Women of Color Task Force to All Member Organizations of the Coalition, 1991, Private Collection.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Maicki, From the Beginning.

Resigning Member Programs to Jeff Holden, July 3, 1991, Private Collection.

Ibid.

Deidra Shaw to Resigning Member Programs, July 10, 1991, Private Collection.

Ibid.

Maicki, Why There Are Two Coalitions in South Dakota.

Asetoyer, interview.

Andrea Smith develops the notion that “including” women of color within anti-violence mobilization without actually “centering” them unwittingly contributes to white supremacy because it simply adds a “multicultural” component to anti-violence models that were developed primarily with a white, middle-class experience in mind in “Beyond the Politics of Inclusion: Violence Against Women of Color and Human Rights” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4, no.2 (2004): 120-124.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Book Ltd, 1999), 44.

Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”

Brenda Hill to author, May 22, 2008, Private Collection.

Asetoyer, interview.

Chapter two. (Re) Locating Violence: Title IX of the Violence Against Women Act

In the summer of 2009, my boyfriend Charles took a group of inner-city youth on a road trip from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon. They were a motley crew of “at-risk” students, primarily Black and Latino, ranging in age from 18-25, enrolled in a charter school and working toward the attainment of their high school diplomas after having been r/ejected from the public school system. Most of them had never been outside of their respective Los Angeles communities, other than serving time in various criminal justice facilities, and none of them had ever seen the Grand Canyon before. The oldest son of a first generation, Mexican-American, single mother, Charles too had grown up in the more impoverished and dangerous streets of Los Angeles and his experiences there eventually motivated him to become the principal of the charter school his students attended. The trip was one of many he had designed to broaden their experiences, possibilities, and minds.

Upon returning from this momentous trip, Charles was excited to recount his travels to me. The Sunday afternoon he arrived home, we relaxed in the living room of his Echo Park apartment when, in all earnesty, he told me he had seen “real Indians” in Arizona. I pressed him to describe what he meant by the phrasing “real Indians” and after a couple of feeble attempts to better articulate himself, he finally answered that they'd been “Indians from the reservation” -- the dark-haired, dark-skinned Southwestern-looking Indians of non-Indian fantasies. Although his comment was more familiar than I care to admit, I was sincerely shocked and confused by it.

Charles had already been dating me, a Muscogee Creek woman, for a couple of years at the time. He had brought me a stunning white buffalo turquoise pendant from his trip. He had attended powwows and ceremonies with me. He had previously dated another Native woman. And, he had spent his entire life in Los Angeles, the urban center with the largest population of Native peoples. So why was he so eagerly telling me he had finally encountered “real Indians” in

Arizona? What was it about my Muscogee self, visibly steeped in the Native community of Los Angeles despite not wearing regalia to the grocery store, that didn't seem “real” to him?

It was during this conversation that I realized exactly the pervasiveness of the colonial regime. Don't get me wrong; I had encountered stereotypical understandings of Nativeness before. I had been asked if I was “sure” I was Indian by a number of people in various contexts. I had also been asked exactly “how much” Indian I was by dozens of friends, strangers, and acquaintances. But never had I imagined that a person I was so intimately connected with, whose politics and experiences so closely resembled mine, who listened intently when I mounted my soapbox of Native indignation, and who supported my political and academic work in Native communities might not actually consider me to be a “real Indian.” Social constructions of Nativeness do run deep.

Furthermore, in this moment I became keenly aware of the extent to which

understandings of Nativeness are connected to the politics of place. Yes, my somewhat racially ambiguous physical features probably have something to do with the way in which my boyfriend non-Indianed me that afternoon, but it was my residence in Los Angeles, as opposed to the Navajo or Hualapai reservations he had just passed through, that marked me as less Indian than the Indians he had seen near the Grand Canyon. It was the widespread and overwhelming belief that Native peoples both should and do reside in recognizably designated Native spaces that marked the individuals he had seen in Arizona as more Native than me.

In this chapter, I intend to address the multifaceted ways in which the United Sates has utilized colonial spatialization to facilitate the biopolitical management of Native peoples.

