Invisibility, Appropriation, Erasure, and Racism: When Mainstream "Violence Against Women" Activists Do Violence to Native Women. #NoMore #MMIW

Photo copyright Wings and Aji, 2015;
all rights reserved.

The photo above is of myself. I own it, both rights and identity. That's something that should not have to be said, but it does.

This post will ramble a little, or a lot. I want those who read it to see what it's like, to the limited extent possible, to live in our moccasins, just for a brief moment. I want you to feel what we feel, and to do that, you're going to need to travel a winding road to get there. As always, we speak only for ourselves, but by the same token, only we speak for ourselves. So take my hand, and let's visit what for most of you will be another country, another world entirely.

I'm going to talk today a lot today about identity: about personal autonomy and sovereignty; about intersections and crossroads; about respect or racism; about being an ally or being a thief. Yes, thief: Appropriator, exploiter, user, all of those fit, but what it all boils down to is theft. And what that boils down to, among other things, is another, particularly insidious form of racism and fundamental disrespect.

And today, it's all boiling over on Twitter, as — yet again — another white woman who styles herself a feminist, an activist, and no doubt an anti-racist engages in vicious racism and sexism against women of color, specifically, indigenous women.

This post is about many things, among them Rosie O'Donnell and Eve Ensler, the casual racism and dismissiveness of V-Day and OneBillionRising, the colonialist mindset of certain self-appointed "leaders" in the vanguard of the dominant culture's "feminist" movement.

Or, as Wings said this morning: "It's the same old thing, nothing changes; white people take from Natives, without asking and without credit, and use it to promote themselves." 

It's also about US: the indigenous women of this continent; our sovereignty, our autonomy, our very identities; about our sisters, erased and rendered invisible in literal as well as metaphorical terms in the public discourse — the missing and murdered indigenous women for whom the hashtag #MMIW was created, and whose lives and memories Native women activists are forcing back into the light of day on February 14th.


Yes, Valentine's Day. It's a logical choice, and an inspired one. On a day when the dominant culture celebrates romantic love (and those without it curse the hours), it's a perfect time to capitalize on the symbolism and imagery to force the dominant culture to see the problem of domestic and intimate partner violence, of sexual violence, of the abduction and trafficking and torture and murder of our women, now a crisis of epidemic proportions (as it has been for a long time, actually).

More years ago now than I like to remember, I conceived and began using two separate memes: "invisible minority," to refer to us Natives (after one time too many of hearing our supposedly "liberal" and "anti-racist" allies refer, in official capacities, to race issues as affecting "African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian American," with absolutely no thought of our very existence) ; and "dominant culture," to refer to the white world (because, face it, American culture IS white culture, by default — by its very definition colonialist, and therefore saturating everything it touches). At the time, all those years ago, I was the only person I knew who used them. After Wings and I met, he picked them up, too. And slowly, I began seeing them appear elsewhere: in some cases, springing organically from like minds who were seeing the same things I was seeing; in others, borrowed, or more often, appropriated, without asking and without credit, as is the norm. [And to be clear, I am not saying that I am the only one who conceived either phrase and used it on my own; I am saying that at the time I began using them, I was the only person in any of my circles who did. That was, of course, a long time ago.]

We both have long experience with this invisibility, and with this erasure, beginning with family histories and being ripped away from our identities and cultures in different ways. We've both had our work stolen, and lately, too, most recently in the service of a self-promoting racist fraud. And I, as a woman, have long since been accustomed to dominant-culture attempts to strip me of my history, my work, my words, my very identity and lived experience. [Not all of those attempts, by the way, come from white men, although they do still come from the dominant culture. I'll let you figure that one out for yourself.] 

All of this is by way of saying that, in our world, it's not at all unusual to realize that, when something terrible happens to Native people, Native people are really the only ones who care. And so it is, and has been, with our missing and murdered indigenous women.

What that means is that the lead in bringing these women's identities and stories to light has been assumed entirely by Native women themselves. Indeed, as with the anti-KXL movement, it was First Nations women in Canada, nearly a quarter-century ago now, who first took up the staff and the drum and the song and the prayers and put themselves out there on the line to protect the Sacred Feminine of our world: our women and Mother Earth alike. They were soon followed by Native activists from this side of the U.S./Canada border, but let us make absolutely no mistake: Both movements were and are led by indigenous activists. [Yes, it's true, despite the fact, as I was surprised to learn in recent weeks, that the new version of the anti-KXL protest narrative gives all credit to white lawyers and ranchers on this side of the border for "launching" the movement. Oh, yes, I'll have more on that later, never fear.] 

