The Lumbee are the largest tribe in North Carolina and pri-marily reside in Robeson County, which has made lists of the most dangerous counties nationwide.

Requirements: 200-500

417The Lumbee are the largest tribe in North Carolina and pri-marily reside in Robeson County, which has made lists of the most dangerous counties nationwide. Indigenous women are more likely to be murdered than any other racial group, wherever they live. This work explores violence against Natives and the dangers to Lumbee women in particular.Content Note: This commentary discusses traumatic topics, including rape and murder, which some may find distressing.Introduction In 2014, I was working as a school social worker at Lumberton Senior High School, the school I graduated from. I worked with a myriad of kids—those impacted by domestic violence, struggling in school, or who just needed a little extra support and guidance. There are students I worked with that I will never forget. One of those students is Marcey Blanks. She was a whirlwind of a girl, bright and witty and sharp-tongued, but also kind, empathetic, and thoughtful. She was brown-skinned, thin as a rake, with soft, brown, wavy hair and the biggest brown eyes I’d ever had the privilege of seeing. After I left my job in 2015, I often checked on Marcey on social media to see how she was doing. And in 2016, I remember exactly where I was when I got the news: Marcey had been brutally murdered. Once I learned more details—that she had been raped, that her home had been set on fire, that she had been stabbed 89 times, and that she managed to, after all of this, walk out of her home to a neigh-bor’s and name the person who did this, after which she died on his doorstep—I was even more horrified that such a thing could happen, let alone to someone I knew.Marcey’s story, in all of its horror, is unfortunately not unique. I host a podcast called The Red Justice Project with Chelsea T. Locklear, another Lumbee woman, and each week we cover the story of a different Indigenous person who has gone missing or been murdered, with a particular focus on cases in Robeson County, North Carolina, where the Lumbee Tribe is centered. Every story is horrible in its own way, but the stories are endless. Someone once asked us what we would do when we ran out of stories to tell from our home county; I realized in horror that we never will. This list is never-ending.North Carolina is home to eight state-recognized tribes, including my own Lumbee people. The Lumbee Tribe is the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, with more than 70,000 members, and North Carolina is home to more than 122,000 Indigenous people [1, 2]. Robeson County, where the Lumbee Tribe’s headquarters is located, has topped many statewide and national rankings as one of the most danger-ous counties to live in, and Lumberton, the county seat, has been named as one of the most dangerous cities in America [3, 4]. But for Native women living in the county, the reality is particularly dire. Indigenous women in the United States are 10 times more likely to be murdered than the national average and 84% have experienced violence in their lifetime [5]. Indigenous women are also the group most likely to be victims of sex trafficking, with 40% of all women who are sex trafficked in the nation identifying as Native American [6]. In my work on our podcast, people often ask us why. Why is this happening? Why is there this epidemic of violence against Indigenous women? I always respond that it is not an epidemic. Sarah Deer notes in her 2015 book The Beginning and End of Rape that the word epidemic “allow[s] society to absolve itself of blame…suggests that the problem is biologi-cal, that the problem originated independent of long-stand-ing oppression…suggests a short-term, isolated problem” [7]. The problems that Indigenous women face are neither short-term nor isolated. These were the same problems faced by their mothers and grandmothers before them, the same problems that their own daughters and granddaugh-ters face now.Violence Against Native Women: The BeginningWhen Christopher Columbus first landed his fateful ship in the “new world” on his voyage, one of the first acts of the Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in North Carolina Brittany HuntElectronically published November 8, 2021.Address correspondence to Dr. Brittany Hunt, 6936 Cascade Dream Ct, Huntersville, NC 28078 ([email protected]). N C Med J. 2021;82(6):417-419. ©2021 by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine and The Duke Endowment. All rights reserved.0029-2559/2021/82612

418settlers he brought with him was to start a sex slave trade of Indigenous girls. In the year 1500, Columbus wrote this to a friend in reference to Taino girls: “there are many deal-ers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand” [8]. Pocahontas, who many consider the most famous Native woman of all time, was just a child, 8 or 9 years old, when she met John Smith, and oral tradi-tions and other written records indicated that she was raped by the colonists in the area, that other Native children were routinely raped by colonists, and that Native women would offer themselves up to prevent this abuse [9]. Pocahontas died at age 20, the location of her remains unknown [9]. Sacajawea, who was used by the women’s suffrage move-ment as the image of women’s liberation and independence, has a similarly sad story: she was kidnapped as a child and sold into slave marriage at age 13 to a 34-year-old colonist, after which, at age 16, she was forced to accompany him and Lewis and Clark on their journey west. She died at age 25.The targeting of Indigenous women is not a new phe-nomenon, and certainly not an epidemic. Our girls and women have always been isolated, preyed upon, hunted. What is happening now nationwide, in North Carolina, and in Robeson County in particular, is “a fundamental result of colonialism, a history of violence reaching back centuries” [7] and that now reaches forward, seizing our mothers, daughters, sisters—and our Marceys. Despite this centuries-long assault on our women and girls, the matriarchy reigns and remains. Our women are still at the center of our cultures, our mothers are still the leaders in our households, our grandmothers are still the backbone of our families. A few years ago, my granddaddy expressed annoyance that we called their house “grandma’s house.” This was never intended as a slight, but as an ances-tral reminder that we are a matriarchal people, that property belongs to the women, just as all life springs from them. The colonizers knew upon arrival to Indigenous soil that women were revered, that we were leaders amongst our people, working and owning land and property [7]. For colo-nialism to work, this system had to be uprooted to mirror more closely the subjugation of European women, in order to justify the seizure of Indigenous land and labor from our women. And ultimately, though colonizer men have been the primary abusers, Indigenous men began joining in on the degradation of Indigenous women. Patriarchy and colonial behaviors have impacted us all, but none more than Native women, as they face threats from both within and outside of their communities.Violence in Robeson County ContinuesIn Robeson County in 2017, the bodies of three women—two Indigenous and one White but enmeshed in the Native community—were found. Rhonda Jones was found in a trash can, and the same day, just feet away, Kristin Bennett was found in an abandoned home in a television cabinet. A friend of theirs, Megan Oxendine, spoke to the news about their deaths. Weeks later, her body was found less than a mile from the others, beside an abandoned home [10]. The medi-cal examiner listed the causes of the three women’s deaths as “undetermined.” Two other women—Cynthia Jacobs and Abby Patterson—went missing from the area within weeks of these deaths [11].When asked by a reporter about information on missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) in the county, local sheriff Burnis Wilkins stated, “I wasn’t really 100% familiar with our cases until you actually brought it to my attention and wanted some statistics” [12]. What the sher-iff “wasn’t familiar with” are the stories we can’t forget, the murders that rip apart families, that traumatize communi-ties. They are the Marceys, Rhondas, Kristins, Megans, Cynthias, and Abbys, and they are not statistics to us. They are us. When we tell our stories on The Red Justice Project, they are not just cases. They are our people. Each mother or sister or friend of a victim we speak to, we share a special bond with. They share with us the most intimate and violent loss they have experienced. Marcey’s mother told me that after she learned of her murder, she wanted to go to Marcey immediately; she said, “I felt like if I could just get to her to touch her, hug her, she would be all right” [13]. She told us that she goes to Marcey’s grave every single day.Generational Trauma and HealingNative communities throughout the state, but the Lumbee community in particular, are marred by the collu-sion of colonial violence and historical trauma, defined as the “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations…which emanates from massive group trauma” [14]. Though in modern medicine the focus is often on the body and studying the quantifiable through Western sci-ence, there are other forms of science that are innate, immu-table, and ancestral to Indigenous peoples that are harder to name or measure. As Indigenous people, we do not just experience our own realities, but the realities of our commu-nities and of our ancestors. This aligns with the Indigenous concept of blood memory, which is a “common tribal value of multigenerational remembrance [that] runs directly counter to prevailing Western traits of individual achievement, lack of transgenerational memory, and transcendence of one’s genealogical fate and place of origin” [15].Though we seek neither to transcend our “genealogical fate” nor forsake our blood memories, there is a systemic unhealth prevalent in Indigenous communities through both direct and peripheral violence. What happens to my mother also happens to me. What happens to my sister also happens to me. What happens to my neighbor also happens to me. Indigenous healing is not individual, it is communal. How can I heal myself if my sister is in pain? How can my sister heal if she sees me suffering?

419There are many steps that we can take together toward healing. Currently, the Lumbee Tribe is being denied full fed-eral recognition. For us, this recognition would mean access to funding, services, and greater self-determination to create policy, health services, domestic violence services, and heal-ing modalities for our people. Though we have done much already, bureaucracy prevents us from doing more. Our bod-ies are being judicated through court systems that care little for our lives, and by sheriffs who know nothing of our sto-ries. Indigenous health needs to be managed by Indigenous peoples. Full federal recognition is one way to secure this.However, non-Natives need to take their place on this issue as well. Ninety-six percent of perpetrators of sexual violence against Indigenous women are non-Native [16]. More education on Indigenous people should be required in schools, including on their nations and societies pre-col-onization and the ways in which colonization has impacted them from 1492 to today. Rather than putting the focus on women preventing their own rape or murder, the onus needs to be placed on non-Native men and strategies they can take toward self-control and healing. Much violence can be pre-vented in this way, rather than taking the reactive approach of making it a women’s issue.Though there is much healing that needs to be done in Indigenous communities, our state and country have their own historical trauma that needs addressing. A country that began through so much violence, pain, and degradation cannot be sustainable for anyone—regardless of whether you are the ancestor of the colonized or of the colonizer. A wound comes whether you are the inflicted or the inflictor. How can you be healed if you are a creator of pain? White supremacy, racism, and colonialism, are a mar on us all. And no one knows this more than Indigenous women. Brittany Hunt, PhD director, Indigenous Ed, LLC, Lumberton, North Carolina.AcknowledgmentsI would like to acknowledge those who inspired this work: Marcey Blanks, Rhonda Jones, Kristin Bennett, Megan Oxendine, Cynthia Jacobs, and Abby Patterson, and the countless other Indigenous women and non-Indigenous women connected to Indigenous communities who have been marred by violence. This work is forever for you, in hopes that it will inspire others to work, too. Disclosure of interests. No interests were disclosed.References1. Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina (Lumbee Tribe). History & Culture: Recognition. Published 2019. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.lumbeetribe.com/history–culture2. NCPedia. American Indian tribes in North Carolina. Published 2005. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.ncpedia.org/tribes3. Spectrum News Staff. These 2 Carolina cities among the most dan-gerous in the US, study says. Spectrum News 1. Published August 26, 2017. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://spectrumlocal-news.com/nc/triad/news/2017/08/26/most-dangerous-cities-in-the-us-report-nc-sc4. Tribune Media Wire. 3 NC counties make list of top 30 ‘murder capitals’ in the U.S. Fox 8. Published February 29, 2016. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://myfox8.com/news/the-30-murder-capitals-in-the-u-s/5. Salam M. Native American Women Are Facing a Crisis. New York Times. Published April 12, 2019. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/native-american-wom-en-violence.html 6. NCAI Policy Research Center (NCAI). Human & Sex trafficking: Trends and Responses across Indian Country. Published Spring 2016. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.ncai.org/policy-research-center/research-data/prc-publications/TraffickingBrief.pdf7. Deer S. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. 3rd ed. University of Minnesota Press; 2015.8. Brockell G. Here are the Indigenous people Christopher Columbus and his men could not annihilate. The Washington Post. Published October 14, 2019. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/14/here-are-indigenous-people-christopher-columbus-his-men-could-not-annihilate/9. Schilling V. The True Story of Pocahontas: Historical Myths Ver-sus Sad Reality. Indian Media Network. Published September 8, 2017. Updated September 13, 2018. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/true-story-pocahontas-historical-myths-versus-sad-reality10. Futch M. How did these 3 Lumberton women die? The Fayetteville Observer. Published July 11, 2019. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.fayobserver.com/news/20190711/how-did-these-3-lumberton-women-die11. Burke D. Inside the tiny town where three women have died and two more gone missing in just six months. Mirror UK. Published No-vember 6, 2017. Updated November 7, 2017. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/inside-tiny-town-women-three-1147868912. Jones R. “There’s a Sickness in Robeson”: Families of Slain Na-tive Americans in N.C. want justice. Spectrum News 1. Published March 9, 2021. Updated March 11, 2021. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triangle-sandhills/news/2021/03/09/murdered-native-american-families-search-for-justice#13. Locklear C, Hunt B. Episode 11: Marcey Blanks . Red Justice Project. Published January 18, 2021. https://www.redjusticepodcast.com/listen-here/episode/4a13241f/episode-11-marcey-blanks14. Brave Heart MYH, Chase J, Elkins J, Altschul DB. Historical trauma among Indigenous peoples of the Americas: concepts, research, and clinical considerations. J Psychoactive Drugs. 2011;43(4): 282–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2011.62891315. Mithlo N. Blood memory and the arts: Indigenous genealo-gies and imagined truths. American Indian Culture and Re-search Journal. 2011;35(4):103–118. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.4.ch5u144q02746t4616. Indian Law Resource Center. Ending Violence Against Native Wom-en. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://indianlaw.org/issue/ending-violence-against-native-women