Informed by feminist, indigenous, 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 while simultaneously professing to work against such injustice. To accomplish this, I unpack the ideological and literal violence enacted by Title IX, the Safety for Indian Women Title, of the Violence Against Women Act. I 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 others, thus enacting violence against the very population it professes to “save,” but it does so at the very same time that it condemns violence against Native women. That is, like the state of South Dakota “supported” the SDCADVSA (which could in many ways be described as a Native coalition) while it simultaneously sanctioned and rewarded the ethnically-exclusive Network, the federal government purports to address violence against Native women while it simultaneously enacts violence against them. Furthermore, Title IX regulates our understanding of the spatiality (or the geography) of violence. In other words, recalling Edward Soja's theorization of spatial justice, I urge us to consider both the way in which settler colonialism violently shapes our geographies and the way in which geographical formations perpetuate and reinscribe the violence of settler colonialism.¹

Reservation Blues

A staple of the North American imagination is that of the Indian reservation. Frequently portrayed as a remote and foreign, yet familiar and knowable, locale, shrouded in mystery and bounded by poverty and alcoholism, the reservation of colonial fashioning has come to represent all things Indian. John Moore argues that the reservation has actually become synonymous with Nativeness and, as such, Indianness has come to be understood as “something bestowed by the federal government, in some mysterious way, when a reservation is created, and thus something withdrawn when a reservation is dissolved.”² Before we proceed with analyzing the problems of such conceptualizations of the reservation, however, I'd like to spend a few moments describing the institution and its origins.

David Wilkins writes that as of 2005, there were 314 reservations and other restricted and trust lands in the United States.³ The combined acreage of these lands is approximately 100 million, 4% of the total United States land base, and is the land most commonly referred to as “Indian Country.” Historically, the term Indian Country denoted all lands populated by Native peoples, all lands “beyond the frontier,” but contemporarily, Indian Country is defined more specifically as “all the land under the supervision and protection of the federal government that has been set aside primarily for the use of Indians. Federal law defines it, first, as all land within the boundaries of an Indian reservation, whether owned by Indians or non-Indians. Second, it includes all `dependent Indian communities' in the United States. These are lands --pueblos of

New Mexico, Oklahoma tribal lands, and California rancherias--previously recognized by other European nations and now by the successor government, the United States, as belonging to the tribes or as a set aside by the federal government for the use and benefit of the Indians.”⁴

Although there were arrangements that resembled what would eventually be called “reservations,” as far back as the early 1700s, it wasn't until the middle of the nineteenth century that the modern reservation emerged with the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851⁵ which allocated funds for western tribes to be relocated onto reservations. The exact moment at which individual tribes “relinquished” title to certain lands and “reserved” the title of other lands through treaty negotiations and other measures varies from Native nation to Native nation, but by the end of the nineteenth century, what can be called “the reservation era” was well underway and most Native peoples “were confined, imprisoned on reservations.”⁶ According to Moore, the legal definition of “reservation” most frequently cited is that set forth in the 1901 decision United States v. Martin which states “An Indian reservation is a part of the public domain set apart by proper authority for the use and occupation of a tribe of Indians. It may be set apart by treaty, act of Congress, or executive order.”⁷ Significantly, this definition highlights two critical components of the reservation institution: (1) that reservations are created from federal action, as opposed to merely emerging from indigenous homelands and (2) that they are intended for the “use and occupation” of Native peoples but that they are generally owned, or held in trust, by the federal government. Clarifying such distinctions are critical to understanding reservations as settler colonial constructs rather than indigenous geopolitical structures. This is not to say that indigenous peoples have not adapted to, altered, or even embraced the institution of the reservation in various contexts, but that contemporary views of reservations as the places where Indians reside and where Indianness flourishes must account for the settler colonial logics embedded in this institution.

Arguably, the simplest explanation for the creation and implementation of the reservation system was land clearance and economic exploitation of indigenous land and labor. As settlers demanded increasingly larger tracts of land and pushed further west, the policy of removal became more difficult to actualize and reservations emerged as an alternative to assigning indigenous peoples to remote areas beyond the presence of Euro-Americans. Because settler colonists began to infiltrate and desire all indigenous lands, it became necessary to systematically colonize Native peoples on small parcels of land in the midst of non-Indians.⁸ Such geographical arrangements spurred increased efforts at assimilation and the eradication of the Native. In “An Elusive Institution: The Birth of Indian Reservations in Gold Rush California,” John Findlay makes the compelling argument that, in their design and function, reservations were intended to resemble 19^th century “rehabilitative” institutions such as the penitentiary, the insane asylum, and the almshouse.⁹ Described as “solutions to the apparent ills caused by social instability and as models of how people might begin to restore order….reformers touted asylums as special environments in which those regarded as deviant might be isolated, concentrated, and resocialized through discipline and routine, and then integrated anew into the larger world,”¹⁰ and might I add, economic structure. Likewise, reservations were generally trumpeted as places wherein which Native peoples would transition from savagery to civility in preparation for complete assimilation into Euro-American society and workforce. Findlay also argues, however, that it wasn't long before all asylum-like institutions, reservations included, lost their reformist missions and “became storage bins for society's outcasts.”¹¹ As this shift began to occur, reservations became increasingly militarized and the goal of managing and retaining Indians replaced that of “protecting” and “rehabilitating” them.

