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| Photo copyright Wings, 2013. 2014; all rights reserved. |
Author's Note: This piece first appeared as the second of a two-part series at Daily Kos on September 8, 2013, as part of the RaceGender DiscrimiNATION diary series there. Since this is Women's History Month, and since indigenous women remain invisible to the dominant culture except as cartoon characters and subjects for appropriation, it seemed an apt time to run them again. What follows is Part II; Part I appeared here yesterday.
In Part I, I wrote about the escalating rates of rape and other violence inflicted on Native women in and around the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota — a deadly byproduct of the new colonial invasion of Indian land courtesy of the fracking companies drilling in the Bakken oil shale reserve. Last Monday, I posted a companion piece in last week's edition of "New Day: This Week In American Indian News.", noting that it would be expanded into a full-length diary today, covering the story of the colonialist trafficking in the bodies and spirits of indigenous women in the shipping lanes separating the U.S. and Canada. As I said last time:
This series is, among other things, about the intersectionality of race and gender in this country's culture, both historical and contemporary.Intersectionality is simply a fact of being, of existence, for women of color. Every moment of our lives is lived at a crossroads.
Sometimes, the four roads don't lead outward, but rather, inward — toward a vortex of interrelated and competing risks, benefits, calculations, interests, slings and arrows and aggressions micro and macro and everything in between.
Today, I'm going to talk about four very specific roads:
Objectifying. Commodifying. Targeting. Trafficking.
It's spectrum and linear progression, crossroads and vortex.
It's destroying indigenous women's lives.
And today, these watery crossroads meet at a very specific vortex: a whirlpool of colonialist sexual violence in the boundary waters of the Great Lakes.
Author's Note: At the outset, readers need to be aware of the content of this piece. Much of what follows deals with stories of extreme physical, psychological, and sexual violence and human trafficking. If any of these issues presents a trigger for you, you may not wish to read further.Of course, this one is also an old, old story, and even in its latest incarnation, it's been around for several years now. Unfortunately, it's been mostly women who have done the reporting of it so far, particularly Native women. Which means, of course, that it's gotten virtually no attention in the mainstream.
Much as I loathe Bill Maher's casual racism and sexism, his new multimedia project, VICE, has the capacity to change that: A white man is reporting this story now, for an "edgy" media outlet founded and run by another, much more famous white man. The CBC has also now picked up the story. So I'm grabbing this opportunity.
For what?
To bring attention to the fact that our women, our girls — our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our very selves — are being sold into the sexual slavery of human trafficking. Right here. In the U.S. and Canada. In the boundary waters separating the two countries, just as they are in the filthy, gritty oilfield towns of the Northern Plains.
Indian women are being raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, and worse — on a daily basis, and in an organized way.
And it has to stop.
So how did we get here, at the center of this colonialist crossroads, this toxic medicine wheel of Manifest Destiny?
I'm sure that there are many more than four sets of dynamics involved — endless layers upon layers of historical trauma and monstrous harm leaching into each other like the layers of a rotted onion. But there are four that are readily identifiable, and they manifest themselves in the stories of these 105 women — and all the other women and girls and children whose stories have not yet been uncovered, much less told.
Note: Scattered throughout each subsection are relevant statistics and quotes from the women themselves. Each comes from the same source. Each is included to bring focus to the content of that subsection in a way that keeps the women themselves at the center.
OBJECTIFYING
One advantage of small, organic, indigenous cultures is that they are sometimes able to arise, grow, and thrive in the relative absence of social stratification and the objectification that occurs as a natural result. This is not to say that such social structures are characteristic of all, or even most, such cultures, but it is (and was) possible in a way that highly structured European societies, and especially colonialist, imperialist societies, were (and are) not. Even cultures with highly specific gender roles are not necessarily guilty of objectifying women; the mere existence of gender roles, culturally defined, that have arisen organically amidst culture and environment do not, without more, imply objectification, subjugation, or discrimination, despite the best efforts of some branches of contemporary thought to insist that they do.
This is true of a number of North America's indigenous cultures: Some societies were (are) matrilineal, with heritage passed through the mother; some were (are) matriarchal, with women controlling the fundamental power structure. In some tribal nations, women held the power of wealth, property, family and clan management, and sometimes even the overall power of tribal governance and rule. And while externally applied labels like "matriarchal" and "matrilineal" are often of limited utility in understanding the complex set of interrelationships that constitute the cultural and societal structure of any given tribal nation, it is also true that even in societies that, from a European worldview, seem to vest power in the men, women often held (hold) many forms of power in important ways that kept (keep) the culture in balance. In some cases, this is reflected in the very fluidity of gender roles and identity, since for many peoples, gender identity and sexual orientation were widely accepted as a spectrum, not a box.