The Beginning and End of Rape Sarah DeerPublished by University of Minnesota PressDeer, S..The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.For additional information about this bookAccess provided by University of North Carolina @ Charlotte (7 Jan 2018 19:02 GMT)https://muse.jhu.edu/book/42560

16TwoWhat She Say It Be LawTribal Rape Law and Indigenous FeminismsThe peopLe of my naTion, the Mvskoke, have always gov-erned themselves pursuant to laws. Like most tribal nations, the Mvskoke people relied for millennia on sacred oral traditions and ceremonies both to establish and enforce legal standards. These laws were not written down. In fact, for many Native people, reduc-ing laws to writing weakened their power by limiting accessibility to a few and losing the value of rhythm and intonation. Europeans utterly failed to understand this kind of system. Seeing no judges, courtrooms, or attorneys, settlers assumed that Native people were without law. This assumption made it morally palatable to impose foreign laws upon Native people, and also facilitated the applica-tion of racial epithets such as “uncivilized” and “savage.” Starting in the early nineteenth century, federal Indian agents encouraged, cajoled, manipulated, and bribed Native people into reducing their laws to writing, while simultaneously mandating the development of an American- like system to replace tribal legal traditions. The earliest written laws of tribal nations thus provide fascinating case studies on how the clash of culture and ideas played out in every-day legal relationships.Mvskoke leaders started writing down laws much earlier than most other tribes. By the early nineteenth century, Mvskoke peo-ple were largely intermarried and intermingled with Scottish immi-grants. Federal officials encouraged and expected assimilation, and writing down laws (in English) was a central component of

17these efforts. Some of the earliest known Mvskoke written crim-inal laws date to 1825, when Chilly McIntosh, the son of a well- known Mvskoke chief, handwrote fifty- six criminal laws in English to satisfy the local Indian agent that the Mvskoke people were law- abiding. The thirty- fifth law clearly addresses gendered violence. While the crimes were not labeled with any particular title, it is safe to say that this is the first written Mvskoke rape law:And be it farther enacted if any person or persons should undertake to force a woman and did it by force, it shall be left to woman what punishment she should satisfied with to whip or pay what she say it be law.1Several interesting concepts emerge from this forty- three- word sen-tence, although the syntax is confusing and the word rape itself is never used. The word “force” (used twice) is an important clue that this passage describes a physical attack and the law clearly refers to women as victims (although it does not indicate the gender of perpetrators). There is a clear reference to corporal punishment (“whip or pay”)— which is consistent with observed Mvskoke law in practice in the early nineteenth century. Perhaps most remark-able component of this law is the last six words: “what she say it be law.” This phrase, suggesting a rape victim had legal standing to participate in sentencing decisions, is fundamentally inconsistent with Anglo- American rape law in the same time period.2For most of American legal history, rape was framed as a prop-erty crime perpetrated against men.3 In fact, the phrase “marital rape” was an oxymoron in American law until the early 1990s (mar-ried women had no legal right to deny sex to their husbands). In 1825, most state laws often required two eyewitnesses to convict a man for rape— a woman’s word alone could never be sufficient. In addition, settler women were not allowed to be attorneys, judges, or jurors, meaning there could literally be no female voice to “say the law.” Yet the 1825 Mvskoke law— in the same era— ends with the phrase “what she say it be law.” Somehow, despite the per-sistent effort and pressure to develop an American- style govern-ment and legal system, the Mvskoke law suggests a legal tradition that acknowledged the decision- making capacity of women. This does not mean the Mvskoke people were feminists in the modern

18sense of the word, but it does tell us the precolonial legal system likely operated with a fundamentally different worldview.The pressure to assimilate laws and governments continued (and continues today), and less than fifty years later, the Mvskoke rape law read as follows: “Be it enacted, That should any person be convicted of rape, he shall for the first offense receive fifty lashes, for the second offense he shall suffer death.”4 Several fundamen-tal changes are expressed in less than fifty years. Note that the gender- neutral 1867 law does not mention a victim at all. The voice of Mvskoke women appears to have been lost or at least eclipsed through the forced Americanization of the Mvskoke people.With Mvskoke law as a starting point, this chapter considers the relevance of precolonial responses to sexual violence in tribal nations by exploring general foundational structures and belief sys-tems about gender that existed prior to the imposition of foreign legal structures. This chapter will also consider the limitations of mainstream American feminism in developing solutions to violence against Native women and how Native women’s perspectives can be muted by the dominant discourse about patriarchy. This chapter closes by exploring the role of contemporary tribal jurists in docu-menting and enforcing tribal- specific gendered justice. Gender Equity in Traditional LawPatriarchy is largely a European import. Native women had spiri-tual, political, and economic power that European women did not enjoy. That power was based on a simple principle: women and chil-dren are not the property of men. I am guarded about pan- Indian essentialisms suggesting tribal nations were all “matriarchal” and therefore rape free— Plains Cree Métis scholar Emma LaRocque cautions that “it should not be assumed that matriarchies neces-sarily prevented men from exhibiting oppressive behavior toward women.”5 I often provide forty- five- to fifty- minute lectures on Native women and rape, and I have sometimes been guilty of over-generalizing and overromanticizing precolonial gender roles— if for no other reason than time constraints. Still, there are some common themes in tribal histories and epistemologies that serve as counterpoints to patriarchy. Women exercised power in ways that weren’t always readily recognized by a non- Native observer

19because they did not always perform tasks associated with Euro-pean leadership.Power should not be confused with pure equality. Tribal soci-eties were generally not gender neutral. In fact, gender was often explicitly prescribed in the division of duties, based on a dualistic scheme with a significant emphasis on balance. Often, this duality is presented in a reductive way (e.g., “The women farmed while the men hunted”). In reality, it would be more accurate to say “most women farmed” and “most men hunted”— there were always excep-tions based on personal abilities, ceremonial expectations, or the need to balance responsibilities.Exploring a particular tribal epistemology can illuminate some specific ways in which this gendered balance was achieved. In Mvskoke culture, “The balance of male and female principles per-meates all Creek thinking. The balances, therefore, involve the divi-sion of various powers, functions, and privileges.”6 This framework for gender can also be described as nonbinary complementary dualism, wherein binary gender lines are fluid without fixed boundaries. This is evidenced by the role that Two- Spirit or gender nonconforming people played. Sometimes a man would perform a woman’s role, and vice versa.In a gendered epistemology, all persons have valued roles and duties, which balance one another; “dualism embraces difference in principle, not as division but rather as complementarity.”7 It is a versatile description that continues “to offer exceptional sanctu-ary to an attitude about gender that cherishes a wide arena of per-sonal autonomy and freedom.”8 Women and men often had separate duties, but the separation took the form of horizontal distinctions rather than a vertical hierarchy of authority. The gender lines, as part of a creation story or cosmology, are set up to complement each other, to provide “equilibrium.”9 In some cosmologies, gendered identity is transcended by those with particular spiritual gifts.10Even the fundamental foundation for Native identity was women centered; many tribal kinship systems are organized around a matri-lineal clan system whereby a child’s primary identity is based on the mother. In matrilineal societies, women are often vested with the power to name the leaders of the clan who then execute the chosen laws of the people. Property was conveyed through women, and they often chose the leaders of their tribal councils. In some

20political structures, like that of the Haudenosaunne, women held “veto” power over decisions to go to war based on their willingness to provide food for warriors.Many traditional tribal gender laws have been lost or damaged through assimilation (particularly Christian assimilation). It is dif-ficult to re- create or reimagine how precolonial systems adjudicated rape, but there are clues in historical records that affirm the pres-ence of significant anti- rape sentiment in most tribal cultures. One of the most significant clues comes from tribal constructs of sexual autonomy and bodily integrity. In the Lakota culture, for example, Mark St. Pierre and Tilda Long Soldier write, “the woman owned her body and all the rights that went with it.”11 European settlers were fascinated and sometimes horrified by the sexual autonomy of Native women. Their journals and observations, especially those from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provide important (though often flawed) information about women’s sexuality in Native communities. In Europe and early America the legal system was used to limit, penalize, and punish sexual choices of women. Not so in tribal nations. In 1722 Diron D’Artaguiette, a French set-tler, wrote that young Native girls “are the mistresses of their own bodies” as though this were somehow a noteworthy observation.12 Many European settlers judged cultural values about women’s sex-uality as savage and primitive if not altogether inhuman. French Jesuits, who were the primary European contact for many tribal nations, were “baffled and sometimes horrified” by the sexual and political autonomy exhibited by indigenous women.13 Christian missionaries and federal agents used Native women’s autonomy as justification for conversion and assimilation. Native women who expressed and celebrated their sexuality had no place in mainstream America and were often shamed and marginalized. Many Europe-ans were alarmed by the powerful role played by Native women within their nations, and efforts were made to reduce the status of Native women through numerous means.14 Missionary records from throughout the continent indicate that many religious groups formally imposed severe consequences on Native women who dared exercise independence and sexual autonomy.15Likewise, Europeans were often fascinated by the anti- rape cul-tures they encountered, particularly when they discovered that Native men did not rape women war prisoners.16 For example,

21Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (the Harvard historian who coined the phrase “well- behaved women seldom make history”) writes that the Puritans were “amazed at the sexual restraint of Indian men, who never raped their captives.”17 Even Europeans who wrote dis-paragingly about Native people noted that Native people abhorred sexual violence. Brigadier General James Clinton of the Continental Army told his troops in 1779, “Bad as the savages are, they never vio-late the chastity of any women, their prisoners.”18 Another account comes from George Croghan, who testified about Indians in the Middle Atlantic colonies in the late eighteenth century: “I have known more than onest thire Councils, order men to be putt to Death for Committing Rapes, wh[ich] is a Crime they Despise.”19 Despite the proliferation of “captivity narratives” in the nineteenth century, which were framed with the intent to dehumanize the brut-ish behavior of Indians, there is very little historical documentation of Native men perpetrating rape against white women.Precolonial Responses to RapeThere is, of course, no database of stories or laws that we can con-sult to understand how tribal nations articulated and enforced rape laws. We do have anecdotal evidence that tribal nations took rape seriously enough that punishments in some regions included cor-poral punishment, banishment, and even the death penalty.20 Native women’s activists have documented the traditional response of tribal communities to violence against women.21 Ojibwe scholar Lisa Poupart explains:According to the oral traditions within our tribal communities, it is understood that prior to mass Euro- American invasion and influence, violence was virtually nonexistent in traditional Indian families and communities. The traditional spiritual world views that organized daily tribal life prohibited harm by individuals against other beings. To harm another being was akin to committing the same violation against the spirit world.22While my research is generally consistent with Poupart’s conclu-sion, I hesitate to claim that all tribal cultures were entirely 100 percent “rape free.” But the frequency of the crime was low, in part