Luana Ross speaks at great length about the technology of confinement advanced by reservations. In Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality, she positions reservations alongside military forts, boarding schools, orphanages, and jails in order to reveal that “from the time of European contact to the present day, [America's indigenous people] have been imprisoned in a variety of ways.”¹² For example, in her narration of the racialization and “settlement” of Montana, Ross describes the pass system that was put in place as an instrument to control Native peoples and mobility. This system was implemented once

Natives were segregated on reservations and required Natives to obtain legal permission, or passes, in order to leave the boundaries of the reservation. If Natives were found off of their respective reservations without a pass, they were subjected to vagrancy laws.¹³

The settler colonial logic that justified the restriction and imprisonment of Native peoples grew so powerful that, as Paula Gunn Allen tells us, “off the reservation” eventually became a military and political expression to designate “someone who doesn't conform to the limits and boundaries of officialdom, who is unpredictable and thus uncontrollable.”¹⁴ Originally, however, the term designated a particular outlaw -- an indigenous person who defied the colonially imposed border of the reservation. The consequences of such border crossing were immense and could even result in death: “Those who crossed the set borders were deemed renegades. They were usually hunted down, and most often, summarily shot.”¹⁵ Thus, an institution that had supposedly emerged as a temporary enclave to facilitate the assimilation of Native peoples quickly morphed into a permanent institution stringently committed to the management, regulation, and imprisonment of indigeneity.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Native peoples initially welcomed reservations with anger, disdain, and resistance. For example, it has been documented that although the Crow reservation was established in an 1851 treaty, the Crow people traveled beyond those boundaries regularly depending on the season and their needs. In fact, as late as 1882, government officials complained that they were “maintaining an outpost without Indians” because large portions of the Crow people rarely went near the reservation agency.¹⁶ Likewise, Findlay reports that in California “most inmates simply left [the reservation], not just to secure food to supplement their meager diets but also to find a different environment in which they might survive”¹⁷ because the majority of them “looked upon the reservations, rather as a hell than a home.”¹⁸

Putting Indians in Their Place

Keeping both the emergence of and early indigenous responses to the reservation in mind, I'd like to turn toward examining the process through which reservations have become naturalized as the proper and authentic containers of Indianness. In other words, how is it, I ask, that the reservation, a colonial construct, has come to symbolize, represent, and regulate Indian identity and existence? How has the reservation come to be privileged as the site of “Indian Country” by both settler colonists and contemporary Native nations? And, what are the implications of such colonially constructed understandings of Native place and identity?

Since the 1990s, there has been a proliferation of texts that explore the material and symbolic construction of place. These books vary widely in their respective foci on the way in which geography and spatiality are intertwined with gender, masculinity, empire, dominance, resistance, etc. but they all share the impulse to explore the degree to which, despite hegemonic beliefs, space, place, and location are social and political constructs. That is, critical contemporary geography posits that space is both produced and productive.¹⁹

For example, in her 1993 monograph, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Gillian Rose argues that like the practices of mapping and placemaking, the practice of geographical inquiry has historically been understood as a neutral, ordered, hierarchal, and masculine discourse wherein which “detached explorers” make sense of (and determine) the spatial ordering of the world. Thus, she describes the feminist geographical project as one that critiques the masculinist concepts, assumptions, and subjects of traditional geography and insists that there is social context and consequence of geography as a field of study. She posits, “Its epistemic exclusions are enacted by and impact specific people.”²⁰ Geography, or the spatialization of our world, then, is not a neutral practice but rather an exceedingly political process that orders our understanding of and location within things large (nations, continents, and peoples) and small (individual bodies, homes, parlor rooms).

Likewise, indigenous and anti-colonial scholars have made critical interventions into the study and practice of geography. In the compelling and impassioned collection Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, scholar Sherene Razack describes the aim of the anthology as an effort to both “tell the national story as a racial and spatial story, that is as a series of efforts to segregate, contain, and thereby limit, the rights and opportunities of Aboriginal and people of colour”²¹ and to unmap or “denaturalize geography by asking how spaces come to be.”²² More specifically, the contributors to Race, Space, and the Law track the dominance and production of spatiality but, in particular, as this dominance manifests in white settler societies. In a series of pointed questions they ask: “What is being imagined or projected on to specific spaces and bodies, and what is being enacted there? Who do white citizens know themselves to be and how much does an identity of dominance rely upon keeping racial others firmly in place? How are people kept in their place? And, finally, how does place become race?”²³ These questions and the musings they inspire are critical to the discussion of the naturalization of the reservation as the authentic space of Indianness. They highlight the extent to which settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy rely upon the segregation and containment of particular bodies and particular communities as a practice of domination and nation building. It is critical, then, that we read and interrogate the place of the colonially constructed reservation in practices of spatialized domination and imperialist geography.

