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Protesters Blame Native American Violence Against Women on “Redskins” Team
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 7, 2015 @ 9:16 am In The Point | 13 Comments
Yes the word “Huh” is completely appropriate.
Washington’s football team won’t be playing in Super Bowl XLIX this weekend. But in the days before the NFL’s biggest game kicks off in Glendale, Ariz., Native American activists and organizers in a state that has 21 recognized tribes will hold multiple events that both challenge the team’s “Redskins” name and tie the stereotypes perpetuated by it to one of the most pressing issues facing the NFL this season: domestic violence.
Saturday, a coalition of Native American groups, grassroots organizations, and activists will hold a vigil in Phoenix’s Civil Space Park to memorialize missing and murdered indigenous women, according to the event’s Facebook page. The next day, on Super Bowl Sunday, they will march and rally in downtown Phoenix to draw attention to harmful effects of Native American stereotypes when it comes to violence against Native women, who face domestic violence and sexual assault at higher rates than other communities…
The stereotypes created by Native mascots like Washington’s cloud the fact that issues like domestic violence and sexual assault affect Native women even more acutely than other demographics, said Jacqueline Keeler, a writer and founder of the group Ending Offensive Native Mascotry who is also helping organize the march and vigil events.
“A lot of the stereotypes promoted by mascots are…the warrior image. The flip-side of that is the ‘Poca-hottie,’ the Savage Squaw, the person who is sexually available to the white man, and that is a big part of the story of America, this idea that there is some Indian princess out there,” Keeler said, pointing to images of Washington cheerleaders, who have in the past dressed in their own Native American costumes.
“How white men view us matters,” she added. “These stereotypes that people have are so powerful. They really mislead them about Native people, they cause them to harm Native people. This is why they have to stop.”
Keeler pointed to statistics from the Department of Justice showing that Native American women “are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault crimes compared to all other races,” and that an estimated 70 percent of those crimes are committed by men of other races, a higher rate of interracial violence than women of any other ethnicity suffer (overall, 39 percent of Native women identify as victims of domestic violence and 34 percent as victims of sexual assault, also higher rates than women of other ethnic groups, according to surveys from the Centers for Disease Control)
Those statistics however are actually a good deal more complicated than that.
Even according to the material linked in the ThinkProgress, that 70 percent is a general statistic. Not specifically a sexual assault statistic.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs at least 70% of the violent victimizations experienced by American Indians are committed by persons not of the same race— a substantially higher rate of interracial violence than experienced by white or black victims.
Furthermore the Justice Department’s own statistics say something else entirely.
Approximately 60% of American Indian victims of violence, about the same percentage as of all victims of violence, described the offender as white.
So that’s the national average. Not a substantially higher percentage.
The situation becomes more complicated because race on reservations is itself ambiguous. Reservations are filled with people who are not enrolled in tribes and might therefore be considered another race entirely.
Since many tribes don’t bother having actual blood quantum requirements, the difference between a white man, a black man and a member of a tribe can be a technicality.
The debate over VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) tried to swamp the more complex discussions by insisting that the problem was white men invading reservations and raping women. While that has happened, sexual abuse and sexual assault statistics on reservations are horrifyingly high.
There’s no disputing the fact that crime, of all sorts, on reservations is off the charts.
These are extreme numbers. And they can’t all be blamed on white people. Except that in PC SJW America, they can.
The abuse of Indian women and children can be traced to the introduction of unnatural life ways into Native culture. Scholars support this idea and suggest that violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women directly relates to historical victimization. According to proponents of this idea, domination and oppression of native peoples increased both economic deprivation and dependency through retracting tribal rights and sovereignty. Consequently, American Indian and Alaska Natives today are believed to suffer from internalized oppression and the normalization of violence.
In other words, white people oppressed American Indians who responded by beating their wives. Cool story, bro.
The earliest mention I can find of Native American women having their noses cut off for adultery is in a memoir by Alexander Maximilian, a Prussian prince, naturalist, and ethnographer who explored the Great Plains in the 1830s. He said this about the men of the Blackfeet tribe: “They generally punish infidelity in their wives very seriously, cutting off their noses in such cases; and we saw, about Fort McKenzie, a great many of these poor creatures horribly disfigured. When ten or twelve tents were together, we were sure to see six or seven women mutilated in this manner. The husband also cuts off the hair by way of punishment.”
Nose-cutting of adulteresses, though hardly universal among American Indians, was fairly widespread—we have credible reports of its occurrence among the Creek, Sioux, and Navajo. In the 1870s, General George Crook reported Arizona Apache men both beat their wives and cut their noses off for infidelity. Crook tried to stop the practice by imprisoning a nose-cutting husband for a year, with unknown success.
Obviously the Apaches were suffering from internalized oppression.
“They practice polygamy to a considerable extent. They buy their wives. When girls arrive at the age of puberty, and often before, their parents place them upon the matrimonial market and they go to the highest bidders. A pony or two is generally regarded as a fair equivalent for a girl. Hardly any women past middle life have husbands.”
I’m sure that began with Western immigration. Not before.
There were certainly plenty of tribal variation and outside observers often had reason to make negative observations, but the idea that there was some gender utopia before the Europeans got here is a calculated myth built up by leftists looking to create imaginary matriarchies everywhere.
Indian men did not start beating women because of European colonization. Playing these kinds of games perpetuates the problem by blaming whitey.
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