Violence Against Native Women Has Colonial Roots: Understanding today's violence against Native American women requires confronting our brutal past.

• Author: Whyatt, Robin

Native American women in the United States are currently experiencing a crisis of violence and sexual abuse.

They go missing by the thousands and at rates considerably higher than those of white women, although with less media attention. In one study by the Sovereign Bodies Institute involving 2,306 missing women and girls, more than half were homicide victims.

The case of Kimberly Bearclaw Iron provides a heartbreaking example of this tragedy. She grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, but went missing in September 2020 from her home in Billings, Montana, leaving behind her three children. She was twenty-one years old and a devoted mother. After several days, she called her dad from Nevada in tears, desperate to get home, although she did not give her location. She continued to call her dad occasionally over the next month--always from an untraceable number and on speakerphone, which disconnected abruptly. She never answered when he would call back. She would tell her dad she was OK, but he did not believe her. He felt something was definitely wrong. Then the calls stopped.

Her family fears she is a victim of sex trafficking. While Native Americans make up only 1.1 percent of the U.S. population, they have been shown to comprise a much larger share of sex trafficking victims in several states. Iron is still missing.

More than half of Native American women experience sexual violence at some point during their lifetimes, and one out of three are raped. On some reservations, people say they do not know a single woman who has not been raped, and they tell their daughters what to do when--not if--they are raped, according to legal scholar and advocate Sarah Deer. Most disturbing: Non-Indigenous perpetrators commit an estimated 86-96 percent of the sexual abuse of Native women and are rarely brought to justice. Amnesty International concludes that this is due to the "complex interrelation between federal, state, and tribal jurisdictions that undermines tribal authority and often allows perpetrators to evade justice." The trauma from the current state of abuse is devastating.

Violence against and sexual abuse of Native American women was almost unheard of in traditional societies. Prior to colonization, Indigenous women in what became the United States were honored and were essential to maintaining tribal cultures. As a Cheyenne proverb states, a tribal nation is "not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground."

During European colonization, however, the rampant sexual abuse and murder of Native women constituted an integral strategy of conquest and genocide. Amnesty International and other organizations assert that this strategy normalized and now fuels today's high rate of violence against and sexual abuse of Native American women, as well as the impunity enjoyed by their attackers. Native American women are still experiencing the brutality of colonization.

The systematic rape of Native women began with the Spanish. During Columbus's 1492 voyage to the Caribbean, Taino women were raped. Columbus's second voyage in 1493 was larger, with seventeen ships carrying 1,200 soldiers, sailors, and Catholic friars. Arriving on the island that Columbus renamed Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the troops were said to have gone wild, raping Native women and killing, torturing, and enslaving Native peoples with extraordinary brutality.

According to historian David E. Stannard, Native women were "gambled away in card...