Razack explains the concepts of “mapping,” spatialized dominance, and the Cartesian subject with the help of Foucault's notion of the production of subjects in space.²⁴ In her account of Foucault's theorizations, eighteenth century disciplinary technologies contributed to and solidified the production of two distinct bodies: the normal, respectable, self-disciplined, bourgeois body and the abnormal, degenerate, Other body. The production of a self-regulating and disciplined bourgeois body necessitated the production of the undisciplined and degenerate body that it could be contrasted to and, eventually, spatially separated from. Thus exists the Enlightenment individual, or the Cartesian subject, “who maps his space and thereby knows it and controls it,” (as opposed to the uncivilized Other whose “maps” or ways of relating to space have been rendered meaningless by the colonial authority) and proceeds without apology to “claim territories of others for his own.”²⁵

In the “New World,” settler colonists have utilized such ideologies from the earliest moments of contact with indigenous peoples whom they portrayed in stark contrast to themselves. Indians were described (and treated) as the savage, irrational, undisciplined opposite of the civilized and enlightened individual. Likewise, indigenous lands were characterized as wild, untamed, and unchartered, ripe for the mapping, containment, and conquest of European, and later Euro-American, explorers. The gendered element of such conceptualizations cannot be taken for granted. Exploration, imperial excursion, the “penetration of virginal lands,” the displacement of Natives and the settlement of whites were portrayed as masculine tasks while Native peoples and Native lands were frequently feminized.²⁶ The emergence of the reservation must be read from this context, wherein which the production of the raced and gendered Cartesian subject necessitated the counter production of the also raced and gendered, degenerate indigenous subject who, eventually, justified relegation to the reservation. In fact, the very production of the pure and superior US nation-state necessitates and is built upon the act of “fixing” Native bodies (and other bodies of color) in geographical locations and time frames situated in opposition to so-called civilization and US exceptionalism.

Thus, the construction of the reservation can (and must) be read alongside a number of other segregationist and biopolitical policies developed to “protect” the pure and civilized white man from the contamination of the racialized and gendered Other. Like immigration laws, separate drinking fountains, and separate spheres between men and women, the reservation exists as yet another attempt to differentiate between the pure, bourgeois, white, male subject and those who threaten his tenuous claim as rightful owner of land and nation. Hence, as I mentioned in the previous section, when it became impossible for colonists to continue relocating Native peoples beyond the “frontier of civilization,” they restricted Natives to reservations in an alternate attempt to segregate them from (and further situate them in opposition to) white settler society. In this way, the reservation was both a product of and aided in producing the ideological and literal separation between Euro-American and indigenous. Although Native peoples had previously occupied and been in relationship with all of the lands that would eventually become the United States, they were quickly relegated to specific locations demarcated by the federal government and reinforced through jurisdiction laws and ideology. Reservations were thus produced in response to and perpetuated the production of Native Otherness.

Interrogating the ways in which the structuring of the reservation resembles the structuring of other settler-spaces also aids us in understanding the significance of normalizing the reservation regime. For example, in Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager examine the myriad ways in which the home, the workplace, the city, the nation, etc. have been gendered. Of particular use to our discussion is their exploration of the “separate spheres” of feminine and masculine space. Domosh and Seager argue that although frequently unsubstantiated in practice and lived reality, there exists a powerful Western ideology that separates a male world of work, politics, and the public from a female world of the home, the family, and the private.²⁷ These dichotomous spheres mirror other colonial binaries such as civilized/savage, and thus were not entirely new concepts, but were more urgently propagated during the growth of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, in efforts to more efficiently solidify the nuclear family, which aided in firmly planting heteropatriarchy in even the most intimate spaces of the nation and developing a gendered division of labor that would strengthen the economy of the nation-state, upper and middle class women became increasingly relegated to the private (and devalued) space of the home while men claimed the public space of work and politics for themselves. The domestication of the bourgeois woman within the home also served to distinguish her from her “degenerate” counterparts (working class women and women of color.) Before long, it became incredibly dangerous and taboo for “respectable” women to inhabit any space perceived as outside the realm of the home and the home became naturalized as the place where women belonged. When these women did venture beyond the hearth they risked the wrath of heteropatriarchy: “Violence is one of the most common and powerful tools to sustain particular sexual, family, and household structures and to keep women spatially restricted to them.”²⁸ Again, in what could seem like an ironic twist of fate but rather should be read as the pervasiveness of dominance, we must remember “that it is within the home that most violence against women is committed.”²⁹