22because of the immediate and severe consequences for disrupting balance in society. Evidence lies in both the experience of Native women prior to contact as well as the behavior of Native men, as recorded by European explorers, settlers, and traders.Historically, tribal nations, as sovereigns, exercised full juris-diction over crimes against women. Crimes such as rape, domestic violence, and child abuse may have been extremely rare, but when they did occur, tribal systems provided a powerful system of social checks and balances that held offenders accountable for their behav-ior.23 Unlike the American legal system, wherein victims of violent crime have historically had no voice in the criminal justice pro-cess,24 most indigenous legal systems were victim centered. Tribal governments strived to provide a sense of spiritual and emotional recovery from violent crime, by providing both material goods and spiritual sustenance designed to restore the victim to her previous place in life. Although no system is perfect, indigenous philoso-phies of justice generally provide more protection and healing to victims than the American system.25 Moreover, many “responses” to rape were incorporated naturally as part of the way in which people lived. There were political consequences as well. In Iroquois cul-ture, a man could not achieve a leadership position if he had ever raped a woman.26 As Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook- Lynn explains, “Men who caused stress in the community or risk to the survival of the tribe by dishonoring women were held accountable by the people. They could not carry the sacred pipe, nor could they hold positions of status.”27 Many of these principles need to be revital-ized and enforced.As tribes began to develop written laws in response to pres-sure from the U.S. government, it is possible that some of the val-ues that had been transmitted orally found their way into the early written laws. The Mvskoke law described at the beginning of this chapter is one such example. When compared to the European and early American laws on rape, which often punished women for the actions of rapists, the tribal response to sexual assault was compar-atively victim- centric and respectful of survivors.28

23American Rape LawNineteenth- century American rape laws, based in large part on the common law of England, treated women as subordinate, at best, or as chattel at worst.29 They were not intended to protect women as much as they were intended to control them, preserve chastity, and curtail their sexual independence. And as part of the colonial project, Europeans imposed their own expectations and standards for appropriate female sexuality on tribal people. In Spanish law, women were considered to be the legal subjects of their fathers, brothers, or closest male relative.30 Through the process of assim-ilation and acculturation, many of these European constructs of gender and sexuality have become incorporated into some contem-porary indigenous communities. Reclaiming an indigenous juris-prudence of rape, therefore, requires a reexamination of tribal con-ceptions of sexuality, independence, and autonomy. This is a topic that I discuss more thoroughly in chapter 8.The origins of sexual assault law in the American system devel-oped as an offshoot of property law.31 The traditional American legal paradigm of rape (a stranger attacking a virgin) did not address the experience of most women, as rape law placed women in the same category as inanimate property. Legal scholar Michelle Anderson has carefully studied these early paradigms, and has a described a culture which is fundamentally at odds with sexual autonomy:Historically, [Anglo- American] rape law raised unique procedural hurdles for rape victims that victims of other crimes did not have to surmount. Derived from English common law and applicable in most jurisdictions until the mid to late 1970s, these formal rules embodied clear presumptions against women who complained of having been raped. These rules included absolute exemptions from criminal lia-bility for men who raped their wives. They included requirements that the victim establish that she resisted her attacker to the utmost, freshly complained of having been raped and corroborated her testi-mony with other evidence. They included biased suppositions about victims who had previously engaged in sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Finally, they included special cautionary instructions read to the jury to warn them of the fallibility of the testimony of those who allege they have been raped.32

24Until the mid- twentieth century, most state systems only criminal-ized rape when the victim was a white woman and left indigenous women and other women of color with no recourse.At the same time, the colonial mind- set could not conceive of a legal wrong in raping a Native woman. As a result, Native women were devalued and debased, and their abuse was seen as being outside the law.33 In a 1909 congressional debate regarding punish-ments for perpetrators of sexual assault against Native women, U.S. Representative George W. Norris of Nebraska stated on the floor of the House of Representatives, “the morals of Indian women are not always as high as those of a white woman and consequently the punishment should be lighter against her.”34 Accordingly, in 1968, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (ruling on an Arizona case) upheld a law that imposed a harsher penalty for the rape of a non- Indian woman than for that of an Indian woman,35 presumably because Congress viewed Native women as immoral and therefore unworthy of protection.36 While this particular legal distinction is no longer on the books, the legacy of official disparate treatment is apparent from the statistics we see today.Advancing Native FeminismsStarting in the mid- to late twentieth century, Native women activ-ists sometimes clashed with liberal feminists on the issue of “equal-ity.” Tribal cultural values often do not strive for the utopian ideals of pure equality in the form of a gender- neutral society. This con-temporary tension between Native and non- Native feminists can be traced back to the “clash” between Europeans and Indians during colonial expansion over the two groups’ fundamentally different epistemological views on the nature of gender and the appropriate roles of women in society.37 Today’s mainstream feminist theories about rape are often responding to a culture grounded in a patri-archy of European origin. When tribal governments respond to gendered violence, though, they are responding to a phenomenon fully entrenched in abusive colonial power. Thus, the many solu-tions proposed by mainstream feminists, who focus on patriarchy as the cause of gendered violence, are often a poor match for the responses of tribal societies.

25Skeptics may contend that whatever matrilineal/matrilocal aspects of Native society existed have largely been abandoned or lost as a result of hegemony and assimilation, and it is merely hope-ful idealism to suggest we could rekindle concepts of precolonial gender balance. In response to that concern, this chapter concludes by highlighting a few published tribal court decisions that offer evi-dence that women- centered values and practices still exist, in some form, in some of today’s tribal legal systems. Such cases demon-strate that the effort to sustain and revitalize precolonial gender norms is not merely an academic exercise. Reviewing these cases can illuminate tribal courts as one avenue of confirming or rees-tablishing respect for women in contemporary tribal communities. Many tribal judges have, at least from outward appearances, based their legal analysis on standards established by American common law. What I have highlighted are cases in which tribal jurists have resisted this patriarchal tradition and tapped into unique tribal con-ceptions of gender to resolve disputes.Contemporary tribal court cases addressing gender issues demonstrate a unique tribal perspective or way of thinking about legal cases dealing with gender that is based on tribal customs and traditions. The cases in this section focus on matrilineal clans, family law, criminal law, and property. Cases dealing with child custody, divorce, and sexual assault exemplify these principles of gender equity. These cases are not presented as tribal feminism in action but rather as acknowledgment of gendered law that could be explored further in the efforts to intervene in entrenched gen-dered violence.Kinship Circles: Women at the CenterMatrilineal descent may be one of the salient gender characteristics that has survived over the centuries in some communities. Many Native people may not know much about their language or preco-lonial government structures, but still retain a strong connection to their clan and matrilineal ancestry. The following tribal court cases demonstrate that clan identity is still relevant enough to appear as a central focal point in some tribal judiciaries. If one is using a strictly Western lens, some of these custody/kinship cases may look like a

26preference for women, but only if one characterizes gendered analy-sis as centered on rights as opposed to responsibilities.Hepler v. Perkins is a 1986 child custody decision from the Sitka Community Association Tribal Court in Alaska.38 The case ulti-mately turns on a Tlingit matrilineal society and values based on the mother’s clan responsibilities. In Hepler, a Tlingit mother from Sitka attempted to regain custody of her child from the non- Indian father and grandparents. Both mother and child were Sitka tribal members. The descriptions of familial and clan relationships are distinctly those of the Sitka Tribe and are based on the role of moth-ers within the Sitka community. The mother and child were living away from the tribal community when the paternal grandparents went to the state of Washington to gain custody of the child. The mother asked the Tribal Court of the Sitka Community Association to rule on whether under customary tribal law the tribe continued to assume responsibility for her child even when she and her child were away from Sitka. The Tribal Court of Sitka referred the case to the Court of Elders to rule on this important issue of clan juris-diction over children of female members.The Court of Elders found thatchildren of female members of a clan are children of the clan regard-less of where or under what circumstances they may be found. Clan membership does not wash off, nor can such membership be removed by any force, or any distance, or over time. Even in death clan membership continues, and in re- birth is it renewed.39Based on the tribal custom of female clan membership and their responsibility to care for children, the Tribal Court decided that it had inherent authority to protect the clan relationship, even when a child was not currently living within the tribal territory.The Sitka case demonstrates the continued relevance of matri-lineal descent, which is intertwined with the power Sitka women have in the tribal community. In a matrilineal society, clan member-ship is determined through the mother. As described by the elders, clan membership does not “wash off” and is not diluted by dis-tance. The court ruled in favor of the Indian mother, based not on an assumption that the mother was a more nurturing or effective

27parent but based rather on Sitka values about clan membership and clan responsibility for children.In the Matter of JJS is a 1983 adoption case from the Navajo Nation with a similar acknowledgment of clan identity.40 The District Court of Window Rock in the Navajo Nation located in northern Arizona made a decision to grant custody of a neglected child to the moth-er’s extended family. After considering Navajo customary law, the court awarded custody of the neglected child to the maternal rel-atives, based on the principle that “the Navajo view of the rela-tionship of children to parents is not one of a simple parent and child relationship, but an entire pattern of expectation and desir-able action surrounding children.”41 There is a distinct relation-ship between Navajo children and their parents based on recipro-cal expectations and relations. Children are highly valued in Navajo society as “an integral part of a functioning self- reinforcing and protecting group.”42 This group consists of a large extended family based on matrilineal society. A child can be adopted by the extended family for an indeterminate amount of time in order to retain the family and clan ties. The entire extended family is expected to care for the child as a natural part of community and clan obligations.43Instead of using federal law to decide the case, the court relied on Navajo tradition that dictates the importance of the extended family in raising a child. The bonds between children and grand-parents are extremely important, and the court reflected these val-ues by allowing the child to stay with his or her extended family.The Navajo Nation Supreme Court has also infused contempo-rary divorce law with traditional gender norms. One example is the 1997 case of Naize v. Naize in which the court ordered that the hus-band pay alimony and attorney’s fees to the wife based on Navajo custom and tradition, which dictates that you “do not throw your family away.”44 In exploring these obligations, the court noted that in traditional Navajo marriage, the husband moves into the wife’s home upon marriage, and the joint efforts of the man and woman work to benefit the family. Moreover, the court concluded:If the marriage does not survive, customary law directs the man to leave with his personal possessions (including his horse and riding gear, clothes, and religious items) and the rest of the marital property

28stays with the wife and children at their residence for their support and maintenance. Whatever gains the marital property generate[s] goes to support the wife and children and to a lesser extent the wife’s close relatives.45With these words, the court upheld the wife’s request for spousal maintenance. The court decided to grant spousal support to the female divorcée based on Navajo customary law that indicates that the marital home, all possessions within, and the children belong to the women. The ex- wife’s request for attorney fees was also upheld.However, the Navajo Supreme Court reversed one aspect of the maintenance decision of the lower court, which ordered the ex- husband to provide wood and coal to his ex- wife for the remainder of her life. The Supreme Court referenced another Navajo custom in reversing this decree, noting that divorce should have “finality,” and a lifetime obligation was inconsistent with this tradition. Cus-tomary law dictated that to restore balance and harmony after the divorce, each party should return to his or her own home and leave the other person alone. In this case, the Navajo court relied entirely on Navajo customary law and traditions regarding the position of women within Navajo society.In 1993 the Tribal Court of Appeals for the Sicangu Lakota (Rose-bud Sioux) Tribe in South Dakota carefully considered the role of gender imbalance in a child custody case captioned Spotted Tail v. Spotted Tail.46 The court reviewed a custody decree in a domestic violence case and concluded that the trial court correctly awarded custody to the mother in a divorce case. The mother in this case was apparently accused of abandoning her children and thus of being unfit for custody. However, the court based its decision on the welfare of the children, which it ruled should never be subser-vient to the interests of the parents. In this case, the mother had to flee from the abuse of her children’s father. She tried to make contact with her children, but her husband denied her access and demonstrated a pattern of dominion and vengeance over both the children and the mother.The tribal court put the interests of the children first, instead of focusing on alleged shortcomings of the parents. Despite the fact that the mother had not been able to parent for several years, the court considered how domestic violence affected her access to the

