization, but also because it speaks to the complicated and myriad ways in which the “logic of elimination,” that Patrick Wolfe so deftly delineates in his comparative study of the relationship between genocide and settler colonialism, manifest.⁴ In other words, rather than read the history of the SDCADVSA as an isolated historical moment in which there were a few racist apples in a relatively well-meaning bunch of anti-violence activists, I urge us to seriously consider the development of the SDCADVSA as illustrative of “settler colonization [as] a structure rather than an event” that is complex in social formation, continuous throughout time, at moments presents as genocide, and at moments presents as other equally destructive forms of the logic of elimination.⁵ Such an understanding of settler colonialism enables us to read the events surrounding the SDCADVSA in tandem with previous and/or simultaneously occurring manifestations such as the racial classification of Natives, frontier homicide, blood quantum policies, child abduction, boarding schools, etc. which ultimately aids us in more fully understanding the consequences of working within a settler colonial framework in attempts to eradicate violence against Native women.

In The Beginning

In 1977, a non-profit organization was founded by women on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota to work with women, men, and children in an effort to restore the sacredness of women. This organization, the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society, is based on the traditional Lakota teaching that "even in thought - women are to be respected."⁶ Accordingly, the Society combats violence against Native women with traditional Lakota life ways and teachings. Only one year after the creation of the Society (which would later establish the first shelter for Native women on an Indian reservation), president Faith Spotted Eagle was invited to testify at the

United States Commission on Civil Rights hearings on battered women in Washington DC. Because she was unable to attend the event, Spotted Eagle asked Tillie Black Bear, who was a student in graduate school at the University of South Dakota Vermillion and a member of the

Society, to take her place. With approximately 300 other women from across the United States, Black Bear attended the hearings in DC and testified about the needs of women on the Rosebud reservation.

The women present at the hearings began to see that they had similar concerns about violence against women. During breaks in meetings, a group began to gather in the men's restroom to discuss the importance of creating a national movement against domestic violence.⁷ By the end of the hearings, Black Bear (the only Native woman in attendance) and the others had decided to form the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV). All of the women present were asked to organize state coalitions when they returned to their respective homes and approximately 20 women agreed to be on the steering committee for the NCADV.

Despite her doubts that a Native woman would be able to play such a leading role in

South Dakota during the late '70s, Black Bear returned home and spoke with the South Dakota Commission on the Status of Women. They discussed potential organizing efforts and after attending a quarterly meeting of the commission, Black Bear was able to convince them to help her arrange a statewide coalition-organizing meeting.

Black Bear then returned to the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society and began looking for a space to host the meeting. Because there was not a location on the Rosebud reservation that could accommodate the potential attendees, she asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs for the use of their dorms. The BIA agreed and in June 1978 about 77 women responded to the invitation and attended the first organizing meeting of what would become the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence.⁸

Prior to 1978 there were only three programs in the state providing shelter to battered women and advocacy for rape victims: Brookings Women's Center located in Brookings, Children's Inn located in Sioux Falls, and White Buffalo Calf Woman Society. Although all three of the programs served Native women, the staff and board members of Brookings Women's Center and Children's Inn were almost entirely made up of white women. This division between clients and program managers proved to become a spot of tension in later Coalition organizing. However, because only three programs existed throughout the state, most of the women who attended the initial meeting were individuals interested in the issue of violence against women and did not yet represent programs. Of the 77 women who attended, only a few were Native and most of them were from Rosebud.⁹

The first meeting of the Coalition focused on holding workshops to discuss the needs of women in South Dakota and to suggest strategies for addressing these needs. A sampling of the topics explored includes: funding sources, medical services, networking, education, counseling and advocate services, and the creation of shelters.¹⁰ At the end of the gathering a decision was made to meet again during the next month in order to begin drafting the articles of incorporation that would permit the organization to have a formal presence within South Dakota. During this time Black Bear was still facilitating/organizing the Coalition. She had yet to face any real resistance to the fact that she was a Native woman leading a statewide and primarily AngloAmerican organization in South Dakota. The second meeting was held a month later at St. Joseph's Indian School in Chamberlain and the steering committee began drafting the articles of incorporation. Of the seven members on the steering committee only Spotted Eagle and Black Bear were Native.¹¹

In 1978 six more programs dealing with violence against women were established in

South Dakota: (1) Citizens Against Rape and Domestic Violence in Sioux Falls, (2) Women in

Crisis Coalition in Spearfish, (3) Women Against Violence in Rapid City, (4) Women's

Resource Center in Watertown, (5) Women's Center/Shelter in Yankton, and (6) Sacred Shawl Women's Society on the Pine Ridge reservation. Again, although Native women utilized the programs throughout the state, the boards and staff of these organizations were fairly unintegrated with only Sacred Shawl Women's Society being run by Native women.