But the first of many successive waves of invaders from the East brought with them their own cultures from across the Atlantic — cultures marked by rigid social strata that involved the objectification of numerous categories and classes of its members, including women at all levels. It was [and is] a culture built on capitalism and colonialism that privileges the violent taking of wealth, land, and women's bodies. It was [and is] a set of worldviews, of inherent systems of social classification, that would prove fatal to untold numbers of indigenous cultures, and would do wholesale, genocidal violence to the women of many of those cultures that did survive the onslaught.
Racism was an emotionally damaging element in these women's lives and a source of ongoing stress.From the moment of European contact, indigenous peoples have been objectified in myriad ways. Most obvious, of course, is as "Other," "The Other," the initial dehumanization from which all else proceeds. We didn't look like white men and women (although, of course, we did in every fundamental way; the differences were merely ones of hue and shading). We didn't wear their restrictive clothing. We didn't eat their foods. We didn't practice their forms of art. We didn't speak their tongues. We didn't worship their god.
We must not be fully human. And look! Red-brown skin. Surely evidence of the Mark of Cain, or at least of Ham. Perhaps it was Ham after all, since we had a tendency to dress in practical terms, which meant fewer layers of clothing in the warmer seasons and climates. [Yes, some white systems of religious belief apply both the Mark of Cain and the Curse of Ham exclusively to people of African ancestry, as a racist way of explaining black skin. But in some others, the object of the mark, or the curse, was similarly imposed upon Indians. Colonization is much easier on the conscience when the colonizer can feel justified in theft, rape, slaughter, and genocide via the knowledge that the objects "deserved it."]
Primitive. Savage. Not fully human.
Once a culture can convince itself of that kind of moral superiority, all else flows easily from that point.
And while the invaders might be able to respect the men for their practical skills or warrior ethos — and, yes, for their essential manhood, that dignity and automatic degree of authority conferred by the existence of a few inches of erectile tissue — women were subjected to all the prejudices endured by European women, with the added burden of their perceived essential inhumanity, as well.
"After you get into prostitution, you get used to it; it’s like using the bathroom. You don’t think about it after a while, it takes all your feeling of being a woman away."COMMODIFYING
Commodification of Indians and Indian culture is likewise as old as contact, but it has seen a dramatic upsurge over the last century, and especially over the last forty years.
Historical accounts show that European men looked at Native cultures as things, objectified, something for them to try on, use, treat as they wished, and ultimately discard. Custer was a perfect example of early commodification of indigenous culture: He "admired" "the Indian" to such an extent that he played at being one - in the common parlance of the time, he "went Indian."
He didn't, of course. He was never anything but a racist white killer who appropriated other peoples' very being for himself. But he loved to play dress-up in buckskin and fringe, and loved similarly to "wear" Native women, taking female prisoners of war as his personal sexual and domestic slaves.
"A john said to me, 'I thought we killed all of you'."The exploits of George Armstrong Custer and that old Indian killer Lewis Cass, architect of genocide sanitized as "removal," and the all too many others like them, found their way into the mainstream consciousness in the following century with help from Hollywood. John Wayne, racist extraordinaire, and his peers popularized the white cowboy hero of old Westerns, and John Ford made his name (and established an entire genre of pop culture) on the backs of wholly inaccurate, wholly racist tropes and stereotypes about American Indians.
Indian women were universally "squaws," despite that term and its variants being used only by a handful of tribal nations whose languages are found specific branches of the Algonquin language tree. And, of course, the "squaws" were the broadest and most objectified of stereotypes: from the virginal-in-death primitive purity of a Little White Dove to the hypersexualized wanton women who dressed indecently and welcomed too many men to their blankets to the meek scullery slaves who were likewise slaves to rape and abuse, Native women were never portrayed as fully [respectably] human, much less as fully [respectably] women.