The similarities between the structure and operation of the bourgeois home and the structure and operation of the reservation are striking and extremely useful in examining both the naturalization of the reservation and its operation of a separate sphere maintained through the use of violence. As I've already mentioned, with the advent of industrialization and the spread of colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like bourgeois white women, Native peoples were relegated to an interior (and so-called degenerate) space portrayed as separate from and in opposition to the exterior (and so-called civilized) place of the settler colonist. Within this sphere of Indianness, that of the reservation “home,” Native peoples were tasked with becoming assimilated and civilized, or in other words, domesticated. A significant aspect of this process was the replacement of indigenous kinship networks with the model of the nuclear family.³⁰ Again, these efforts were undertaken in service of strengthening the economy of the nation-state and planting heteropatriarchy (as well as white supremacy) as firmly into the private realm of the reservation home as the public realm of settler colonialism. Likewise, the ways in which both the bourgeois home and the reservation became naturalized and privileged as sites of “safety” rather than as sites of segregation through the threat and imposition of violence also have strong similarities.

As I mentioned previously, the evolution of the reservation as a “safe space,” not unlike the bourgeois home, was accomplished by penalizing Native peoples who resisted confinement within. This provided a powerful incentive for internalizing (or at least not resisting) the naturalization of the reservation since being discovered “off the rez” could result in incarceration or even death. The same risks exist today and Native peoples find themselves subjected to the whims, laws, violence, and hegemonic ideologies of the U.S. nation-state if they reside or travel beyond the jurisdiction of their respective Native nations. Additionally, as my opening vignette illustrates, daring to be off the rez today carries the risk of another death -- the stripping away and denial of Native identity. That is, to venture beyond the designated locales of authentic Indianness marks the transgressor as inauthentically, or unrecognizably, Indian.

In the current historical moment consumed by neo-liberal policies of “recognizing” the Native, the complexity and significance of this situation must not be downplayed. In “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the `Politics of Recognition' in Canada,” Glen Coulthard theorizes the risks inherent in an indigenous utilization of the politics of recognition. First, Coulthard defines the politics of recognition “to refer to the now expansive range of recognitionbased models of liberal pluralism that seek to reconcile Indigenous claims to nationhood with Crown sovereignty.”³¹ Examples of this include using recognition as a means to affirming a nation-to-nation relationship between Native communities and their respective settler states, as a means to justifying the right of self-determination, as a means to enforce settler state treaty obligations, as a means to justify the right of self-government, etc. After establishing “that recognition has emerged as the hegemonic expression of self-determination within the indigenous rights movement in Canada,”³² Coulthard, recalling Fanon, then demonstrates the ways in which “the reproduction of a colonial structure of dominance like Canada's rests on its ability to entice Indigenous peoples to come to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and non-reciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the colonial-state and society.”³³ In other words, Coulthard teases out the complex ways in which the Canadian government persuades the indigenous peoples living within its boundaries to internalize the definitions and prescriptions of indigeneity the settler state has created in order to be recognized as indigenous, and thus, able to maneuver as such. Perhaps predictably, though, such a move, wherein which recognition is “granted” to an indigenous group by the settler state, “prefigures its failure to significantly modify, let alone transcend, the breadth of power at play in colonial relationships”³⁴ for it forces indigenous peoples to accept and rely upon the unequal power structures and colonial violence through which indigeneity was constructed by settler colonialism.

Irene Watson speaks of a similar dilemma in Australia and asks, most poetically, “When thinking of Aboriginal community, who are we? Or, in the suggestion of Indigenous to Australia, what thought predominates? Am I Aboriginal to myself; are we Aboriginal to ourselves? Or do we become part of the `collective spirit' of the nation state to become `our'

Australian Aborigine, then free to roam within the colonial spaces and identities as `Australia's Aborigines'?³⁵ Watson illuminates the inherent tension that exists between “being indigenous” on indigenous terms and “being indigenous” on the nation-state's terms. If, she suggests, we choose to identify with the indigeneity the settler state allows us, then we are rewarded with the “right” to roam the limited spaces of indigeneity that have been carved out for us. If, however, we choose to resist settler colonial ideologies, we are deprived of even that opportunity and find ourselves unrecognized by the state.