In order to address the minimal representation of Native women, the steering committee proposed that a board of 15 members with direct representation of programs direct the Coalition as follows:

5 East Missouri River Board Members

5 West Missouri River Board Members

5 Indian Board Members o 1 Urban

o 2 East Missouri River Reservation o 2 West Missouri River Reservation¹²

Despite this attempt at parallel development and participation from both Native and non-Native communities within the Coalition and because Native women were only at the forefront of the two reservation programs that existed in the state at the time, the goals of the steering committee were simply that - goals. In the early years of the Coalition, domestic violence programs statewide were so heavily dominated by non-Native women that the spots reserved for Native women often remained unfilled. Activist Karen Artichoker reflects on this issue: "Being outnumbered and not having other Native women participate really did influence other Indian women not getting involved in those early years." She describes a conversation she had with another Native woman Bernice Stone and recalls, "It's always stayed with me and made me feel bad at the moment and still makes me feel bad. The statement she made was that she felt inferior being in a room full of white people. She said, 'I don't know if I just haven't gotten over some boarding school stuff or my life or whatever….but I always just think that white people are going to look at me and think I'm not smart or whatever.'"¹³ Thus, despite Black Bear's foundational role within the birth of the Coalition, it didn't take long for Native women to realize that the makeup of the Coalition primarily represented Anglo women and their interests.

Meanwhile, a decision was made to incorporate under the name of the South Dakota Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Inc. By-laws and articles of incorporation were drawn up, reviewed first by the steering committee, and then mailed to all Coalition members for comments and voting. The steering committee met again on July 30, 1978 at Sioux Falls College and at that time they finalized all proposals for organizational structure, by-laws and articles of incorporation. In September 1978, Black Bear, Joyce Abraham and Charlotte Schwab

incorporated the South Dakota Coalition.¹⁴

Simultaneously, the NCADV was emerging and although Native women were extremely underrepresented in the make-up of that Coalition as well, they were crucial in its development. In August 1978, sleeping in borrowed National Guard tents, 28 women from all over the country camped out on the Rosebud reservation at Black Bear's invitation for another organizing meeting. Black Bear comments on her motivation for this work: "In the mid '70s, I owned my own home, had 2 young daughters, a master's degree in counseling and a good job at a local university. I had it all, but I still got involved in a battering relationship.”¹⁵

Over the next few years, members of the South Dakota Coalition worked feverishly to network and make changes on the local, national, and international level. In March 1979, the interim Board of Directors of the Coalition met in Pierre at a meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women where Black Bear was invited to testify.¹⁶ During that same year, Jane Thompson (a founder of Women Against Violence in Rapid City) brought Erin Pizzey, considered the founder of the modern women's shelter movement in England and author of Scream Quietly or the Neighbors Will Hear, to Rapid City as a speaker for the South Dakota community. At the time of her presentation in Rapid City, her book was the only resource available on the topic of battered women and her visit was widely attended by members of the Coalition.¹⁷

In December 1979, the Coalition met again and discussed the need to change their bylaws so that they utilized non-sexist language. They also decided to lobby the legislature for the first time. The two issues they focused on were funding for the local programs and a reporting bill to gather concrete data to determine the incidence of battering in the state. The total Coalition budget for lobbying costs was only $100 though so they were only able to reimburse lobbyists at the rate of ten cents per mile.¹⁸ Despite the lack of resources and the severe South Dakota weather that occurs during the January-March legislative session, many women took their turns as lobbyists.

The difficulties of working through the South Dakota legislature extended far beyond weather conditions and economic strain, however, and this became poignantly clear in March of 1980 when the legislative session ended. The Coalition's reporting bill passed both the House and the Senate but was vetoed by Governor Janklow who stated that he could not support the bill because the language protected the rights of unmarried people and homosexuals. According to

Janklow, the legislature did not intend to protect the rights of these groups. Additionally, the

Coalition's funding bill, totaling $25,000, passed in the House but was killed in the Senate Judiciary Committee where even one of the few female legislators in South Dakota at the time cast a dissenting vote.¹⁹

Thus when the coalition reconvened in April and June 1980, the main topic of discussion was the need to build a broader base of economic and societal support. They recognized they had to have more political clout and that increased awareness might help them achieve this. In addition to identifying potential new funding sources, the coalition conducted a panel of legislators who presented lobbying techniques and then decided to introduce two more bills to the January 1981 session. One initiative requested restraining orders for batterers and the other would increase the marriage license fee as a resource for Coalition member programs despite the fact that many Native women were dissatisfied with the marriage license legislation. As marriage license fees in rural counties and on reservations never resulted in a significant amount of money, Artichoker comments, "I remember raising that issue, how is that going to benefit development in Indian communities?"²⁰ She adds that because of such irrelevancy, the few

Native women involved in the Coalition at the time "didn't feel invested or engaged."²¹ The Coalition decided to move forward with both bills regardless of these concerns. The restraining order bill passed both the Senate and House but was vetoed by Governor Janklow and the Marriage License bill failed.²² After this second unsuccessful attempt at passing legislation, the Coalition experienced what many remember as a “down period.”

The tide began to turn in 1983, however, when the Coalition again lobbied for protection orders and the marriage license fee increase. In February 1983 the marriage license fee increase to fund local battered women programs finally passed the legislature and was signed by the

Governor. The Domestic Violence Protection Order bill failed that year but became law in March 1984.²³ Over the next few years advancements continued to be made as funding became more accessible when both Family Violence Prevention and Services Act and Victims of Crime