I wrote about the #MMIW movement on the blog at Wings's site last Friday. I placed it in the context of the groundswell of Native support for two upcoming events led by Indian women, including a public event at North Dakota State University on February 9th, and a march in Fargo, North Dakota, on February 14th. Some of the activists have been working on an art piece to accompany the programs at both events: a collection of 1,181 Native-made single earrings, each one-half of a pair, to symbolize the [reported and recorded to date] 1,181 missing and murdered indigenous women on Turtle Island. If you want to know why the choice of single earrings was so perfect, my post here will give you a hint. And let's also be clear: The choice of February 14th for the #MMIW movement predates Ensler's V-Day (or indeed, her presence in pop-culture discourse) by a good long while; Native women have been marching on Valentine's Day for this explicit purpose for nearly a quarter of a century, since 1991.

So, what's the problem?

Well, Eve Ensler, she of The Vagina Monologues fame, schedules her own V-Day/OneBillionRising events for February 14th. [Get it? V-Day? Valentine's Day and Vagina Day. So clever.] And Rosie O'Donnell, official FoE [Friend of Eve], has been flogging the work of the woman Rosie herself refers to as her "hero" all day today. And when questioned by a Native woman activist, she responded with unreconstructed racism.

Now, let's get a few things out of the way. I don't care for Eve Ensler; never have. Yes, I saw her solo version of The Vagina Monologues when I lived on the East Coast, not in its first year, but when it was still new enough not to qualify yet as some sort of cultural institution. It was . . . okay. There were parts of it that I thought bordered nigh on brilliance, and there were parts of it that I thought were frankly abysmal, even from an artistic standpoint. But the biggest reason for my . . . lukewarm, shall we say, response was her treatment (and lack thereof) of women of color.

This is an old problem for Ensler. It's also one from which she appears to have learned less than nothing.

I'm not going to go into great depth here; there's enough out there on the Internet alone on the topic of Ensler's racial and cultural insensitivities to fill several university libraries with dissertations for decades to come. I'm also not going to vet every source that I link here for every perceived infirmity that Ensler's supporters and dominant-culture critics might find; those are not the point. The point is that she has a long history of swinging wildly between ignoring the actual lived experiences and voices of women of color and appropriating them to promote herself. Neither is acceptable to me, and it shouldn't be to any activist who considers her- or himself an ally of women of color. 

As I said, this is an old problem. Here, I'm only going to review the last four years or so; they provide more than enough examples. We begin with Tahira Khalid, who wrote about her own discomfort with Ensler's templates back in 2011:

I wanted to think that the show was a great thing, a wonderful thing, but I began to resent the words I was memorizing. I know that the majority of Eve Ensler’s monologues are based off of interviews, but I could not help but feel that they were so…presumptuous and self-indulgent. I didn’t truly understand how Eve Ensler could imagine what it might be like to be a Bosnian woman during ethnic cleansing or a woman during the reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I don’t even know how Eve Ensler imagined a vocabulary or a language for these experiences that she hasn’t had. 

Unfortunately, the same is true for I am an Emotional Creature. There are multiple pieces about girls living in horrific situations around the world. There’s a victim of sex trafficking in Sofia, Bulgaria. There’s a suicide bomber in Ramallah, Palestine. There’s a girl working in a factory in Kwai Yong, China and a girl who has experienced FGC in Cairo, Egypt and more. Eve Ensler explains her ability to write by noting the following at the beginning of the book: 

These monologues are not interviews. Each monologue is a literary text inspired by traveling the world, by witnessing events, by listening to real and imagined conversations. On occasion a monologue was inspired by an article, an experience, a memory, a dream, a wish, an image or a moment of grief or rage.

When one is presuming to speak for someone else, even with that person's informed consent, there is a damn near sacred obligation to get it right. All the more so when one is an extraordinarily privileged white woman presuming to speak for the most essential experiences of women of color.

I actually have no idea whether any of the people Ensler describes even exists. I have to confess that I suspect many (most? all?) are manufactured of whole cloth, in the service of her personal project and the "story" that she wants to tell. If that's actually the case, then she has betrayed every one of the women she spoke to, those whose narratives she mined for personal use and self-promotion.

These misgivings on my part are more than borne out by subsequent behaviors, unfortunately.

In 2013, a Pakistani woman activist, Maryam Arain, took on Ensler's approach to "speaking for" women of other cultures and ethnicities, and the inherent dangers of such practices:

When you consider books like Half the Sky, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and mainstream news more generally, it becomes easily discernable how women of color in parts of the so-called ‘developing’ world are consistently represented as victims of monolithic, ‘backwards’ cultures. Much like the white savior industrial complex that has developed in light of human rights discourses in contemporary politics, a feminist savior industrial complex has sprung out of mainstream attempts to address international women’s issues. 

