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The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America
| Title | The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-10-13 08:19:42 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award Despite what major media sources say, violence against Native women is not an epidemic. An epidemic is biological and blameless. Violence against Native women is historical and political, bounded by oppression and colonial violence. This book, like all of Sarah Deer’s work, is aimed at engaging the problem head-on—and ending it.The Beginning and End of Rape collects and expands the powerful writings in which Deer, who played a crucial role in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, has advocated for cultural and legal reforms to protect Native women from endemic sexual violence and abuse. Deer provides a clear historical overview of rape and sex trafficking in North America, paying particular attention to the gendered legacy of colonialism in tribal nations—a truth largely overlooked or minimized by Native and non-Native observers. She faces this legacy directly, articulating strategies for Native communities and tribal nations seeking redress. In a damning critique of federal law that has accommodated rape by destroying tribal legal systems, she describes how tribal self-determination efforts of the twenty-first century can be leveraged to eradicate violence against women. Her work bridges the gap between Indian law and feminist thinking by explaining how intersectional approaches are vital to addressing the rape of Native women.Grounded in historical, cultural, and legal realities, both Native and non-Native, these essays point to the possibility of actual and positive change in a world where Native women are systematically undervalued, left unprotected, and hurt. Deer draws on her extensive experiences in advocacy and activism to present specific, practical recommendations and plans of action for making the world safer for all. Read more
Review
This book is amazing. I have been introduced to the concept of rape as a tool of colonization, but this book really delved into this concept and helped to finalize a lot of broad things I had previously read/learned. This book also offered some semblance of understanding for me as well - my mother's family is Native, and I can trace back the sexual abuses the women in my family have suffered to stories of my great-great-grandmother, and those are just the stories that I know. My great-grandmother was forced into the awful era of boarding schools, where she was repeatedly victimized (in fact, I don't know if she ever had a man in her life who did not assault her), and she definitely had the mindset that Sarah Deer talks about of "Just don't talk about what happened, because it will make everything worse" - when my grandmother was raped by my great-grandmother's [white] husband, she told my grandmother to try and forget it had ever happened. I can even trace this to the way my own sexual victimizations have been treated by the women in my life - and it was interesting to understand this treatment through the lens that Deer discusses in her book. This was an absolutely amazing book, and it has helped me understand the history of my family through a different lens.