62% saw a connection between prostitution and colonization, and explained that the devaluation of women in prostitution was identical to the colonizing devaluation of Native people.Then came the '60s and the appropriative white gaze under the guise of "honor" and "respect," with the invasive theft and the cultural violence of the faux-shaman movements, which took commodification of Native cultures to its logical and destructive end. We now have people of all-European ancestry running around in faux "Indian" regalia, carrying stolen eagle feathers, pretending to be "chiefs" and "pipe carriers," and "keepers of sacred bundles," not one of whom has the slightest thing to do with anything actually Indian - and, of course, charging huge sums of money to spread their virulent sacrilege, including those in cult environments that promote rape and sexual abuse and poisonous faux "sweat lodges" that leave people dead. None of these is benign: All attempt to colonize cultures and identities that are not their own. Some are more obviously problematic than others, involving people with so-called white "supremacist" beliefs and ties to neo-Nazi movements. The more dangerous ones are the ones that pretend to be liberal, that pretend to honor and respect Native cultures and traditions, all while exploiting them ruthlessly, stealing them blind, and then all too frequently shouting "Reverse racism!" and worse every time an actual Native person has the temerity to point out what they are really doing.
Little wonder, then, that mainstream culture has rushed to keep up, with its Disneyfied Pocahontas costume for Mitt Romney's white daughter-in-law and its Paul Frank powwow monkeys and its Victoria's Secret floor-trailing warbonnets on white women wearing next to nothing and its white women's Hipster/hipster "Navajo panties."
And, of course, none of this even begins to address the multibillion-dollar annual industry of racist mascots in major league and college sports. The nadir, of course, is the D.C.-based team with the unapologetically racist series of owners who are proud of the pain and harm they inflict with the use of a genocidal racist slur as their corporate enterprise's "mascot." [No, don't bother raising the issue of the supposed Virginia Indian chief who supports the racism. Not only is he no "chief"; the fraudulent bigot isn't even Indian.] A dominant culture that can redefine willful use of a genocidal slur as "honor" and "respect" when it applies to the Native male warrior ethos its supposedly so admires will experience not the slightest cognitive dissonance over objectifying Native women in the most violent of ways.
There is a pattern here.
When popular culture finds it hip and edgy to dress white women in sexually-revealing pieces of fabric that get slapped with an "Indian" label, what message does that send about the Indian women themselves to whom the broader culture mentally applies such images — and therefore, from whom it believes, accurately or not, itself to be taking them?
TARGETING
Popular culture makes an appearance here, too. I've harped on this before, and I know it's thirty years old and people are tired of it, but nonetheless, it's still a cultural icon in certain circles of the dominant culture. It's an old Atari video game called "Custer's Revenge."
In it, the protagonist plays a U.S. Army officer. His goal is to get to an Indian "squaw." Oh, did I mention that the Indian woman is tied up, a captive, and that his objective is to rape her?
Oh, and did I also mention that it's been remade as an underground version and rereleased, five short years ago?
"When a man looks at a prostitute and a Native woman, he looks at them the same: 'dirty'."Of course, considering what the consistently misinterpreted and misapplied word "squaw" came to mean over the years (it's a racialized slur for women's genitalia, of the four-letter variety beginning with "c," but applied solely to Indian women), and the link between its white-given meaning and what was done with our female ancestors' genitalia in the aftermath of massacres, the links should be unmistakable.
92% had been raped.The fact that the white male-dominated culture so thoroughly stripped Native women of their very humanity, to say nothing of their bodily sovereignty, autonomy, agency, shows that it's really no leap at all from to regarding Native women as appropriate objects for rape and abuse.
And raped and abused they are, at far greater rates than any other ethnic group in the country - and, unlike all other ethnic groups, mostly by men outside of their own (their attackers are 86% non-Indian; more than 70% are white).
84% had been physically assaulted in prostitution. 72% suffered traumatic brain injuries in prostitution.Indigenous women are targets.
In last week's Part I, I reprised my earlier work in this area. I'm going to reproduce it here: first, for those who missed it the first several times around; and second, because to understand what follows, you need to understand the foundation that underlies it. This is that foundation, and we all need to be reminded of it until we can cite the statistics from memory and put them in front of politicians and policymakers at every available opportunity.
I've written about this topic more times than I can count. Truth be told, I'm tired of it. But as long as Native women remain targets, it has to be done.
I am not, however, going to reinvent the wheel. I've previously done a thorough dissection of the statistics, and I'm going to reproduce it here. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years — physical violence against their people's tribal council.
A Legacy of Conquest
In nearly 500 years of contact, rape has been part of a deliberate strategy of war, conquest, and annihilation of Native peoples. It was not uncommon for European settlers to assault Indian women on an individual (or group) basis, but more than that, rape was one of many weapons in the U.S. government's arsenal as it executed its policies of Manifest Destiny and Indian removal.