Images of women as victims of violence and oppression abroad elicit pity in Western readers for their non-Western female counterparts. Pity, as opposed to compassion, depends on a hierarchy of experience whereby we, as Western, sometimes white, feminist-minded consumers, observe the experiences of women around the world as not only outside of ourselves, but also below our own. Subconsciously, or even consciously for some, we begin to assume that “our” culture here in the west is better than theirs; we forget to acknowledge that cultures are neither monolithic nor completely isolated.

Ms. Arain is especially well situated to level such criticisms, since she grew up in the U.S., in a devout Muslim household, wearing hijab in an American high school. And she grew up in the world defined at the insistence of the world's one superpower by 9/11, so for her, the inherent dangers of pretending to speak for, impersonating, appropriating from, or caricaturing Muslim and South Asian/MiddleEastern cultures bespeaks very real dangers that the rest of us can't really even begin to conceive. So when she says this:

The kind of orientalization that we do to these cultures, a simultaneous exoticization (us versus them) and subjugation (‘well, we’re better than that’), feeds into political structures of dominance that give way to colonialism and war. When people become angry and backlash against Western cultural and political interventions with religious extremism and violence, we suddenly dehistoricize the issue and gasp at their ‘backwardsness.’ The mythical binary of West versus East, first critically analyzed by Edward Said in his 1978 classic Orientalism, fuels much of the hatred and narrow-mindedness that exists in today’s international political climate. 

Mainstream feminisms unknowingly perpetuate this harmful binary and its ingrained hierarchy by offering images of women’s oppression without nuance and without demanding self-awareness. Indeed, the type of feminism that V-Day epitomizes, and that many other women’s organizations unfortunately embody, does not ask us to recognize the privileges that exist beside our diverse experiences with oppression. It does not ask us to engage in dialogue with ourselves about how our privileges might subjugate others. It does not ask us to recognize our own complicity in mechanisms of power that give way to misogyny in other parts of the world.

it is not my role to rationalize, to excuse, to dismiss, to wave away. It is manifestly my role to stop, to shut up and listen, to do my best to internalize a lesson that is not my own experience but which she nevertheless is patiently trying to teach me. And then, to act appropriately in accordance with the lesson taught.

Besides, as Natives, we know a little — a lot, actually — about that whole exoticization/dehistoricization/backwardness-ization thing of which she speaks.

In 2013, Black women activists registered their disgust with Ensler's then-new and shiny article, The Congo Stigmata. I hadn't seen it at the time (probably good, considering what was up in my own life right then), but reading now, I can barely get through it. "Disgust" is nowhere near a strong enough word. Nor is repulsion, nor revulsion. It's the sort of appropriative, exploitative, white-privileged ordure that makes me want to gouge my eyes out. 

Calling the effects of her uterine cancer "Congo Stigmata" (and that not even original to her, but bestowed by a white male friend). Describing her particular instance of cancer as "spiritual." Writing like the finest in New Age twinkies of how she's "always been drawn to holes," comparing the "holes" of her medical issues, cured by plenty of money enabling full access to the best that Western medicine has to offer, with the "holes" of the women of Congo whose bodies have been torn apart by rape as an act of war. 

Worse, she then describes her travels to Congo, where, she says, "I needed to see a fistula," and she pressures women and medical personnel there to let her "sit in on" a repair operation. There is little that I find so worthy of scorn as the objectifying of others' pain for one's own gain. And to use words to describe the violence done to this woman's body like "awed," to describe the "hole" as "perfect," to rape this woman yet again with her own gaze by "peer[ing] into her vagina" . . . reading it, I feel like vomiting. Truly. And to top it all off with a photo of herself in traditional Congolese dress? 

There is a phrase that perfectly describes the sort of person who engages in such behavior. If I were to use it, it would then be used to derail the entire post. So I'll just use the clinical term: This is narcissism, in perhaps its purest and most exploitative form. 

Black women activists (and activists of many other backgrounds) were appalled. The author of the blog Everyday Victim Blaming systematically took apart Ensler's shameful paean to herself at the expense of others, brick by brick. She listed only a few of those bricks, while making it clear that her concerns extended much further:

1. The appropriation of the experiences of Congolese women to promote her campaign. 
2. The use of medical procedures as a form of entertainment.
3. Consent: both in terms of wondering if Ensler had consent from the woman whose operation she witnessed and the appropriateness of consent considering the implications of power imbalances.
4. The glorification of the damage caused by gang rape to the bodies of Congolese Women.
5. The dehumanisation of Congolese women.

