Racial Disparities in Native and Indigenous Communities

How are Native and Indigenous communities affected by environmental racism? How can ecofeminism be used as a beneficial tool to analyze these problems and come up with solutions?

Environmental racism is a serious problem related to ecofeminism. Indigenous peoples around the world face environmental racism. This includes Native communities in the United States that are disproportionately affected by climate change. Many Native communities are placed near or next to company plants that produce toxic air and water pollution. When colonial settlers came to Turtle Island, which is now referred to as the United States, they forcibly removed Native people from their homelands to create a way for industrial innovation and opportunity for profit. Native people are the original stewards of the land and know how to care for it properly. When European settlers arrived, Native people knew that what was being done to the land was harmful, and this is still applicable to this day.

In a book titled “Regeneration – Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation” by Paul Hawken, he explains how “the vast majority of Indigenous nations did not (and still do not) see the land as a belonging, but saw themselves as belonging to the land. This difference in understanding – an individual who is separate from the land versus a biological community-dwelling within the land – was the excuse used by colonists to steal 1.5 billion acres from Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. These are known as the stolen lands” (Hawken, 118). Hawken continues to explain how “Indigenous people thrived on land and sea for thousands of years because of intimate knowledge of weather, botany, animals, migrations, medicines, forests, food, and the oceans. They practiced observational science, discoveries about the natural world gleaned over millennia, etched into metaphor and conveyed through stories passed down in unbroken oral traditions,” (Hawken, 118). This knowledge about the land and its resources for sustaining life was carefully studied by Native people for millennia. Colonists did not foster the same understanding or patience into learning the land, and we see the result of these actions in environmental racism and resource depletion.

Kim Tallbear, a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, specializing in racial politics in science, writes “an environment/human divide is… [a] narrative that is absent from the indigenous narrative… Indigenous articulations of indigeneity challenge colonial conceptions that bind indigeneity to cultural stasis and economic deprivation…such articulations can limit efforts by indigenous peoples to build their autonomy and control resources in order to resist the assimilationist state,” (TallBear, 515). Indigeneity is defined by Indigenous people themselves. Colonists arrived on Turtle Island with a new narrative of control and conquest. This took sovereignty from the Native communities already taking care of the land.

This narrative allowed environmental racism to be spread through the land and both metaphorically and literally poison Native communities. Environmental racism against Native communities can be seen in recent cases of the Flint Michigan water crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). They target Native communities for land use and are outwardly classist. Native communities were pushed off of their homelands and were not given respect or status. They were forced to small areas where they would have to assimilate into the majority’s culture to survive. Survival was based on how “American” they could become and how much money they could make. Although, the less money a community has, the more likely they are to be exposed to harmful toxins from company plants because they are susceptible to losing the dispute without large monetary means.

Native women are exceptionally targeted by environmental racism. This includes being forcibly sterilized, marking the largest rape, kidnapping/murder cases by race, and past treatment in Indian Boarding Schools. Native women and girls face increased violence from the intersection of environmental racism and patriarchal rule. Colonists’ patriarchal views acknowledge masculine traits to be more valuable in society. Chaone Mallory states “environmental justice…stands to gain from incorporation of ecofeminist analyses of the material and conceptual intersections between the oppression of women, people of color, indigenous peoples, the poor, and other marginalized human groups and the degradation of natural places,” (Mallory, 15). Environmental justice cannot be discussed without acknowledging the intersection that ecofeminism has on the destruction of the natural world.

Indian Boarding Schools began under Richard Henry Pratt in 1875, where he took a military institution outline and applied it to the development of these schools. He established the Carlisle Indian Industrial School which remained open from 1879 to 1918. An estimated 100,000 Native children were forced to attend, especially after attendance laws were enacted in 1891. The Meriam Report of 1928 analyzed horrific acts that happened in various Indian Boarding Schools. These included poor nutrition, overcrowding, lack of medical care, student labor, and low curriculum standards. Many children attempted to run away back to their homes, but when caught, were punished severely. They would be beaten, humiliated in front of their classmates, or even had shock treatments used on them.

In an article titled “Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools/ The Residential School Experience” from Facing History and Ourselves, “Lorna, who was at the Mohawk Institute from 1940 to 1945, describes the ‘shock treatments’ the girls would receive:

“They used to give us shock treatments for bedwetting. A lot of us never wet our beds but we still had to do it anyway. They said it worked for the girls but it didn’t work for the boys. They couldn’t really ever find out why, but I think it was because of the sexual abuse that went on there… They used to bring in a battery—a motor of some sort or some kind of gadget, and he’d put the girl’s hand on it and it would jerk us and it would go all the way through us from end to end—it would travel. And we would do that about three times,” (Stolen Lives).