29children. Domestic violence cases are especially challenging for mothers who have suffered abuse at the hands of their partners, because judges often unfairly consider the mothers to be a threat to their children. But in Spotted Tail, the court noted that the evi-dence “reveals a father who was domineering, abusive, and revenge-ful, who seemed bent on keeping the children away from their nat-ural mother.”47 This case alludes to the special place children and women hold within most tribal communities. Children’s interests are of primary concern to the tribe, because they represent future generations and the continuation of the tribal community.Contemporary Accountability: Rape in Tribal CourtTribal courts have also considered gender norms in the context of rape cases. In Winnebago Tribe of Neb. v. Hugh Bigfire (1998), the Win-nebago Supreme Court was asked to use the American concept of “equal protection” in a sexual assault case in which the tribal code differentiated between men and women. The male defendants argued that men and women should be treated equally under the law. The court rejected this argument, explaining thatunder traditional Winnebago customary law, gender differences com-monly were drawn for the punishment of offenses related to sexual misconduct because of the natural biological differences in this area between the sexes, the different consequences of misconduct for men and women, and different roles ascribed by the tribal tradition to men and women (without creating any hierarchy or cross- gender disrespect). . . . Ho- Chunk tradition recognizes and respects different roles for males and females in the Winnebago Tribe, and particularly, tolerates and encourages different responses to sexual misconduct for men and women.48After considering research into the tribal gender values through consultation with tribal members, elders, and research on Ho- Chunk customary law, the Winnebago Supreme Court concluded that gender differences constitute a natural part of Ho- Chunk life, and that men and women have different roles to provide for each other in relationships. The equal protection claims failed because the charges against the males made them more accountable, which

30coincided with traditional male roles of respecting women within the community.49Fort Peck v. Martell (2000) is another tribal court case that involves interpreting tribal rape law.50 The defendant, Martell, coerced a young girl to leave the reservation with him by promising her drugs and alcohol, and then he raped her outside tribal territorial jurisdic-tion. The defendant argued that the crime took place off- reservation (in Havre, Montana), thus falling outside the jurisdiction of the tribal court. The Fort Peck Court of Appeals ruled that key elements of the crime took place on the reservation, namely, the “coercive methodology” used by the defendant. This is an innovative analy-sis of the crime, framing rape as a series of actions for which the perpetrator should be held accountable, a ruling that reflects an understanding of rape that is typically absent from American law.Conclusion: Reclaiming Indigenous FeminismsThe tribal cases in this chapter suggest that some contemporary tribal courts are seeking to address gender issues in a distinctly indigenous way. By reclaiming their own tribal perspectives on gender, they are engaging in a unique ethic of decolonization— an ethic that balances traditional views on morality with contemporary needs and problems. Of course, tribal courts are not the only tribal entities that continue to consider how precolonial conceptions of gender can inform contemporary issues. Tribal courts are, however, the living manifestation of tribal law, and the fact that women’s roles are respected and valued is indicative of a larger movement to stop violence.Analyzing the 1825 Mvskoke law is a useful exercise because it illuminates uniquely Mvskoke values that can help shape contem-porary tribal rape law. While the actual substance of the law has little applicability today, it is through these traditions that tribal nations have the opportunity to revisit traditional gender roles and determine how the values of protecting women and holding perpe-trators accountable have relevance for today’s tribal laws.

Indigenous feminismsWeek 5: September 21 Create with Canva!/!#9/24/23, 7:39 PMPage 1 of 1

The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, LorettaSaunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty Simpson, Audra . Theory & Event ; Baltimore  Vol. 19, Iss. 4,  (2016): N_A. ProQuest document link ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, Iexamine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder ofLoretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public thatdenied an historic and political relationship between Indigenous women’s death and settler governance. The paperargues that in spite of this denial, these deaths worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life ofsettler sovereignty. FULL TEXT   Headnote Abstract This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, Iexamine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder ofLoretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public thatdenied an historic and political relationship between Indigenous women’s death and settler governance. The paperargues that in spite of this denial, these deaths worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life ofsettler sovereignty. This article makes two very simple arguments: one about settler statecraft, and the other about settler imperative.First: Canada requires the death and so called “disappearance” of Indigenous women in order to secure itssovereignty.1 Two: that this sovereign death drive then requires that we think about the ways in which we imaginenot only nations and states but what counts as governance itself. Underpinning these arguments is a crucialpremise: in spite of the innocence of the story that Canada likes to tell about itself, that it is a place of immigrantand settler founding, that in this, it is a place that somehow escapes the ugliness of history, that it is a place that isnot like the place below it, across that border. Canada is not like that place for many reasons2 but it is especiallyexceptional now, because it apologized, it stood in the face of its history, it “reconciles” the violence of the pastwith its present and so, presumably, with this acknowledgment of wrongdoing, may move on. These emotionalgestures, registered at an institutionalized, state level are undermined by an extractive and simultaneouslymurderous state of affairs. And, in spite of those present-day discourses from Canadian political scientists andpolicy makers that imagine a process of equality through the space afforded to Indigenous political orders as the”third order of government”, the evidence suggests that Canada is quite simply, a settler society whosemulticultural, liberal and democratic structure and performance of governance seeks an ongoing “settling” of thisland. The process of settlement is definitely contra equality. I will speak more of this evidence shortly. This settlingthus is not innocent – it is dispossession, the taking of Indigenous lands and it is not over, it is ongoing. It is killingNative women3 in order to do so and has historically done this to do so. It is this killing that allows me to alsoqualify the governance project as gendered and murderous. PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 1 of 17

Relatedly, Jodi Byrd’s Transit of Empire4 structures its intervention among two methodological axes: one of”cacophony” the other of “transit.” It is through these axes that history is known, possibility is made and differenceis rendered. With “cacophony” you have the possibility of multiple, sometimes competing and contestorynarratives of truth and with this, possibility as well. But with that multiplicity, also the riot of noise that requires anear, and a decipherment, an audibility but perhaps a willingness to listen. With these two axis/methodologicalmodalities introduced to us we see her analytic commitments unfold, Indigeneity she argues operates as a transit,an emptying nodal point, or circuit, that allows for empire to move, geographically, politically, hermeneutically. Withthis, Indigeneity is moved well beyond the body and into a global heuristic. “Cacophony” more than acknowledges,in a thin way, the ways in which force structures the multiplicity of voices and truths that emerge out of the transitof this force, it privileges the lives of multiple narratives and invites us to listen closely for those that may matter tous and remain unacknowledged. In all of the acoustic mess of settlement, there is a clarity of one trumpeting discourse and that is of ‘the state’ andhere I want to ground Byrd’s transit in flesh, as the force that she describes and analyzes through texts, I willdemonstrate, moves through bodies, through flesh. The state that I seek to name has a character, it has a malecharacter, it is more than likely white, or aspiring to an unmarked center of whiteness, and definitelyheteropatriarchal. I say heteropatriarchal because it serves the interests of what is understood now as”straightness” or heterosexuality and patriarchy, the rule by men.5 As well, it seeks to destroy what is not. Thestate does so with a death drive to eliminate, contain, hide and in other ways “disappear” what fundamentallychallenges is legitimacy: Indigenous political orders. And here is the rub, Indigenous political orders are quitesimply, first, are prior to the project of founding, of settling, and as such continue to point, in their persistence andvigor, to the failure of the settler project to eliminate them,6 and yet are subjects of dispossession, of removal, buttheir polities serve as alternative forms of legitimacy and sovereignties to that of the settler state. Settler states do not narrate themselves in the following manner: “as settler states we are: founded upon Nativedispossession, outright and unambiguous enslavement, we are tethered to capitalist modes of production thatallow for the deep social and economic differences that takes the shape in the contemporary of “unequal” socialrelations. We now seek to repair these unequal social relations through invigorated forms of economic liberalismthat further dispossess and some would say consensually enslave those who do not own their means ofproduction or opt out or fall out of this form of economic life.” More often than not, and here I am thinking of theUS (in its cagey political project), Australia and Canada fancy themselves as “multicultural, democratic,economically liberal,” and committed to free trade among nations and sometimes, social policies that allow forforms of historical redress that correct or attempt to repair the fundamental and un-narratable violences that bringthem into being. Their histories do not live fully within the present, do not enter into a cacophony of discourses, butinstead take the form of supposedly good policy and good intentions, liberal, settler governance. Those goodpolicies and intentions perform a kind of historical reckoning, but through Truth and Reconciliation commissions,discourses of “healing”, Apologies – in general, the performance of empathetic, remorseful, and fleetingly sorrowfulstates. But states that are built upon violence and still act violently, either at a bureaucratic level, at an economiclevel (as we see saw with the former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s relentless drive to extract from land),7 orthrough a violent indifference – which we saw as well with that governments unwillingness to launch an inquiry intothe Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW). This was an unwillingness that is absolutely of a piece with Harper’s August 19, 2014 statement that the problemof murdered and missing Native women should be understood as a “crime” (rather than sociology).8 As a crime itappears to have no context no structure animating it, no materiality besides a legal transgression – thus theappearance of death after a murderous act, with a perpetrator, a victim and a clear and punishable transgressionPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 2 of 17

of a moral and legal code. This is an individuated, judiciable act – justice can be served. But Harper uttered that asthe bodies aggregated, and became something sturdy, something apparent, something hard to ignore, acacophony of death, of grief and of outrage. Harper said this even though this density of native women’s bodies,this aggregate of grief has been called a “phenomenon” of such statistical significance that it warrants reports,warrants explanation. And yet in response to this phenomenon, sociological fact or crime, Stephen Harper repliedto Peter Mansbridge’s query on need for a national inquiry in December, 2014, with “… it isn’t really high on ourradar, to be honest.”9 This specificity of the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) is of apiece with the diffuse forms of violence that constitute a state: the intentions, the feelings, the capacities of itscitizens, who can also, as we saw in the case of Loretta Saunders, and so many more, kill. States do not alwayshave to kill; its citizens can do that for it. How do the subjects of such states reach for life in the face of this death? How do they not lose themselves in thecacophony? What does this speak of for the future? I will consider two cases that stretch beyond a simple,monologic story of governmental sorrow, abandonment and ineptitude and into an opening into the ways we thinkabout citizenships or publics, particularly the way they may be in active antagonism with the subjected, with thosethat are being made vulnerable. The arc of this article will be the following: bodies, sovereignty and what I see asthe necessity of pedagogical practices of thoughtful antagonism and “contention” not “reconciliation.” Bodies In December 2012, Theresa Spence announced that she would stop eating until the Prime Minister of Canada andthe Governor General of Canada – the official representative of the Crown, met with her to discuss treaties, todiscuss the deplorable conditions of life in her community as well as the broader and also deplorable conditions oflife in the North. Each of these men, as the embodiments of states, she said, had a hand in suffering, in the failureto meet their historic obligations to the land and the people upon the land who were living in contaminatedconditions, were without clean water and proper housing, in legendarily cold and bitter winters. She described thisConservative political party in power as particularly “aggressive” and the Prime Minister Stephen Harper asexceptional in his willingness to withdraw the care and compassion that is supposed to mark a 21st centuryliberal, democratic state. As with all spectacularized political cases, things were not what they seemed. The Hunger Strike was not a hungerstrike in a strict sense of the term, and to be fair, which many were not at the time, a hunger strike under conditionsof ongoing death deserve more interpretive flexibility than Theresa Spence or any indigenous or racialized womanin Canada would or could be afforded in those moments. But to continue with my other point, this was not ahunger strike in a “classic” sense – it was rendered a “soft” hunger strike. And as such we read in endlessnewspaper articles, blog posts, vicious comments sections, in twitter flame wars and heard on TV.10 We heard incomparative terms that her campaign did not compare to the strike of Bobby Sands, or other, “successful” strikes -for example, the strikers at Guantanamo, who have had to be force fed, hers did not compare to these otherdeclarations of a willingness to die because these other strikes nearly ended in death, or in fact, ended in death.She was drinking fish broth twice a day, and so, was “fudging” things (so to speak). And in fact, you would thinkshe was actually eating fudge, as irate Canadians “weighed in” continuously on her insincerity, her avarice, herbody, and in particular, her fat. Yet as the hours turned into days and the days turned into weeks, peoplecaravanned to her camp across from Parliament to assemble around her, to offer strength to her, to visit, – to praywith her. They did not care if she drank fish broth twice a day. In fact, they prayed for her continued life, and theycelebrated her fortitude. Of this the Anishnaabe scholar Leanne Simpson argued in her crucial piece “Fish Brothand Fasting”: PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 3 of 17