And she's far from the only one. Writer and activist Mikki Kendall used storify to compile Tweets on Ensler's piece, and they need to be read to give a clear picture of just how violative women found it. And the author of the Prison Culture blog was a comprehensive critic, deconstructing Ensler's "discoveries" of various forms and venues of violence against women:

Once again, Ensler’s readers are left to wonder how such questions “have arisen.” Who has been agitating to include these questions in mainstream anti-violence considerations and interventions? Just as the criticisms of the collusion between mainstream anti-violence advocates and the state are unattributed by Ensler so too does she erase the collective action that has forced the insertion of a transformative justice lens for addressing harm and violence. In addition, the “we” of whom Ensler speaks is undefined. This it seems is intentional because Ensler has positioned herself at the center of global anti-violence organizing where she gets to ‘learn’ from indigenous women through world traveling. For example, Ensler mentions her insipiration for launching One Billion Rising as being Congolese women:

On February 14, 2013 millions of people rose up and danced in 207 countries with our campaign One Billion Rising. It turns out that dancing, as the women of Congo taught me, is a most formidable, liberating and transformative energy. 

It’s instructive that Ensler chose to be inspired by Congolese women’s dancing rather than their years of painstaking and dangerous community and political organizing against violence and for economic justice. Congolese women have been annexed to Ensler’s One Billion Rising campaign. One has to ask, how this happens? How does one become subsumed under the One Billion Rising campaign umbrella? If one Congolese woman dances, must all Congolese women dance too? 

She goes on to quote a Congolese woman who objected, forcefully, to Ensler's appropriation of her and her sisters' lives and pain for flagrant self-promotion, noting wryly, “Imagine someone doing that to [H]olocaust survivors." In this case, the word "that" refers to telling Congolese women to transcend the violation and horror inflicted upon them by . . . dancing. Now, to be clear, many indigenous cultures around the world, including some of ours, use traditional dance for healing purposes. But for a wealthy white American woman to go to Congo armed with such trite and tragic "advice?" I'll use that word again: Shameful.

But all this is before we get to her exploitation and betrayal of indigenous women on this continent.

To understand today's racist outburst by Ensler fan and friend Rosie O'Donnell, we have to go back in time two full years, to the year when Ensler decided that she was going to "save" #MMIW, our missing and murdered indigenous women.  

As CUNY professor and host of Racism Review Jessie Daniels noted last Valentine's Day:

For more than 20 years, Indigenous Women in Canada have led Women’s Memorial Marches to signify the strength of decolonization and the power of Indigenous Women’s leadership. Known as the “Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women” (#MMIW), the commemoration has its origins in tragic events of January 1991 a woman was murdered on Powell Street in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories. Her murder in particular acted as a catalyst and  February 14 became a day of remembrance and mourning. This year marches are held across the lands and each march reflects the nuances and complexities of the particular region with the common goals of expressing, community, compassion, and connection for all women. February 14 marks a day to protest the forces of colonization, misogyny, poverty, racism and to celebrate survival, resistance, struggle and solidarity and to make visible these forces and women’s resistance.

In other words, not only is the tactic of using Valentine's Day to highlight the terrible toll of violence against women something not new, it was actually first conceived and executed by indigenous women. Native women know this, of course, but the dominant culture doesn't. The dominant culture thinks such organized action begins and ends with Ensler and her wholly owned subsidiaries V-Day and OneBillionRising.

Worse still, however, was Ensler's group's own execution of their appropriation of the day for her campaigns.

To understand the full violation of Ensler's behavior, we have to turn to Lauren Chief Elk, Native woman activist and founder of Save Wiyabi. Ms. Chief Elk objected, strongly, to the Ensler group's conduct in stealing (yes, stealing) the image of an actual, real, live indigenous woman and twisting that image to fit their warped worldview. And, of course, to make money for their cause. And, also of course, beyond that, for their own personal self-aggrandizement.

After some back and forth, Ms. Chief Elk published An Open Letter to Eve Ensler on her Tumblr account, and the controversy exploded into the open. One excerpt:

Your organization took a photo of Ashley Callingbull, and used it to promote V-Day Canada and One Billion Rising, without her consent. You then wrote the word “vanishing” on the photo, and implied that Indigenous women are disappearing, and inherently suggested that we are in some type of dire need of your saving. You then said that Indigenous women were V-Day Canada’s “spotlight”. V-Day completely ignored the fact that February 14th is an iconic day for Indigenous women in Canada, and marches, vigils, and rallies had already been happening for decades to honor the missing and murdered Indigenous women. You repeatedly in our conversation insisted that you had absolutely no idea that these events were already taking place. So then, what were you spotlighting? When Kelleigh brought up that it was problematic for you to be completely unaware that this date is important to the women you’re spotlighting, your managing director Cecile Lipworth became extremely defensive and responded with “Well, every date on the Calendar has importance.” This is not an acceptable response.