Of course, the written record is sparse with regard to rape of Native women. To the victors who kept the records, we were not important –- we weren't even fully human. But our memories are long, and our oral traditions strong, and the stories are handed down from generation to generation.
. . .
This behavior was not unusual. To a patriarchal culture that regarded Indians as something less than human, the ability to rape Native women with impunity was seen as nothing more than their due –- the spoils of conquest and colonialism. And they violated, despoiled, and stole our grandmothers' bodies and souls in the same way that they violated, despoiled, and stole the body and soul of Akii, our Mother Earth.
Amplifying Violence
There's a significant and deadly difference in rape statistics as they relate to Native women:
Among rape victims in the general population, 74% report being physically battered in additional ways during the commission of the rape. For Native women, that number jumps to 90%.
Among the general population, 30% of rape victims report sustaining other physical injuries, in addition to the rape itself. Among Native women, that number is 50%.
Roughly 11% of rape victims as a whole report that their rapist used a weapon. For Native women, that number more than triples, to 34%.
Taken in historical context, and coupled with the fact that 86% of all rapes of Native women are committed by non-Indians, it's hard to escape the conclusion that something even more insidious is at work here.
Eluding Jurisdiction
Most rape survivors are attacked by a member of their own racial or ethnic group: In other words, white women tend to be sexually assaulted by white men, African American women by African American men, etc. The one group for whom this rule does not hold is Native American women. As noted above, more than 86 percent of Native rape survivors are attacked by non-Indians, (more than 70 percent of whom are white).
Why does this matter?
It matters because, until [2010], the vast majority of Native women rape survivors had little or no legal recourse: Even where the victim is a tribal member, tribal authorities have had no jurisdiction over non-Native defendants. With limited exceptions, only federal authorities have had jurisdiction to arrest and prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on tribal lands -- and historically, cases involving violence against Native women have received little to no attention. As I've noted elsewhere, "[f]ederal authorities routinely decline to prosecute more than 50 percent of all violent crimes committed in Indian Country; the rate of declination is much higher for sexual assault cases."
And even the passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act is insufficient to control the epidemic of violence. This year's renewal of the Violence Against Women Act [VAWA] will help, but as the preceding passage shows, in places like Fort Berthold, it won't even put a visible dent in the problem. The scope is too great; the resources are too few. Even fewer are those resources known as political interest, political will, and political clout. Dalrymple and his cronies in Congress, the state legislature, and the energy companies have none of the first two; indigenous women have none of the third.
And increasingly, they're losing the most fundamental of resources that would help them to avoid such situations.
Resources like, oh, say, a home.The relevance of these statistics will become clear below. So will that of the contributing factors like homelessness. But it's a whole much greater — much worse — than the sum of its parts, one so multilayered, so complex, and firmly entrenched that it beggars description, much less solutions.
TRAFFICKING
Once you've established that a particular group of individuals can permissibly be treated as a group of objects; that they and their cultures and their very identities are fungible things that can be turned in cheap knock-offs for sale and purchase and use and discarding by the dominant culture; that they are acceptably regarded as a target, whether for cultural and commercial exploitation or for violent assault . . . what's next?
Why, making money, of course. Lots of money. For members of the dominant culture at the expense of the objects, the commodities, the targets.
Trafficking.
And so we reach today's pass, where violent white men traffic in the very bodies and souls and spirits of indigenous women in the most invasive of ways, reprising their colonial history of alleged Manifest Destiny across a landscape of Native women's raped and tortured bodies and spirits.
In 2011, University of Minnesota-Duluth Master's candidate Christine Stark (Anishinaabe/ Cherokee) co-wrote a paper for the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition [MIWSAC] on Minnesota's indigenous women being forced into human trafficking [.pdf]. Entitled Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota, the report was a joint project with Prostitution Research and Education [PRE]. It sought to explore the links between the high incidence of homelessness, poverty, and sexual violence and the rates of human trafficking among Native women in Minnesota.
It reads like a cross between a dissertation and a memorandum of law (apt, since it was published through the William Mitchell College of Law).
Except, of course, for the graphic stories of sexual violence. And the pain and desolation of the women whose stories are told.
There's nothing academic about that.
The report's background sections explore the historical backdrop against which contemporary trafficking of Native women must be evaluated.