In “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the Discussion of Indigenous Nation-Building,” Mishuana Goeman brings this issue home to the United States and asks “How do we make Indigenous spaces that are not based on abstracting land and indigenous bodies into state spaces, while maintaining political vitality? How are the lived realities of indigenous peoples impacted by concepts of borders and territories that support the power of the nation-state?”³⁶ Although these questions and Goeman's theorizations will be discussed more fully in the concluding chapter of this project, I mention them here as well to highlight the extent to which land/territory/place are particularly intertwined with and shaped by the politics of recognition. For as Goeman suggests, “the need for Indigenous Nations to legitimate land claims in a Western court system creates a focus on `accumula[tions]' of past rather than a focus on a living land that is imagined and held in Indigenous philosophies. In other words, land claims argue from a place of precedence and must `prove' or legitimate the length of our occupation on the land, rather than the importance of land to is.”³⁷ I argue, then, that this politics of recognition has played an immense role in naturalizing the reservation and codifying the colonial spatialization of Native peoples. It has meant that, even as we recognize the reservation as a colonially constructed place of confinement, surveillance, and segregation, where biopolitical agendas are frequently unleashed, we are encouraged/persuaded/coerced (through threats of violence, death, incarceration, nonrecognition, etc.) to look toward the reservation as a place of safety and a place from which to make our indigenous claims, or at the very least, as a respite from colonial assault.

Thus, although the settler state stands firmly in the foreground of my discussion regarding the naturalization of the reservation as the space of authentic and proper Indianness, it is not alone in perpetuating such ideology. For a variety of different reasons, Native peoples too have been instrumental, if not in establishing the reservation as the privileged site of Native identity, then in preserving this hegemonic belief. Another poignant example of this is the evolution of the relationship between the Crow people and the reservation that I mentioned previously. Frederick Hoxie argues that by 1930 (and after roughly half a decade of reservationization) the Crow people who had originally resisted the reservation had developed a form of politics that mitigated the constraints of colonial spatialization. Their newly constructed political structure operated within the fixed boundaries of the reservation and did not challenge the authority of the

United States in order to secure their existence and to ease the weight of colonial oppression. Yet, this structure also served the Crow well on a number of occasions and was eventually embraced by a majority of the Crow people. Tellingly, in 1935, when the Crow were presented with the opportunity to abandon this form of politics by adopting the Indian Reorganization Act, the Crow people chose to reject the IRA and honor their existing political structure instead. Thus, over time and out of political necessity the Crow people began to embrace the structure of the reservation as part and parcel of their political formation.³⁸ Rather than continue to view the reservation as a hell from which they needed to escape, they chose to embrace the institution as a symbol of Crow nationhood and perseverance in the onslaught of colonialism. Such strategies and practices of indigenous nationhood are not unique to the Crow. They can be found across “Indian Country” and signal the degree to which the naturalization of the reservation continues and is, oftentimes, perpetuated by Native peoples.

The necessity of developing such strategies in efforts to dismantle and upset the settler colonial desire to eliminate the Native is clear. At times, and in certain contexts, this strategy is crucial to the survival of Native peoples and has, again, at times and in certain contexts, been successful in making indigenous land rights claims, obtaining federal and/or state recognition for Native peoples, lessening the reigns of settler colonialism, etc. However, as I intend to illustrate in my analysis of Title IX of the Violence Against Women Act, the risks that accompany utilizing such strategies are high and can even be deadly for Native peoples and Native nations.

The Violence Against Women Act

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a federal law “aimed at ending violence against women and remedying the laws and social practices that have fostered and justified the history of violence against women.”³⁹ The Act was first authorized in 1994 as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA), which was hailed by former President Clinton as “the toughest, largest, smartest Federal attack on crime in the history of our country.”⁴⁰ Some of the more substantial (and notorious) provisions of the VCCLEA included: providing for 100,000 new police officers, banning the manufacture of certain assault weapons, authorizing $9.7 billion to fund new prisons, expanding the Federal death penalty to cover approximately 60 new offenses, instituting the infamous “three-strikes” rule, eliminating financial support for inmates pursuing higher education, and providing $1.2 billion for more strident policing of undocumented peoples.⁴¹ The VAWA appeared as Title IV of the VCCLEA and allocated $1.6 billion dollars to “comprehensively address violence uniquely targeted at women and their children.”⁴²

Introduced by Senator Joseph Biden in 1991 and finally passed in August of 1994, the initial VAWA received nearly unanimous bi-partisan support and combined new federal criminal penalties with grant programs aimed at supporting state and local responses to violence against women.⁴³ Touted as the first federal acknowledgement of domestic violence and sexual assault as crimes, the Act particularly emphasized community-coordinated responses to combating violence. The reauthorization of the VAWA in 2000 and 2005 built upon the foundation established in 1994 but also expanded the definition of violence against women to include dating violence and stalking, created legal assistance programs for victim/survivors of violence, and established programs aimed at addressing particular communities, such as immigrant and indigenous women. In its current manifestation, which actually expired in 2011 and thus is currently, again, up for reauthorization, the VAWA focuses on the following areas: “enhancing judicial and law enforcement tools to combat violence against women (Title I); improving services for victims (Title II); services, protection, and justice for young victims of violence (Title III); strengthening America's families by preventing violence (Title IV); strengthening the healthcare system's response (Title V); housing opportunities and safety for battered women and children (Title VI); providing economic security for victims (Title VII); protection of battered and trafficked immigrants (Title VIII); and safety for Indian women (Title IX).”⁴⁴