We protect the faster. We do these things because we know that through her physical sacrifice she is closer to theSpiritual world than we are. We do these things because she is sacrificing for us and because it is the kind,compassionate thing to do. We do these things because it is our job to respect her self-determination as anAnishinaabekwe – this is the most basic building block of Anishinaabeg sovereignty and governance. We respecther sovereignty over her body and her mind. We do not act like we know better than her.11 Out of respect for her action and for her sovereignty, other Indigenous people stopped eating in solidarity, allrepeating her “demand” to meet with the PM, to have the Treaties upheld, to make something happen in agovernmental storm of complete and total indifference to the life of land and people in Canada. This indifferencehas a life of its own, of course, and its clearest embodiment and manifestation, Stephen Harper, sowed his ownroots as a chief policy analyst for the Reform party in 1987 – a party that was resolutely opposed to any form ofindigenous rights that was not based on the rights of the individual to acquire and accumulate property. This wayof thinking about rights converted historic agreements signed between their country – Canada – and First Nations,what are in fact, treaties, to be in fact, “race-based” forms of recognition that were not tenable with the idea ofequality-as-sameness that his particular political party advocated for. Hence, Harper’s immediate shelving of theKelowna Accord upon coming into office. This is a gloss on a deeper history of reform/alliance party politics thattake the form of conservative skepticism (and here I am being generous) towards Indigenous peoples in Canada,but it is enough to say for now that the intellectual and political project of neoliberal capital accumulation thatmarked Harper’s ascent to the position of PM is what Theresa Spence walked in to. And in this time of aggressivemoves into soil and subsurface soil, of governmental indifference if not abandonment, she stopped eating. Here I want to gender this argument and move to her body. Theresa Spence’s appearance, her fleshy appearance,was itself a site of ire by commentators on-line, in twitter flame wars, and in print journalism. She was too fat! Weheard in different ways, over and over again, to be sincere, to be what she was supposed to be, which was a personin starvation. Yet her “excess” flesh, flesh that exceeds the western, normative Body Mass Index (BMI) of under 25,itself defies a logic of genocide and in this, settler domination. Why this link between fat, her fat in particular, and aresistance or refusal of domination? Because what she is required to do, with or without the starvation, is die. Infact, her very life, like the lives of all Indian women in Canada is an anomaly because since the 1870s they havebeen legally mandated to disappear, in various forms – either through the Indian Act’s previous instantiation ofVictorian marriage rules whereby an Indian woman who married a non-Indian man lost her Indian status (her legalrights based identity) and as such her right to reside on her reserve. With this legal casting out was the casting outas well of the possibility of transmitting that status to her children, a loss as well of governmental power withIndigenous governance itself, the political form that her body and mind signified. Here I want to use an example to demonstrate this argument about symbolization, Indigenous political orders andsettler governance. In the case of Iroquois or Haudenosaunee peoples (the peoples who signal North America’sfirst “new world” democracy) this move to make Indian women white, to remove their status as Indians was a blowto the knees, if not a strangulation of Indigenous governance and political order, as Iroquois women appointedChiefs, held property, counseled chiefs and de-horned them if necessary (removed them from their position ofChief). They divorced their men by placing their belongings outside of the Longhouse. They were the inverse of thesettler colonial woman, they had legally mandated authority and power, and so, they represented an alternativepolitical order to that which was in play or was starting to be in play in the late 19th Century. They embodied andsignaled something radically different to Euro Canadian governance and this meant that part of dispossession,and settler possession meant that coercive and modifying sometimes killing power had to target their bodies.Because as with all bodies, these bodies were more than just “flesh” – these were and are sign systems andsymbols that could effect and affect political life. So they had to be killed, or, at the very least subjected becausewhat they were signaling or symbolizing was a direct threat to settlement. PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 4 of 17

Now I want to emphasize that the technique of elimination that I am emphasizing here is legal and the time that Iam thinking of is the mid and late 19th Century, when the legal work of the Indian Act went into play and marriagerendered Indian women the property of their husbands. As such if Indian women “married out” they weredisappeared into a white, settler body politic through a limited enfranchisement (here I say “limited” because asnew white women and they would not vote in Manitoba until 1918 and Quebec by 1940). Nonetheless, when theirIndigenous political order was overlaid by the Indian Act and specifically its gendered rules recognizing only someforms of marriage, defining then, a notion of out-marriage and the simultaneous imposition of patrilineal descent.At that moment we see a white, heteropatriarchal and white setter sovereignty ascend and show us its face. Itdoes so through the work that it does with this legal move to dispossess people of land, of territory, to killtraditional governance forms and in the Haudenosaunee (and other Indigenous) cases, supplant traditionalIndigenous governance, sovereignty and political life. This was achieved through the imposition of Federal andstate law in particular legislative moments12 but also through slow processes of forced geographic removals,assimilation projects and citizenship itself. The move to patrilineal/patriarchal governance in Indian territories wasa legal femicide of a sort – but not of fleshy bodies, of political form, as women are the political form of the IroquoisConfederacy. Yet, it is this very instrument of Indian women’s legal death or redefinition as subjects of white sovereignty, thatmakes Theresa Spence a “Chief.” An elected, Indian Act “Chief,” 136 years after the Act is imposed on Indians inCanada and 82 years after her Cree trapping community of Attawapiskat in Northern Ontario, enters into Treatywith Canada – Treaty 9 – this is 1930. They are among to the last to sign on, or be added to this Treaty. At that pointthis small “hunting band”, one that lays at the mouth of James Bay, an important stopping point for travelers,fishermen and hunters, was brought into the legal life of an emergent state. Within 82 years the broader politicalorder of “Cree” in James Bay (who are in both what is now Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec) have suffered atleast one serious famine at the turn of the century due to beaver pelt over hunting, have resisted and then enduredthe construction of a hydro-electric dam in 1971 (for Quebec) have then Treated again in 1975 (JBNQA).13 It wasat that time that Mathew Coon-Come argued, “Under this Agreement… [we were] promised compensation, schools,social services, health care, sanitation, housing, employment and training. We were also assured that our huntersand trappers would be able to continue their traditional way of life. As with other Indian treaties, many importantcommitments have not been honoured.”14 What appeared to be an exorbitant payment for their water at that timewas actually paltry – as they cannot fish because of methylmercury poisoning, suffer obesity because of thesedentarization required of their forced relocation and reservationization, and then had to contest with every bit ofenergy imaginable, with a Public Relations firm in tow, a second hydroelectric project “Great Whale” (in 1992),which was to provide energy to sell to the United States. Theresa Spence’s people and community are literally, cousins to all this,15 and seem to suffer even more, outsideof recent Treaty and Provincial payments, it is as if they are outside of time, they suffered the same famines astheir kin in Quebec, and live in what all accounts, sounds like a surreal, federally recognized zone of simultaneousemergency and abandonment. Spence has been on Council since 2010, there have been three states of emergencydeclared since 2009 because of flooding, because the houses are in such disrepair they are uninhabitable, becauseof sewage back up, because these conditions are not survivable anywhere but especially so in subzerotemperatures. Here from Indian Affairs: “”only 46 of Attawapiskat’s 316 housing units are considered adequate,while another 146 need major work and 122 are placement.16 Further to this, Aboriginal and Northern Affairsrepresentative revealed that of the 316 homes, 85 percent are “unfit for human habitation” 17 The Canadian Press -where they have alighted upon Attawapiskat – have zoned in on federal transfers to the community, totaling inevery year, 31 million dollars, and requiring forensic auditing on where the money has gone – transfers in theshadow of a De Beers Victor diamond mine that starting extracting from the land next to Attawapiskat in 2009 -PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 5 of 17

something they have since protested vigorously, pointing to problems with a community consultation process andthe signing a 2005 Impact Benefit Agreement (IBA), negotiated in secrecy, that did not result in housing, betterhealth care services, jobs and improved recreation facilities for the youth.18 Shiri Pasternak has argued in hermeticulous analysis of the fiscal warfare against First Nations people and the case of Attawapiskat that theseImpact Benefit Agreements are another strategy to gain access to Indigenous lands because they “sanitize aregime of accumulation” in new “frontiers like Attawapiskat (2015: 14). She elaborates, “[w]hile IBAs technicallyconstitute a consultation process, since they imply consent from First Nations, these agreements containconfidential and non-compliance clauses that scholars refer to as a hostage situation of “indentured servants, whopromise to work a certain number of years in exchange for their freedom, no matter how bad the workingconditions” (Pasternak 2015: 21). 19According to a 2013 APTN article, this problematic Impact Benefit Agreementprovides Attawapiskat with roughly $2 million a year (1.5 percent) of their annual revenue and De Beers hastransferred $10.5 million into a trust fund for Attawapiskat as of January 2011. The mine also generated $448.8million in gross revenues by the same date.20 It is in this context as well that Theresa Spence, out of what some may say is desperation or deep strategy,stopped declaring states of emergency from the North and, while down south in their nation’s capital – Ottawa, foran Assembly of First Nations General Meeting, decided to declare her own body an exception. In this, she declaredher own body a space for the pronouncement of need, of sovereignty, the site of the decision not to eat. And to noteat solid food until the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper would meet with her to talk about the indifference hisConservative government had shown to Attawapiskat, but also to all communities in the North, to the land, to thepeople on the land. She then started her fast in a traditional dwelling constructed parallel to Parliament and herbody, her action became a piece with the “Idle No More” movement – what may be largest, broad based, grass rootssocial and political movement to unfold in Canadian history.21 Its goals are literally and directly to (and I quote)”stop the [Stephen] Harper government from passing more laws and legislation that will further erode treaty andindigenous rights and the rights of all Canadians.”22 Further it stated “Idle No More calls on all people to join in arevolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water.”23 With those objectives the movement has taken the form of “actions”: flash mobs and round dances in publicspaces that were peopled by at times, hundreds and thousands of participants who drummed and dancedpeaceably, as well peaceful road blockages. Although Spence’s action was separate from the four women inSaskatchewan who first brought the serious implications of the government’s Omnibus Bill C-45 to publicattention24 their actions drew strength from each other and shared similar concerns. The Omnibus Bill was abudget bill that would do many things but of most interest to native people and the environment, would amend theIndian Act so that reserve lands could be leased without a majority consent of the voting membership, amend theNavigational Protection Act so that major pipeline and power line projects did not have to prove their project won’tdamage or destroy a navigable waterway it crosses, unless the waterway is on a list prepared by the transportationminister and the Environmental Assessment Act, which in this Omnibus bill reduces further the number of projectsthat would require impact assessment under the old provisions. “Idle No More” describes itself as an ongoingmovement that took and probably still takes exception to the lack of consultation that marked the passage ofthese acts, as well as the way in which they over-rode existing treaty agreements and the Indian Act itself, not tomention fundamental issues of consent, as well as the abusive indifference of the Federal government to the livesand lands of Indigenous peoples. According to estimates by Idle No More, those amendments removedenvironmental protection for 72 to 99.9 percent of lakes and rivers in Canada.25 It is because of this removal oflegal protections (and probably other very good reasons) that the movement joined forces with those who want tosimply end the prospect of tar sands extraction in Northern Alberta in order to transport and sell oil elsewhere -treating the land like a dead body to be extracted from. It is of no irony that, in that political moment and in thehistorical context that structures Canada, Theresa Spence’s body would be treated with the callous indifference ifPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 6 of 17