Prostitution is another form of this egregious violence against Native women. An honest review of history indicates that European system of prostitution was imposed by force on tribal communities through nearly every point of contact between Europeans and Native people. It is essential to understand the history of this trafficking of Native women in order to reduce the epidemic of sexual violence against them (Deer, 2010). Yet most research on violence against Native women in the United States fails to include prostitution and sex trafficking as forms of sexual violence. Neither a 2007 Amnesty International report about sexual assault perpetrated against Native American women in the United States nor a 2010 report on sexual violence against Native American women (Bachman, Zaykowski, Lanier, Poteyeva, & Kallmyer, 2010) addressed prostitution and sex trafficking.The report included interviews with 105 Native women who had been subjected to trafficking, including prostitution and rape. What came out of those interviews is nearly indescribable in its brutality, rendered all the more so by the flatness of affect that comes through in the report's pages.
The statistics, which echo those summarized above, ring all too terribly true:
• 79% of the women we interviewed had been sexually abused as children by an average of 4 perpetrators.• More than two-thirds of the 105 women had family members who had attended boarding schools.
• 92% had been raped.
• 48% had been used by more than 200 sex buyers during their lifetimes. 16% had been used by at least 900 sex buyers.
• 84% had been physically assaulted in prostitution.
• 72% suffered traumatic brain injuries in prostitution
• 98% were currently or previously homeless.
Of course, adequate health care is rarely available or accessible to women caught in the web of human trafficking anyway. But the problem of access to healing, in terms of both physical and mental health, are magnified in untold numbers of ways when for women of color of cultural backgrounds very different from that of the dominant society.
• 33% spoke of Native cultural or spiritual practices as an important part of who they were.
• 52% had PTSD at the time of the interview, a rate that is in the range of PTSD among combat veterans. 71% had symptoms of dissociation.
• 80% had used outpatient substance abuse services. Many felt that they would have been helped even more by inpatient treatment. 77% had used homeless shelters. 65% had used domestic violence services. 33% had used sexual assault services.
• 92% wanted to escape prostitution.
• Their most frequently stated needs were for individual counseling (75%) and peer support (73%), reflecting a need for their unique experiences as Native women in prostitution to be heard and seen by people who care about them. Two thirds needed housing and vocational counseling.
• Many of the women felt they owed their survival to Native cultural practices. Most wanted access to Native healing approaches integrated with a range of mainstream services.
And in their own words:
"[My culture] doesn’t put you around drugs or alcohol. It teaches you different values. It gives you belonging and faith."
But such resources are few and far between. And for women who are, as one report put it, "disappeared" for indeterminate periods of time into the bowels of cargo and container ships to provide sexual services to the men, any such resources might as well be on the other side of planet. Either way, they're equally inaccessible.
CROSSROADS, BOUNDARY WATERS, AND WATERY TRADING POSTS
According to VICE reporter Dave Dean:
Through the process of researching and writing this report, Stark kept hearing stories of trafficking in the harbors and on the freighters of Duluth and Thunder Bay. The numerous stories and the gradual realization that this was an issue decades, perhaps centuries, in the making, compelled Stark to delve further into what exactly was taking place.She found the women. Hundreds of them.
They called them "boat whores."
In an article written for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Stark describes one disturbing anecdote of an Anishinaabe woman who had just left a shelter after being beaten by her pimp—who was a wealthy, white family man. He paid her bills, rent, and the essentials for her children, but on weekends, "brought up other white men from the cities for prostitution with Native women… he had her role play the racist 'Indian maiden and European colonizer' myth with him during sex."I had to stop reading at that point. Just for a while.
When I picked up where I left off, I learned that the trade in sexual slavery is no longer confined to adult indigenous women; young Native girls and boys, and even babies, are reportedly being sold as sexual commodities to be "owned," however briefly, and used.
[Ms. Stark] told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. the Duluth port has been well-known among First Nations people for generations as a place where women, teenage girls and boys, and even babies are trafficked.
"The women and children -- and I've even had women talk about a couple of babies brought onto the ships and sold to the men on ships -- are being sold or are exchanging sex for alcohol, a place to stay, drugs, money and so forth," Stark said. "It's quite shocking.
"I have spoken with a woman who was brought down from Thunder Bay on the ships and talks about an excessive amount of trafficking between Canada and the Duluth-Superior harbor. There is a very strong link between Thunder Bay and Duluth."The numbers — in this one milieu alone — are staggering:
At the time of these interviews, more than a third (37%) of the women had been used by more than 500 men who bought them for sexual use. Eleven percent had been used by 500-900 men; 16% of the women had been used in prostitution by 900-1000 men. At a most basic level, these numbers provide a crude index of the harms perpetrated against these Native women in Minnesota prostitution.