Young girls in these institutions experienced sexual abuse and would sometimes have their hair shaved off because the teachers knew that hair was symbolically important to their culture. Many Native people only cut their hair when in mourning or grief. These institutions wanted to strip Native children from their culture so that they would forget their culture, traditions language, and knowledge. Hawken writes “Indigenous knowledge persisted in the face of determined efforts to erase it…colonization instigated centuries of rape, violence, genocide, and dispossession. at certain times and places, when such violence was not considered ‘acceptable,’ colonists tried to strip away indigenous cultures instead. children were taken from their parents, forcibly moved to distant boarding schools, put in uniforms, forbidden to speak their native language, controlled like cadets at a boot camp, and taught a way of thinking that demeaned their culture and history. on top of the effort to obliterate their culture, they were subject to physical and sexual abuse by the boarding schools…” (Hawken, 119). These horrific practices are ongoing and have been used as violence against Native women and girls for centuries.

Native women and girls are also subject to forced sterilization in their communities. Environmental justice relates to both ecofeminism and reproductive justice.

In many Native tribes and communities, the woman is often seen as the head of the household, for she creates sacred life. Children are the bloodline to the next lineage and are deeply valued. They are often seen as a sign of wealth, the more children you have in your life. Forced sterilization of Native women's bodies establishes direct violence to their bodies and is driven by a desire to eliminate Indigenous people around the world. In a film titled Ama (meaning “mother”), we meet Jean Whitehorse, who is a Navajo woman. She describes her experience being forcefully sterilized without her consent by a doctor. Native women are often sterilized without knowing when it is done during a C-section. She also accounts for knowing doctors who would taunt and ask Native women to get sterilized. This is a direct correlation with patriarchal dominance for control of women’s bodies and the natural world. This intentional practice led to depression, alcoholism, and violence in many Native communities.

Such violence includes Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) in many Native communities throughout Canada and the United States. In an article titled “The Murders of Indigenous Women in Canada as Feminicides: Toward a Decolonial Intersectional Reconceptualization of Femicide by Paulina García-Del Moral, she states “the murders of Indigenous women in Canada constitute racialized gendered violence rooted in the ongoing material and discursive effects of colonial power relations,” (Moral, 929). The violence used on Native women and girls is rooted in colonization and the desire to conquer land and in turn, conquers women’s bodies. This is an example of how looking at the patriarchal system we are in through an ecofeminist lens can be helpful. We see the blatant connection between how the Earth is being treated and how Native and all women’s bodies are being treated.

Moral states “racialized gendered discourses of femininity that have historically associated Indigenous women’s sexuality with immorality have marked them as disposable. This marking is intimately tied to dispossession, enabling Indigenous populations to be considered as primitive and barbaric and unfit owners of the land,” (Moral, 932). They continue to state “it simultaneously produces a cultural narrative that places the killing of Indigenous women in the context of prostitution, thereby disassociating this violence from the ongoing harmful material effects of colonialism, like the extreme poverty that may lead these women to engage in sex work in the first place. Razack illustrates that Canadian courts consistently reproduce this cultural representation, rendering invisible the dehumanization of Indigenous women, its relation to the construction of the modern Canadian settler state, and the contemporary subjectivities of colonizers who understand themselves as entitled to land and to the bodies of Indigenous women,” (Moral, 932-933).

Native women around the world are targeted by the result of the patriarchy and deserve justice. Some resources you can donate to are the Native American Rights Fund and the Warrior Women Project. The Native American Rights Fund supports Native American rights protection, resource and lifeways protection, and, tribal sovereignty. The Warrior Women Project provides a forum for Indigenous activists to tell their stories for the benefit of future generations. Also, check out native-land.ca. to see the land you are currently on and how you can better respect the stewards here before and with you. Some Native American stories to share are “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer and “There There” by Tommy Orange. We must respect and protect Native and Indigenous land in any way that we can. Honoring Indigenous peoples and lands plays a huge role in climate protection and ecofeminist rights. To end with a Paul Hawken quote, “there is an extraordinary teaching about the earth that is needed, a way of knowing that erases the separation between people and nature, a disconnection that has caused the climate crisis. that knowledge is here,” (Hawken, 119).

Resources

TallBear, Kim. “Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 43, no. 4, 2013, pp. 509–533., https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312713483893.

Mallory, Chaone. “What's in a Name? in Defense of Ecofeminism (Not Ecological Feminisms, Feminist Ecology, or Gender and the Environment): Or ‘Why Ecofeminism Need Not Be Ecofeminine—but so What If It Is?’” Ethics and the Environment, vol. 23, no. 2, 2018, p. 11., https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.23.2.03.

García-Del Moral, Paulina. “The Murders of Indigenous Women in Canada as Feminicides: Toward a Decolonial Intersectional Reconceptualization of Femicide.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 929–954., https://doi.org/10.1086/696692.

Hawken, Paul. Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Penguin Books, 2021.

“Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools/ The Residential School Experience” Facing History and Ourselves https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-4/punishment-and-abuse

Tucker, Lorna, director. AMA. 8 Dec. 2018.