not the ire that it was. Flesh and Sovereignty I want to explain why and to do so with recourse to her body and its relationship not so much with this movementbut with death and its failure to die. Spence fasted for six weeks, drinking one cup of fish broth in the morning, oneat night. During that time The Sarah Palin of electoral politics in Canada, then Conservative (Algonquin) SenatorPatrick Brazeau declared at a fundraising dinner that he had the flu and lost more weight in one week than she didin six weeks. This prompted a heckler to chime in, (and be reported in the Press repeatedly), “I think she gainedweight!”26 Spence’s fleshy body was not seen as a sign of resurgent Indigenous life to white Canada, it was notseen as a stubborn, resolute, and sovereign refusal to die, staying alive to have that conversation about Crownobligations, about housing and about historical obligations – it was read as a failure to do what it was supposed todo – perish. Not only do Conservative, neoliberal governments require extractive relationships to territory at alltimes, focusing upon surplus rather than social welfare or care of its supposed citizens (even if they are differentlycitizened, as Indigenous peoples are),27 those that are Conservative settler regimes require a double move, toextract from land and kill land if necessary – it is metaphorically a resource that gives itself to you for this purpose.Harper’s regime is most open about this way of viewing territory. Now all settler colonial regimes, some wouldargue (here I am thinking of Patrick Wolfe’s work and those on his tail or trail) have territory as its irreducibleelement, a desire for territory, not labor, or exclusively labor for example. But Theresa Spence’s two bodies, herChiefly one and her Womanly one were especially untenable because they were both Indian bodies. An Indianwoman’s body in settler regimes such as the US, in Canada is loaded with meaning – signifying other politicalorders, land itself, of the dangerous possibility of reproducing Indian life and most dangerously, other politicalorders. Other life forms, other sovereignties, other forms of political will. Indian women in the aforementionedexample of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy transmit the clan, and with that: family, responsibility, relatedness toterritory. Feminist scholars have argued that Native women’s bodies were to the settler eye, like land, and as suchin the settler mind, the Native woman is rendered “unrapeable” (or, highly rapeable”)28 because she was like land,matter to be extracted from, used, sullied, taken from, over and over again, something that is already violated andviolatable in a great march to accumulate surplus, to so called “production.” This helps us to understand the so-called “phenomenon” of the disappeared women, the murdered and missingNative women and girls in Canada. When we account for this way of looking at Indian women it is not a mystery, isnot without explanation, their so called “disappearances” are consistent with this ongoing project ofdispossession. And we can see that this is sociology and this is criminal. Sherene Razack (2002), Andrea Smith(2005), Beverly Jacobs and Amnesty International (2004 Beverly Jacobs and Amnesty International (2009), thefilm-makers Christine Welsh (2006) and Sharmeen Chinoy (2006),29 as well as countless activists andheartbroken, devastated family members who have marched and petitioned who have stayed on the police have alldocumented, theorized, and written about these deaths, these disappearances, which are explained not only bypolice ineptitude, by police racism, by gendered indifference, but by Canada’s dispossession of Indian people fromland. This dispossession is raced and gendered, and its violence is still born by the living, the dead, and thedisappeared corporealities of Native women. The disappearance of Indian women now takes on a sturdysociological appearance: “missing” in the past decade, gone from their homes, murdered on the now-legendary”Highway of Tears”30in Northern British Columbia, offstreets or reservations. Indian women “disappear” becausethey have been deemed killable, rapeable, expendable. Their bodies have historically been rendered less valuablebecause of what they are taken to represent: land, reproduction, Indigenous kinship and governance, an alternativeto heteropatriarchal and Victorian rules of descent. As such, they suffer disproportionately to other women. Theirlives are shorter, they are poorer, less educated, sicker, raped more frequently, and they “disappear.” Theirdisappearance thus is not an unexplainable phenomenon; like the so called “Oka Crisis” of 1990 in MohawkPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 7 of 17

territory, these not-so-mysterious disappearances are symptomatic of what administrators have called in Canada(and sometimes in the United States) “the Indian Problem.” And the Indian’s problem”: dispossession and settlergovernance are not up for examination and scrutiny, as they were with INM and the pushbacks such as Oka,Ipperwash, Elsipogtog. Theresa Spence’s fleshy life, disciplined in a spectacular declaration to not eat in order toeffect a political end was a sovereign exception to the exception that Indian people find themselves in settlerstates of occupation, Indigenous dispossession and right now, what may be qualified as neoliberal indifferenceand aggression to corporeal life. The Chief’s two bodies signaled too much for a settler eye and imagination tohear let alone act upon, and were she to have died, her body would have been in fact, the eliminatory logic of thestate laid bare, and made all too real. And in these times when the drive to death is apparent, when we are sent thememo repeatedly on the relationship between ideological degradation, gender, dispossession and governance,rendered in the bodies of the murdered and missing women, when Indigenous people are rising up all over, holdinghands with settlers in absolute concern, grief and outrage, the language normatively should not be “reconciliation”since the historical violence of colonialism is not over, it is ongoing.31 Grief I now want to turn now to a recent death, which was a grief filled, nerve ending in this. Loretta Saunders was ayoung Inuk woman who was killed in February 2014. I will unpack some of the details of her passing shortly butwill say for now that this violent murder, which is actually unexceptional when considered against the largercorpus that I have been talking about: the sociological fact, the crime of “Murdered and Missing IndigenousWomen in Canada” is one that was exceptional in that it that actually seemed to matter, it seemed to shockCanada. It was saturated with grievability and managed to rouse the murdered and missing women to settler (andIndigenous) consciousness in ways perhaps that it had not before.32 But before talking of the specifics of herpassing so I want to think first with the writing Darryl Leroux, her thesis advisor, who attempted upon her death, topuncture common understandings of the murders and deaths of Indigenous women in order to offer historical andpolitical context to these deaths. After Saunders’ death was confirmed and it was in fact, a “fact” that she was gone, Daryl Leroux made a careful,and simultaneously impassioned plea in the Huffington Post for white Canadians to think about the history thatthey inhabit, the benefits that they incur from Indigenous dispossession – as Indigenous dispossession is as I havejust argued, foundational for Canada (and of course, the United States). And Indigenous women’s vulnerability toharm, to violence is symptomatic of this dispossession. Before I get further into the crux of his argument I will justrehearse a few points. When we speak of dispossession we are speaking of the materiality of land. The land thatIndigenous peoples own, care for, are related to and are moved from, by force or by fiat for settlement. Thus whenwe think about dispossession we have to think about it as an ongoing activity that the US and Canada are veryinvolved in as these governmental projects also move Indigeneity – as a living thing, a corporeal thing and also asystem of ideas and practices out of the way. These states have to be involved in this ongoing “moving away”because they fundamentally need this land and its resources to fuel themselves and keep producing themselves ofcourse, as a political order but as systems that are attached to people who are not but who can invoke Indigeneityin different ways to suppose themselves, to construct themselves, as civil, as lawful, as the “not-that” (savage andprior other). This may seem a crude construction from various literatures but I want to ground my analysis thoughin the need for not only land, but also selfhood and statecraftto legitimate claims to governance. When we talkabout dispossession, when we talk about settler colonialism or imperial colonialism we are not talking about priorevents, or even just events, we are talking about ongoing processes, and what the comparative historian PatrickWolfe has called a sturdy, enduring “structure” and in this, not only an event.33 Alyosha Goldstein has recentlycalled for a nuancing of this further, as assemblage,34 but the feature of a discernable will to eliminate over timeand is born out in the Canadian case and especially so in relation to gender. Structures move through time andPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 8 of 17

place and if you pay close attention, you can actually see structural activity. The evidence for this, some of which was in Leroux’s articles on the Saunders’s murder, is a “termination plan” putforth by Harper’s regime in September of 2013,35 the ongoing tar sands36 project in Northern Alberta, which stripsthe top soil of Northern Cree and Ojibway communities in order to extract oil from the stripped earth to pipelinethrough the United States and ship through, literally through, other Indigenous communities, and whitecommunities through the trick of “eminent domain” – a legal manoeuver that Indians in the states are very familiarwith because it was one of ways in which land was expropriated from them through an argument that targeted itas necessary “for the public good.” The four phase Keystone Pipeline37 in particular is a compact between big oil,(TransCanada Corporation based in Calgary) and local and federal Canadian and US governments, as state permitswere required to start construction. Starting in 2008 private industry worked with public law to expropriate privateand Indian land to route crude oil from Hardisty Alberta to Regina, Saskatchewan across the border down toNebraska and on to Illinois. Later phases extended the pipelines from Nebraska to Oklahoma Liberty County Texasand “Phases 3 and 3a” onto Houston, Texas. Phase 4, called Keystone XL was rejected by the Obamaadministration after years of review.38 The 1700-mile pipeline was also to start in Hardisty Alberta and route itselfthrough Nebraska, down to the Gulf of Mexico where the oil would be reworked for domestic consumption and/orsold to markets in China, solely for the profit of big oil, not the “public good.” Indian land in Northern Alberta isbeing harvested as well as privately held acreage by white Americans in the Plains. White Farmers that till theearth in perfect, Lockean fashion, are being subjected to the legal concept of “eminent domain” in North Dakota.39It duplicates in precisely what happened to indigenous peoples whose land they now claim and is being taken fromthem. So let me return to this person, the late Loretta Saunders and what her passing means in all of this. For those ofyou that don’t know who Loretta Saunders is, she was a 26-year-old Inuk student from Labrador who was studyingat St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was writing her honor’s thesis on the so called “phenomenon”of murdered and missing Native women in Canada, and during the course of her thesis research and writing, inFebruary, 2014 her lifeless body was found in a hockey bag along the Trans-Canada highway in New Brunswick.40She was pregnant on multiple levels, pregnant with this thesis that she was researching and writing, and quiteliterally, three months pregnant. According to all accounts, she was a great student, working hard, looking forwardto starting these new chapters in her life, and then was killed shockingly, suddenly by a white couple subletting herapartment when she went to collect the overdue rent from them.41 Loretta Saunders’ murder really, really upset everyone, registering grievability and forms of action42 in ways notseen before for reasons that are both predictable and yet, not. One, she was, like all of these Native women, killedin part of what looks like a vaporous crime spree that belongs to not one serial murder, but an entire citizenship. Asmentioned earlier 1,06043 Native women have disappeared or been killed in the past decade – there have been twoAmnesty International reports, calls for a national public inquiry, reports into police ineptitude, a municipal inquiryfollowed by an apology by the Vancouver police chief Jim Chu for years of doddering inaction regarding themurdered and missing women in that city and the specificity and particular heinousness of Robert Pickton’sperfectly commodifying site of gendered pain and gendered elimination, the “piggy farm.” At the so called “piggyfarm” 49 women (he confessed to 49 and was charged for 6) were murdered and ground, like meat. Like Saunders’body, found in a hockey bag, a container for the sport that seems to condense meaning, and hope, whilesublimating white male violence in a civil form, to stand for Canada itself, Pickton’s violence does perfectlydisgusting and unambiguous work to tell us, to scream at us, Native women will be killed by this country and itspeople. Yet in spite of these signs that scream, settler governance in those moments could not or would not hear them. InPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 9 of 17

