Readings 9/22/08

"Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide" by Andrea Smith

Chapter One: Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide

This article was extremely difficult for me to read. I have a habit of putting my overactive imagination to work while reading to bring me into the story the author is trying to get across, which in this situation was very emotional for me. The extremely vivid pictures painted by the authors - and the sources she uses - were more than effective in illustrating how brutal the colonizing forces were in their abuse of women as a way to complete their take-over of everything else. It is one thing to "know" about the violence inflicted on entire populations, and another to be confronted with it. It was extremely powerful, and I am glad the author was that up front with her audience.

I learned a lot in this reading. One of the most astonishing to me was the quote on page 19, that said, "Furthermore, 70 percent of tribes did not practice war at all. For those that did engage in war, the intent was generally not to annihilate the enemy, but to accrue honor through bravery" (Smith, 19). I feel like that is one misconception people have about the history of Native Americans; they feel like the groups fought between each other all the time, so what's the difference between that and what the settlers did? The answer is immense and complicated, which I have a problem explaining to people who have this mindset. The idea of fighting for honor, not for some kind of immediate monetary gain (or some other kind of advantage) is something we do not really have in our society where there is always something we want, they have, etc. Also, the idea that there were hundreds (if not thousands) different groups and so cannot be so easily put into the "they" category is difficult for some people to comprehend.

Changing Ones, Chapter One and Two

Will Roscoe

These chapters set up the idea of gender and sexuality as we see them for what they are; they are socially constructed by the culture and people in that culture. Therefore, the idea that things have always been the way they are now is not only arrogant, it is blatantly untrue. No matter how revisionist our history books, people who we would call transgender (in the Native community two-spirit or some other term) have existed all over North America in practically every society that Western society documented. In many cultures, the people settlers and explorers called berdaches (which are now referred to as two-spirit) were seen in many cultures as either nothing out of the ordinary (and by that I mean it was not unusual for villages or families to have two-spirit people in their community) or very special people full of power, sometimes shamans or in other community-respected positions of power.

The pictures in the book were fastinating, especially the one on page 29 featuring Osh-Tisch. Not only is that section of the book a particularly interesting view into the life of a two-spirit member of the Native community, I love how the story is from the 1900's. One thing I feel people do with this kind of subject is relegate it to the past, which creates this invisibility around the Native community today that is hard to break through. This goes double for the Native queer community, which is alienated from society both because of their ethnic idendity as well as their gender identity and/or sexual orientation. It is time to discard the notion of the two-spirit as an antiquated part of North American, but instead an aspect of history that has carried into the 21st century, with it its own set of challenges and joys to be recongized for what they are today, not how we saw them 200 years ago.