It got worse, of course.

Ensler's employee[s] in charge of the group's Facebook account began deleting all posts by Native women objecting to her theft of Ms. Callingbull's identity, and of the efforts of Native women across Turtle Island. Giving voice to the voiceless? Fighting violence? No, Ensler and her employees attempted to silence the voices of the actual women who were the subject of the whole controversy, and thereby inflicted further violence against them.

Ms. Chief Elk pulled no punches:

This is something that Indigenous women constantly face. This erasure of identity and white, colonial, feminism is in fact, a form of violence against us. The exploitation and cultural appropriation creates and excuses the violence done to us.

When I told you that your white, colonial, feminism is hurting us, you started crying. Eve, you are not the victim here. This is also part of the pattern which is a problem: Indigenous women are constantly trying to explain all of these issues, and are constantly met with “Why are you attacking me?!” This is not being a good ally.

You asked me what would it mean to be a good ally. It would have meant stepping back, giving up the V-Day platform, and attending the marches and vigils. It would have meant putting aside the One Billion Rising privilege and participating in what the Indigenous women felt was important.

She also noted that, less than a day after asking how they could correct the problem, Ensler went on The View to announce that her own cancer treatment was a "shamanistic exercise." Talk about a giveaway . . . . And, no, I don't mean our cultures' sort of "giveaway." 

The upshot is that Ensler's ultimate response, apparently, had been to "invite" Ms. Chief Elk to "join V-Day." Whoosh.

As a result, Native women in [at least] two countries began boycotting V-Day and OneBillionRising. We have refused to dance on the white woman's command, and rightly so: This is not a minstrel show, and we are #notyourNatives, #notyourdancers, #notyourmascots, #notyourMMIW. Instead, indigenous women have joined forces, in numbers stronger and spirit fiercer than ever, and danced our own dances.

Still, white primacy and Great White Saviorism will not be denied.

Today, comedian and talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell issued a series of hagiographic Tweets canonizing her friend and "hero," Ensler, exhorting everyone to "JOIN US FOR ONE BILLION RISING !!! [sic]."

Another woman activist apparently challenged O'Donnell on the basis of Ensler's abysmal record with indigenous women, as brought to light by Lauren Chief Elk (this activist's Tweets are protected, no doubt in no small part because of the harassment she's received for being outspoken). O'Donnell's response?

Misogyny. Victim-blaming and -shaming. And then a series of Tweets aimed directly at Lauren Chief Elk, including referring to her dismissively, and with all the racism that this nation's legacy of white colonialism has to offer, as "Chief."

I've written here and elsewhere, at some length, as to why calling Indians "Chief" is inappropriate. True anti-racist activists get that already. And so they let O'Donnell know that calling Ms. Chief Elk "Chief" was not merely wrong, but racist. Her response?

This is only the one that I could still find easily in her Twitter feed (it appears that the deletion gremlins have been at their appointed duties, from what I can tell).

It is not remotely possible that a woman as educated, as wealthy, and as privileged as Rosie O'Donnell has no concept of Native names. It is likewise not believable that she, as a lesbian, has no understanding of concepts of intersectionality. So what, then, can we conclude from her barrage of nasty and vitriolic race-based Tweets this morning?

There really only is one conclusion that can reasonably be drawn. And, yes, intent is irrelevant, but here, the intent is pretty damn plain. The newly-minted hashtag #RacistRosie? As far as I can tell, it's wholly accurate.

Also as far as I can tell, Ensler hasn't bothered to speak out against her hero-worshiping friend's appalling racism. And I don't expect that she'll get around to it, either — unless, of course, she can find a way to make it all about her. 

Perhaps she can find some awe, some spiritual stigmata, some "perfect" "holes" in the racism directed at Lauren Chief Elk and other Native women today.

But I have neither time nor patience for such racism in the phony New Age guise of "shamanistic exercises," and I will not stand by while she and Ms. O'Donnell attempt to erase Native women into invisibility. And that includes our missing and murdered indigenous women.

#NoMore #MMIW.




Except as otherwise noted by links, quotes, and context, all content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner. The copyright owners of the quoted content likewise retain all rights in their own work.