Many argue that the VAWA has had a positive impact on the problem of violence against women. For example, the National Network to End Domestic Violence argues that the Act has made remarkable gains in the effort to deter domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking and even credits the 1994 and 2000 versions of the VAWA with reducing non-fatal, violent, intimate-partner victimizations of women by 49%.⁴⁵ There has also, however, been a strong critique of the VAWA, its implementation, and its effects. One of the most prominent concerns has been the legislation's ability to adequately address and serve women from varying ethnic, racial, national, sexual, and socioeconomic locations. For example, in her landmark essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Kimberley Crenshaw accuses the VAWA and its proponents of marginalizing and further perpetuating violence against women of color in the way in which gendered violence was made universal in order to gain support for addressing the issue at the legislative level. Crenshaw argues that early supporters such as then-Senator David Boren (D-OK) were able to “empathize with female victims of domestic violence only by looking past the plight of `other' women and by recognizing the familiar faces of their own.”⁴⁶ In other words, that violence against women was not acknowledged as a problem until it was argued that even white women experience violence further marginalizes any attention that might be directed toward the severity of violence against “other” women and, thus, effectively excludes these women from the benefits such legislation might incur. Furthermore, Crenshaw argues that “any authentic and sensitive attention to the experiences of Black and other minority women probably will continue to be regarded as jeopardizing the movement”⁴⁷ because it darkens the face of the seemingly authentic victim of violence - white womanhood.

Likewise, a number of scholars and activists have examined the ways in which the VAWA works to disenfranchise women of color through its institutionalization of the antiviolence movement, its reliance on criminal justice measures, and its disavowal of state violence. These critics argue that because the mainstream antiviolence movement increasingly relies on state and federal sources for funding (for example, those funds authorized under the VAWA), the shape and agenda of the movement itself has transitioned from working in the interest of women who have been victimized to working in the interest of the state. In the introduction to Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, the contributors to the text argue that mainstream antiviolence “approaches toward eradicating violence focus on working with the state rather than working against state violence. For example, mainstream antiviolence advocates often demand longer prison sentences for batterers and sex offenders as a frontline approach to stopping violence against women.”⁴⁸ Since the criminal justice system has historically been, and continues to be, oppressive toward communities of color in general and women of color in particular, the Incite! anthologists argue, “this strategy employed to stop violence has had the effect of increasing violence against women of color perpetuated by the state.”⁴⁹

In a statement jointly-produced by the Critical Resistance⁵⁰ and Incite! Women of Color Against Violence⁵¹ organizations, the impact of such strategies is fleshed out in five succinct points: (1) Law enforcement approaches to violence do not deter violence in the long term. For example, mandatory arrest laws have affected the rates at which women kill their abusers in selfdefense but they have not decreased the number of perpetrators who kill their victims; (2) Increased criminalization actually penalizes a significant number of women because it places them in closer contact with law enforcement agencies than ever before. For example, when undocumented women report occurrences of sexual and domestic violence, they often find themselves deported; (3) Despite the fact that prisons have been found ineffective in deterring rates of sexual assault and domestic violence, the antiviolence movement has contributed to the growth of the prison industrial complex which, over the last fifteen years, has incarcerated women of color at alarming rates; (4) Reliance on state funding has professionalized the antiviolence movement and divorced it from a community-driven, social justice agenda; and (5) Reliance on a criminal justice response has limited women's and communities' abilities to conceive of alternative antiviolence strategies. It has individualized violence and presented the state as the only solution for redress against violence.⁵²

Arguably, the 2005 reauthorization of the VAWA can be read as a partial response to the anti-racist, feminist critiques of the antiviolence movement that proliferated at the end of the twentieth century. In particular, it can be argued that Title IX - the Safety for Indian Women Title - was a direct attempt to address the relationship between violence and intersectionality as it pertains to Native women. As the following section will illustrate, Title IX received considerable support from a variety of organizations and activists. As a matter of fact, many of the Native activists that helped to build and shape the national and the indigenous anti-violence movement, as I explored in the previous chapter, were prominent in the development of Title IX. However, a critical analysis of Title IX also reveals that “as the antiviolence movement has attempted to become more inclusive, attempts at multicultural interventions against domestic violence have unwittingly strengthened white supremacy within the movement”⁵³ and perhaps, I would add, wittingly perpetuated the colonial spatialization practices that facilitate the biopolitical management and elimination of Native peoples.