Prostitution is intergenerational (Pierce, 2009). Fifty-seven percent of the 105 women we interviewed had family members also involved in prostitution. These included cousins, sisters, mothers, aunts, nieces, and daughters. Brothers and fathers, possibly involved in pimping, were also mentioned. Fifty-eight percent of the women's families knew about their prostitution and in 43% of those instances, the families had tried to help the women get out of prostitution.It's also intergenerational in another sense:
Duluth police in 2002 found evidence that three traffickers had prostituted up to 10 women and girls on foreign ships in the port. Collin (2011) noted that approximately 1,000 ships a year dock at the Duluth harbor and also described reports of women and children trafficked to ships' crews who are disappeared for months before returning. Intergenerational harms persist in that some girls whose mothers were prostituted on the boats were conceived during prostitution (Baran, 2009) [emphasis added].And the damage spreads in all directions, before and after, outward and inward. Ms. stark, one of the authors of the 2011 report, knows this all too well. Just last month, she wrote of how it haunts her daily — the brutal matter-of-factness of the women's stories, the casualness with which society concerns itself with whether they live or die:
"I’ve been raped my whole life. What else do you want to know?"
A trafficked Anishinaabe woman in her late 50s said this to me during an interview in Duluth. She was 4 the first time she was raped. As one of five women who interviewed 105 Native trafficked women in Minnesota for the report “Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota,” I hear her words reverberate in my mind.
I think of her. I wonder if she is OK. I wonder if she is still alive. I still feel her pain and desperation that began at such a young age and continued through decades of abuse and degradation in prostitution as an adult.
Wondering if she is still alive is not hyperbole. It’s realistic. The United States doesn’t compile the numbers, but a Canadian study found that women and girls who are prostituted have a 40 times higher death rate than those who are not.
A serial killer in Oklahoma has preyed on Native trafficked women. In Minnesota, one woman we were to interview died the day before we were to meet with her. Another trafficked Native woman was killed and her body dumped along Interstate 394 in Minneapolis. She had just turned 18. Murder. Suicide. Drug overdoses. Beatings. Rapes.
I've said over and over again that we are the Invisible People, the Forgotten Ones. Dispensable and disposable. To be used and abused and dumped like trash by the side of an interstate highway. And barely more than a child, by any calculus.
The women's own words — the piece still mostly missing from existing coverage of this story — are soul-searing:
"It’s like incest — no one wants to talk about it."
"As far as I’m concerned, all prostitution is rape."
Or, as in the above story of the eighteen-year-old woman, "It's like homicide."
"Prostitution is dangerous. It's like suicide."
Ms. Stark is not done. She's in the process of interviewing another fifteen people, specifically to bring to light what happens aboard the ships. Because despite efforts to sustain ignorance by public officials like the Thunder Bay Police Department spokesperson, who "said he was unaware of sex traffic on ships between his city and Duluth," officials know that it's happening. From the initial report, two years ago:
Duluth police in 2002 found evidence that three traffickers had prostituted up to 10 women and girls on foreign ships in the port. Collin (2011) noted that approximately 1,000 ships a year dock at the Duluth harbor and also described reports of women and children trafficked to ships' crews who are disappeared for months before returning. Intergenerational harms persist in that some girls whose mothers were prostituted on the boats were conceived during prostitution (Baran, 2009).Her latest update is due out sometime this month.
As I've said throughout, none of this is new. It's been known for years. Beyond the few women doing the reporting and trying to help the women get out, no one has cared.
Kezia Picard, the director of policy and research for the Ontario Native Women's Association [ONWA], notes that her organization has long received anecdotal reports of such human trafficking.
"The reason that indigenous women and girls are sometimes trafficked has to do with all of these ongoing issues like poverty," she said. "Another one of the large risk factors for indigenous women and girls is the lack of housing ... women will sometimes engage in survival sex, not of their choice, in order to have somewhere to live."Let's be clear: "Survival sex" is not consensual. Not in the slightest. It's the unspeakable lack of options that women have been forced throughout history to endure just to stay alive long enough to try to get out. But it's not a "choice" in any accepted sense of the the term that involves agency, autonomy, sovereignty. And it's not consent to the brutality inflicted on these women (to say nothing of the children, who by definition cannot consent).
And it has to stop.
Not one more child.
Not one more girl.
Not one more woman.
Copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014, 2014; all rights reserved.
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