March 2014, one month after the Saunders murder, the conservative-led cabinet refused the call for a nationalinquiry into these deaths that crash through austere, Canadian silence the in the form of tears, marches, outragecongealing into one discourse of outraged grief, why are these women being targeted, who is the perpetrator, whatdo we do?44 When history and sensibility is “the perp” a lot has to get done. And the Saunders case agitated all that in ways notseen before. So that is the one way in which this fairly recent murder scrapes at whatever iota of patienceIndigenous people have with the state of affairs. But I suspect the other reason is that Loretta Saunders looked likea white girl. She had fair skin, blond hair, light eyes, she could have infiltrated a KKK meeting without notice.Perhaps, and we will find more than likely, perhaps not. It isn’t white skin privilege that upset people, in that she ismore precious than the darker ones among us – it is that her death demonstrates that no one is safe. Her violentpassing is teaching us that one cannot “pass” – this structure, this assemblage, those people that articulatethemselves through and for it, will find you, and subject you, it can kill you. You too can be emptied of your familialrelations, your relationship to land, your signifying possibility as the ongoing project of Empire transits in Byrd’sparlance, or plows through you. One’s, life, one’s land, sovereignty, one’s body, emptied out, in order for other thingsto pass through. This includes fleshy bodies, this includes Theresa Spence’s stubborn and life sustaining fat. Thisis because if you are an indigenous woman your flesh is received differently, you have been subjected differentlythan others, your life choices have been circumscribed in certain ways, and the violence it seems, and will find you,and choke you, and beat you, and possibly kill you. And Darryl Leroux tried to explain this to Canadians in theHuffington Post, where you will find the startling comments of Canadians who argued in the comments section (invarious ways) ‘she was not subjected to this violence because she was Inuk, she was subjected to this violencebecause she is a woman, because these are killers and they are wholly responsible.’ Somehow the killers wereoutside of the state, they were imagined as outside of the history that structures them as well.45 My favoritecomment to Leroux’s post was and is “You also just helped explain why the numbers for missing/murdered nativewomen are so high. You count any woman with any amount of native blood as native” – completelymisapprehending his argument about history and territory, and with that that phenotype. His crucial point beingthat skin color is not a matter of Indigeneity, that Loretta Saunders was an Inuk that she belonged to her people,she belonged to her family, and that they belong to specific territory. Here he argued that Indigeneity is actuallythis kind of specificity of place and people, and that in particular this so called “white Inuk” belonged to thosepeople and she was claimed and loved and grieved by them. In the numerous YouTube videos on this case you cansee her distraught family plead the public for information, you can see her sister Delilah Saunders with tear stainedcheeks calmly ask for information from the public about her sister, and then wait and ask and then organize asearch for her body. When the news comes to the Saunders family, we see them embrace each other with the reliefof knowing simply that her body had been found – frozen, in the hockey bag. They were happy simply that she hadbeen found because so many of these women have not. And couple their sentiments, which are literally,heartbreaking, her murder enraging, with the cacophony of comments from the Canadian public to Leroux’s blogposts with statements of remorse, because this case is so awful it is inspiring even grief in the trolls. Pedagogies of Contention When I first wrote an earlier version of this article I presented it in Austin, Texas for a graduate student conferenceon ‘Violence and Indigenous Identity.”46 This was in April of 2014. Like many other people, I was thinking a lotabout Loretta Saunders, about the other women, and Leroux’s piece made me think about my students,47 aboutmy job as Professor but specifically as a research Professor that takes teaching very seriously. And as a researchProfessor, I should not work so hard on my teaching. But nonetheless, I take it seriously and push things to thepoint of almost total bodily collapse every year when I get a long, painful and relentless bronchitis. I can barelywalk to work, let alone lecture, and I work across the street from my apartment. I say this not to dramatize a pointPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 10 of 17

about exertion, we all work very hard, but to talk about what I teach and its crucial capacity to exhaust. What Iteach: violence, dispossession, Indigenous political life in the face of death, is high stakes and I know it. Where Iteach is high stakes and I know it – in the US a site of complete atrophied disavowal of dispossession and ongoingcolonialism, disavowal of indigeneity itself. And the courses push up and expose the structures of thatdispossession and disavowal to students while providing an historical narrative with analytics to help them along.Repeatedly I hear, and read from them in different ways, “we didn’t know this” and from my Indigenous students, ofwhich there are more than I ever expected, “this helps to put it all together.” From all, “let’s do something!” I don’tseek to make a claim of an extraordinary status for native studies alongside other crucial, non-canonical andsubaltern histories, all with their own very serious and searing urgencies, but let me make the modest claim thatthe material serves as a “surprise” that topples things and so I would say, is crucial. But because of its generallynon-curricular nature if I don’t get it right, if I don’t ensnare my students with this information, they may never get it,and they may never get it because they may never even hear it. This is because we live in a place, in multipleplaces, that simply require a disappearance of Indians in order to make the meta claims of the state make sense,”We are a nation of immigrants” – this is not true. And even though Obama then quickly offers the exceptionalqualifier “Unless you are one of the Native Americans” he does not explain the violence of settler colonialism, theongoing violence of this all and how it is still going on and itself explains the minoritized, post-genocidal and yes,exceptional space of indigeneity. So unless people have the data of dispossession, the conceptual and analyticaltoolkit to work with these statements, they may take it as a fact, they may be compelled by it as something that istrue and also virtuous. When they have the material of native studies and Indigenous studies to think with thesestatements are perceived differently, their own histories are perceived differently, they will have to think morerobustly and critically about what is before them. And why is this not a matter for everyone to care about, to teach,to think with, to act upon? Because this disappearance keeps things in its place, the narratives, the politics, thedistributions in power that allow for land to still be taken, for Indigenous identities as well to be violated and stolenbecause it is presumed that Indigenous peoples are not here to claim each other, to stand up for each other andthemselves. I have written about this in my first book, Mohawk Interruptus (2014) but you will find other examplesof this clarity of Indigenous political will in other works in literary history (Monture 2014) ethnography (Nesper2002, McCarthy 2016), political analysis and critique (Alfred 1999Alfred 2005Alfred 2008, Coulthard 2014, Bruyneel2007, Moreton-Robinson 2002, Moreton-Robinson 2007, Moreton-Robinson 2015).48 The people I have written about (and belong to), the Haudenosaunee for example, insist on the life of Indigenousnationhood and sovereignty through time and express this in actions that are about not being American, not beingCanadian, and in this it is holding these nation-states in a position of doubt, sometimes interrogation andsometimes refusal. Their political posture is, in short, saying I am not playing with you. You are not the onlypolitical or historical show in town, and I know it. I think of Loretta Saunders, of her sister’s completely devastatingblog that documents her love for her sister, the sadness and rage that she wakes up with, her hopes for the safetyof other women, of life after her sister’s murder,49 and I think of the death grip that threatens to seize all of us, thedeath grip that is very much a part of a settler show. A show of strength, of callous indifference, of an ire thatobtains to Indigenous women’s bodies and how this attaches even to those of us that might think we are safe.Simultaneously I think of her thesis advisor, who tried to translate the very things he was surely teaching LorettaSaunders, learning from Loretta Saunders, to Canadians in the Huffington Post. Is this the cacophony ofdiscourses that vie for a kind of truth telling? Force qualified as violence moves through us, trying to empty us out,transiting through moving to the flesh that is the subsurface of “identity” as peoples possessing bodies with livinghistories of relatedness to territory that is constantly being violated, harmed, ignored – allowing some of us to bedevalued to the point where we are denied bodily integrity, denied philosophical integrity, flattened, sometimeskilled. The force of this is ongoing, and multileveled. I think now, after writing my first book and thinking throughthe politics of Kahnawà:ke which are at times extremely difficult but so very alive and vibrant, which resist andrefuse this kind of process at every turn, the desire for reconciliation by the Canadian government is a curious one.PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 11 of 17

I am not sure that this is possible or fair to attempt to “reconcile” with something that is so violent, so relentless,unless all people stand fully before the sorts of stories I have just assembled, the stories that circulate in ourcommunities, the loss, the gains, the names, and think then about what peace means. The settler state is asking toforgive and to forget, with no land back, no justice and no peace. I find this request for forgiveness by a killing statewith what we now know and continue to know to veer towards the absurd if not insult, in spite of its conciliatoryintent. This is because historical, bodily and heuristic violence along with theftare among those things that arereally impossible to forgive let alone forget. Footnote Notes 1. For the reach of global, imperial and comparative analysis of settler colonialism see Bruno Cornellier andMichael Griffith’s volume of Settler Colonial Studies (2016) 6: 4. See also Alyosha Alex Lubins edited volume ofSouth Atlantic Quarterly (2008): 107 (4). 2. See Paulette Regan Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation(2011) for an account and analysis of Canadian self perception, especially as international peacekeepers and inrelation to the US 3. And over-incarcerating Native men. Please see Sherene Razack’s (2014) Dying from Improvement: Inquiries andInquests into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) for a book length analysis of theover preponderance of deaths in custody, most are men. 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 5. This is argued in various ways by Aileen Moreton-Robinson in The White Possessive: Property Power andIndigenous Sovereignty (2014). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 6. See Kevin Bruyneel The Third Space of Sovereignty (2007) and Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus (2014) forrelated arguments. 7. Trudeau cancelled the controversial Enbridge Northern Gateway project that would transport oil from the Albertatar sands of the coast of British Columbia, He did so just 9 days after assuming office. He is, however supportive ofthe pipeline projects “Energy East” and “Trans Mountain” http://www.canadianbusiness.com/economy/how-the-trudeau-government-tore-up-the-rulebook-on-pipelines/ (last accessed 08/30/2016), because they are thought tooffer a “cleaner” solution than pipelines that transport crude and are underway with more process and consultationwith First Nations. The younger and presumably innovative and inclusive Trudeau was widely regarded at the pointof his election as a departure from the Conservative party leader Stephen Harper’s nine years in office. 8. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/harper-rebuffs-renewed-calls-for-murdered-missing-women-inquiry-1.2742845 [last accessed 09/20/2015]. 9. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/full-text-of-peter-mansbridge-s-interview-with-stephen-harper-1.2876934 (lastaccessed 09/20/2015). 10. For an excellent summary please see http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/31/patrick-brazeau-theresa-spence_n_2589799.html [last accessed 4/7/2013] 11. Please note in his piece Simpson recasts the action of Spence in ceremonial terms, and as simultaneousenactment of the consequences of and critique of Indian Act colonialism. Simpson argued, “colonialism has keptIndigenous Peoples on a fish broth diet for generations…” (2014: 155) “Fish Broth and Fasting” in The Winter WeDanced: Voices from the Past, the Future and the Idle No More Movment The Kino-nda-niimi Collective. Winnipeg:ARP Books. Pp: 154-157. 12. The end of treaty-making for example in the United States (1871) and the imposition of the Indian Act inCanada (1876). 13. This is “James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement, which affects Cree in what was once James Bay and is nowreferred to as “Eeyou Istchee.” (http://www.gcc.ca/pdf/LEG000000006.pdf last accessed 09/19/2015) 14. Mathew Coon Come “Remarks to the Canada Seminar.” Harvard Center for International Affairs and KennedyPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 12 of 17