Title IX - Safety for Indian Women

In 2003, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI)⁵⁴ created the NCAI Task Force on Violence Against Women to coordinate a nation-wide indigenous effort to end violence against Native women and to respond to Federal efforts to address this problem. On June 16 of

2003, the NCAI passed Resolution # PHX-03-034 - Support for the 2005 Reauthorization of the

Violence Against Women Act Including Enhancements for American Indian and Alaska Native Women - wherein which the NCAI's support for VAWA reauthorization, the NCAI Task Force, and other efforts to halt violence against indigenous women is memorialized.⁵⁵ More than simply support earlier manifestations of the VAWA, which mostly provide set-aside funding for tribal governments, however, the resolution also calls for amendments that have the potential to shift the balance of power between the Federal government and Native nations. Specifically, Resolution # PHX-03-034 voices support for “increasing the sentencing authority of Indian tribes in cases of domestic violence and sexual assault cases beyond one year and $5,000” and “increasing criminal authority to Indian tribes to prosecute non-Indian rapists and batterers.”⁵⁶

The need to articulate such demands arise from the “jurisdictional nightmare” that describes the intersection of Federal, state, and tribal jurisdiction over Indian peoples and lands. Although the almost overwhelming attention paid to this “maze of (in)justice” over the last decade or so suggests that the complexity and importance of this issue has already been established, it is significant that I briefly outline jurisdictional issues as they are intertwined with violence against Native women and colonial spatialization. Simply put, and as legal scholar and anti-violence activist Sarah Deer so aptly argues, “Due to a series of federal laws, tribal governments have lost jurisdiction over the vast majority of sexual violence that happens to Native American women.”⁵⁷ Although the body of such laws is immense, four stand out in their significance and long-term impact: the Major Crimes Act of 1885, Public Law 280 (1953), the

Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, and Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978).

In 1885, and the height of the reservation era, Congress drastically compromised Native sovereignty when it passed the Major Crimes Act (MCA). The MCA marked the first significant federal intrusion on tribal justice systems because it extended U.S. jurisdiction over Natives who committed certain “major” crimes against other Natives in Indian territory.⁵⁸ The reasoning behind this law is that Native peoples are incapable of dealing with such matters themselves. Notably, the MCA did not theoretically strip tribes of jurisdiction over these same crimes. Tribal and Federal jurisdiction remains concurrent. However, in practicality, Native peoples rarely pursue the prosecution of crimes such as murder and rape as the penalties they can assign to these transgressions, which will be examined in the discussion of the Indian Civil Rights Act momentarily, have also been drastically limited by the Federal government. The consequences of the MCA are numerous but of particular interest to the project at hand is that: (1) victim/survivors of serious violence in Indian country are forced to turn to federal law enforcement when reporting their assaults; (2) the Federal government rarely pursues the prosecution of such matters; and yet (3) this process more firmly establishes colonial control over indigenous peoples and Native lands. In other words, the MCA contributes to segregating and “othering” Native peoples, essentially marking them as “outside” the parameters of justice allowable to non-Indian U.S. citizens, while simultaneously placing that which occurs on the reservation under increased federal scrutiny and surveillance.

In 1953 Public Law 280 (PL 280) was passed to transfer criminal jurisdiction from the

Federal government to state governments in California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Alaska (which, as might be obvious, are states heavily populated with Native peoples). Other states were given the opportunity to assume such jurisdiction but Native nations were not consulted in the matter. PL 280 severely affected the resource distribution for law enforcement in PL 280 states. Even though tribes were divested of federal funding because it was assumed that the respective states would assume responsibility for law enforcement, “state[s] were not provided with any additional resources with which to enforce crimes in Indian country.”⁵⁹ In 1968, an amendment to PL 280 allowed states to retrocede from this arrangement but, again, did not give tribes the same opportunity. Since the retrocession provision, state governments have returned over 30 tribes to Federal jurisdiction, yet “about 23 percent of the reservation-based tribal population in the contiguous 48 States and all Alaska Natives fall under PL 280.”⁶⁰ Obviously, the transference of jurisdiction from Federal to state back to Federal in some areas, the singular transference from Federal to state in others, and no transference at all in some locations has resulted in significant jurisdictional confusion and uncertainty. Likewise, PL 280 tribes often argue that, like the Federal government, state governments control criminal proceedings but rarely respond to criminal occurrences committed against Indians and on Indian lands.⁶¹