School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, October 28, 1996.http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/coon_come.html (last accessed 09/19/2015). 15. This article is rich in its invitation for critical commentary, “Quebec Cree avoided the fate of Attawapiskatt”basically by controlling the process of “economic development” through techniques of political resistance untiltheir terms were met. It is emphasized that they are not “opposed to development” but simply want to control itand to receive revenues from it. Time does not permit me to deconstruct the underlying principles of this discoursebut later versions of this project will (http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2013/05/14/pol-james-bay-cree-northern-quebec-attawapiskat.html) (last accessed 09/20/2015). 16. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/07/attawapiskat-spending-audit-theresa-spence_n_2425725.html (lastaccessed 09/20/2015) 17. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/attawapiskat-chief-slams-audit-leak-as-distraction-1.1318113 (last accessed09/20/2015). 18. Please see the documentary “The People of the Kattawapiskak River (2011, National Film Board of Canada,Alanis Obomsawin, dir) for a documentary treatment of the housing crisis as well as a crucial account of theirindependent funding of their hockey rink. 19. In footnote 101 of her article “The fiscal body of sovereignty: to ‘make live’ in Indian country” Shiri Pasternak(2015) provides a genealogy of IBAS as this accumulative technique and traces them back to Haida Nation v.British Columbia (Ministry of Forests) 2004 SCC 73). In a nutshell, there must be consulation with First Nations ifAboriginal Rights will be contravened, the cunning of IBAs is they imply consent and do not require it fully.Pasternak draws on Ken Caine and Naomi Krogman, “Powerful or Just Plain Power-Full? A Power Analysis ofImpact and Benefit Sharing Agreements in Canada’s North,” Organization and Environment 23:1 (2010). ForPasternak see http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1090525 20. http://aptn.ca/news/2013/02/15/attawapiskat-councillor-accuses-de-beers-of-trickery-as-showdown-looms-on-diamond-mine-ice-road/ 21. This admittedly a difficult claim to prove as the INM movement was and perhaps still is amorphous and proneto spontaneous public actions and thus difficult to “calculate.” Other “to the streets” and protests have beensignificant in demographic scale, notably the Winnipeg workers strikes of 1919. See Craig Heron, ed. (1998) TheWorkers Revolt in Canada 1917-1925. Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the gendered consumer activism of”the Homemakers” organizations through out the 1930s who organized in vigorous protest against rising milkprices. See Julie Guard (2010) “A Mighty Power Against the Cost of Living: Canadian Housewives organize in the1930’s.” International Labor and Working Class History 77: 27-47). I am grateful to Jarvis Brownlie for pushing meon this claim. 22. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/9-questions-about-idle-no-more-1.1301843 (last accessed 09/20/2015). 23. http://www.idlenomore.ca/vision (last accessed 09/20/2015). 24. The Omnibus Bill was first brought to public attention by four women in Saskatchewan – Jessica Gordon, SylviaMcAdam, Sheelah McLean, Nina Wilson as well the woman that first started the hashtag “Idle No More” (and thusintensive discussion and actions – Tanya Kappo). Theresa Spence was similarly acting in protest to what shecalled (and her people call) the “aggression” of the Conservative Government in Canada. In this, their callousindifference to the lives and lands of Native people in the North, in her community housing is abominable andwater undrinkable. This is endemic to many reserves in the North. Please see Pasternak for a detailed legal historyof Spence’s action, placed within the larger context of Indigenous dispossession and Canadian lawmaking (2016).For a multivocal, edited account of the “Idle No More Movement” please see The Kino-niimi Collective (eds.) TheWinter We Danced: Voices from the Past and the Future, and the Idle No More Movement (2014). 25. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/9-questions-about-idle-no-more-1.1301843 (last accessed 09/20/2015). 26. The exchange as reported by Huffington Post Canada: “I look at Miss Spence, when she started her hungerstrike, and now?” Brazeau asked. A spectator then cried out, “She’s fatter,” sparking laughter.(http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/31/patrick-brazeau-theresa-spence_n_2589799.html) (last accessedPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 13 of 17

09/20/2015) 27. See Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States for an ethnographic account of thisdifferent citizenship (Simpson: 2014). 28. See Andrea Smith, Conquest (2005), Jacki Rand, Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State, (2008)specifically chapter 6, which links a degraded status of Kiowa women to settler capitalism. There is reference tosexual violence as well in Ned Blackhawk’s Violence over the Land (2006) and James Daschuk’s Clearing thePlains (2014) but they do not make the claim regarding gender and territory that Smith and Rand do. 29. Amnesty International (2004) No More Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to DiscriminationandViolence Against Indigenous Women in Canada. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International (2009). No More Stolen Sisters: The Need for a Comprehensive Response to ViolenceAgainst Indigenous Women in Canada. London: Amnesty International Publications. See also Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy (dir.) 2006 Highway of Tears. DVD. Al Jazeera International 26 mins., Razack,Sherene (2002) “The Murder of Pamela George” in Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society(Sherene Razack, ed). Toronto: Between the Lines Press. Smith, Andrea (2005) Conquest: Sexual Violence andNative American Genocide. Boston: South End Press. 121-147. Welsh, Christine (dir.) (2006) Finding Dawn. Ottawa:National Film Board of Canada. 30. Highway 16 stretches across Northern British Columbia. Eighteen women have been murdered between PrinceRupert and Prince George, rendering that stretch “the Highway of Tears” (Chinoy 2006). On September 12, 2012 itwas reported that Bobby Jack Fowler murdered one of these women in British Columbia and died in an Oregon jailin 2006. 31. Coulthard, 2014. 32. I will explain some of this shortly but let the attention paid to her death, shocking because of what Doenmezcalls a “fatal symmetry” (2015), not override the sustained memorialization and activism of the families and otherloved ones of the Indigenous women and girls or the grass roots community activism and documentation. EveryFebruary 14 is a day of remembrance for the women and girls which sees memorial marches all throughoutCanada. Please consult as well http://www.itstartswithus-mmiw.com/ (last accessed 09/20/2015) for a “No MoreSilence” database that documents the missing women. This site works in partnership with “Sisters in Spirit”through the Native Women’s Association of Canada. Defunded by the Conservative government, the Sister’s inSpirit initiative documented the root causes of violence and harm in Native women’s lives. 33. The paradigmatic piece is Patrick Wolfe, (2006) Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journalof Genocide Research 8 (4): 387-409. 34. Goldstein, Alyosha (2014) “Introduction: Toward a Genealogy of the US Colonial Present” in Formations ofUnited States Colonialism (Alyosha Goldstein, ed.). Durham: Duke University Press. Pp: 1-32. 35. See Russell Diabo (2014) “Harper Launches Major First Nations Termination Plan” As Negotiating TablesLegitimize Canada’s Colonialism in The Winter We Danced Pp: 51-64. 36. For an excellent summary of the Oil or Tar Sands projects in Northern Alberta, and the “catastrophic climatechange that…[Keystone XL] would induce” as well as American lobbying efforts against it please seehttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/the-president-and-the-pipeline (last accessed 08/30/2016). 37. The fourth phase was not approved by the American state department in November, 2015. 38. Obama’s November 06, 2015 statement can be found here https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/06/statement-president-keystone-xl-pipeline (last accessed 08/31/2016). 39. See the successful opposition in the courts to TransCanada’s attempt to assert eminent domain in Nebraskahttp://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/02/24/foreign-company-tries-to-seize-u-s-land-for-keystone-pipeline/#4565e39a64ec (last accessed 08/30/2016) 40. In her thesis Already Disappeared: Interrogating the Right to Life of Indigenous Women in Canada CarolineDoenmez has called the shock of Saunder’s writing about what would befall her as a “fatal symmetry” in heranalysis of the Canadian government’s “failure to protect” in the case of Saunders (alongside of analysis of thePDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 14 of 17

treatment Cindy Gladue and Tina Fontaine) (2015: 13). 41. The details of her murder and the sentencing of Blake Legette and Victoria Henneberry, the couple that killedher may be found here http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/loretta-saunders-murder-was-despicable-horrifying-and-cowardly-1.3052465 (last accessed 08/31/2016). 42. Hers is the only individual murder that occasioned a march on Parliamenthttp://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/loretta-saunders-vigil-draws-hundreds-to-parliament-hill-1.2561062(last accessed 09/30/2015) 43. These numbers are based on Royal Canadian Mounted Police data, which is flawed as it does not include citieswhere RCMP do not have jurisdiction, like Vancouver and Toronto (Doenmez ibid: 14-15). 44. The Inquiry was launched on August 3, 2016 https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1448633299414/1448633350146 (last accessed 08/30/2016). 45. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/darryl-leroux/loretta-saunders-indigenous-_b_5007672.html (last accessed9/19/2015). 46. Violence Against Native and Indigenous Identities: Unearthing and Healing Our Communities, University ofTexas – Austin, March 28, 2014. 47. It was my former student, Lakota Pochedley who invited to me UT-Austin as she was then a graduate studentthere and had gone on after completing a thesis under my supervision at Columbia. 48. Gerald R. [Taiaiake] Alfred (1995) Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and theRise of Native Nationalism. Toronto: Oxford University Press. (1999) Peace Power and Righteousness: AnIndigenous Manifesto. Toronto: Oxford University Press. (2005) Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action andFreedom. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Kevin Bruyneel (2007) The Third Space of Sovereignty. Glen Coulthard(2014) Red Skin: White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress. Theresa McCarthy (in press) In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River (Tucson:University of Arizona Press). Rick Monture (2014) We Share our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistanceat Six Nations of the Grand River. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Larry Nesper (2002) The Walleye War:The Struggle for Ojibway Hunting and Fishing Rights. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Aileen Moreton-Robinson Moreton Robinson, Aileen (2002) Talkin’ Up To the White Woman: Indigenous Women and FeminismQueensland: University of Queensland Press. Moreton-Robinson (ed.) (2007) Sovereign Subjects: IndigenousSovereignty Matters. New South Wales: Allen &Unwin. (2014) The White Possessive. 49. https://homicidesurvivor.wordpress.com/ (last accessed 09/20/2015). AuthorAffiliation Audra Simpson Audra Simpson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of MohawkInterruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), co-editor of TheorizingNative Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly,Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010, she won Columbia University’sSchool for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” She is a Kahnawake Mohawk. Audra can be reached [email protected] Acknowledgements This article is dedicated to the late Loretta Saunders and the MMIWG who have been stolen from their territoriesand their loved ones. First written for “Violence and Indigenous Identity” at University of Texas at Austin (2014), Ithank Lakota Pochedley for the invitation to Austin and the occasion to write new work for that specific event.Expanded and revised versions were presented at the Native and Indigenous Studies Association meeting in 2014as well as the University of Winnipeg, Ryerson University, Carleton University, McMaster University, ConcordiaUniversity, Clark University and UCLA. I thank Isabelle St. Amand and Martin Loftfor inviting me to keynote”Revisioning Americas” in Kahnawà:ke as well as Tracey Lindberg and Malinda Smith for inviting me to keynotePDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 15 of 17

Critical Race and Anticolonial Studies Conference in Edmonton, Alberta where an earlier version of this piece waspresented in 2014. I am grateful to these audiences for their engagement. Any mistakes are my own. DETAILS Subject:Violence; Colonialism; Multiculturalism &pluralism; Women; Murders &murderattempts; Native women; Narratives; Deaths; Reconciliation; SovereigntyLocation:CanadaPeople:Harper, StephenPublication title:Theory &Event; BaltimoreVolume:19Issue:4Pages:N_ANumber of pages:1Publication year:2016Publication date:2016Publisher:Johns Hopkins University PressPlace of publication:BaltimoreCountry of publication:United States, BaltimorePublication subject:Political ScienceISSN:25726633e-ISSN:1092311XSource type:Scholarly JournalLanguage of publication:EnglishDocument type:Journal ArticleProQuest document ID:1866315122Document URL:https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/state-is-man-theresa-spence-loretta-saunders/docview/1866315122/se-2?accountid=14605PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 16 of 17

LINKSLinking Service Database copyright Ó 2022 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuestCopyright:Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press 2016Last updated:2022-06-24Database:ProQuest Learning: Literature,Social Science Premium Collection,ProQuest CentralPDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COMPage 17 of 17

Collepals.com Plagiarism Free Papers

Are you looking for custom essay writing service or even dissertation writing services? Just request for our write my paper service, and we'll match you with the best essay writer in your subject! With an exceptional team of professional academic experts in a wide range of subjects, we can guarantee you an unrivaled quality of custom-written papers.

Get ZERO PLAGIARISM, HUMAN WRITTEN ESSAYS

Why Hire Collepals.com writers to do your paper?

Quality- We are experienced and have access to ample research materials.

We write plagiarism Free Content

Confidential- We never share or sell your personal information to third parties.

Support-Chat with us today! We are always waiting to answer all your questions.