Mukai – Round 6
1AC
Contention One: Their Stories
105 Native sex workers were interviewed and their stories were published
anonymously--- findings illustrate the ways in which colonialism is inextricably
tied to prostitution and how social stigmas are the largest contributors to the
violence these womyn face
Farely et al. ’11
[Melissa Farley Nicole Matthews Sarah Deer Guadalupe Lopez Christine Stark Eileen Hudon
Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota]
A majority of the women we interviewed (62%) saw the connection between colonization and
prostitution of Native women. Some women observed the profound inequality produced by
both institutions. One way of understanding colonization is that it removed Native peoples'
life options, with prostitution being one of the few options left for some women.
“I’m doing what I can to survive, just the way Native Americans did what they
could to survive with what was given to them by the government: disease,
alcohol, violence.”
Other women described the common losses of basic human rights resulting from colonization
and from prostitution: loss of traditional ways of living, loss of social status, and loss of selfrespect.
“The living conditions. I see a connection to poverty and public housing. I’m put
down anyway, so why not prostitution? I’m called a ‘squaw’, so why not?”
Several women explained that the concepts of sexism and prostitution were unfamiliar to
Native people until contact with colonists. For example,
“Our Native people weren’t aware of anything about prostitution until the
British came and started raping our Native women and had them as slaves and
using them for sex.”
Another woman said that white European colonists brought with them a “culture of
prostitution” and imposed it on Native women. Another woman saw the sexism of colonists
toward their own women and compared it to prostitution.
“The way that the white people treated their women is the same way that
pimps treat their hoes. And then Native men started treating us like that.”
Others saw the commonality between colonization and prostitution of Native women in the
desire to subordinate another person.
“It’s how they treat you. Like cowboys and Indians. They’d rape the women and
take them and sell them. Just like Black people and slavery. We’re not supposed
to have anything. Not supposed to say anything. Not supposed to look them in
the eye or be disrespectful.”
When discussing their cultural identities, racism was mentioned by some interviewees.
Several women were frustrated that not only did they experience racism from non-Native
Americans (one woman was called "dirty Indian" by white European American women), but
they also experienced racism from their own communities. Several women said that because
they were "mixed race" and not full-blooded Indians, members of their own communities
rejected them. One woman who sought help on her reservation was rejected because her
daughter appeared too "white." Several women felt alienated from all communities:
“I identify as Native when johns call me a Black bitch. I tell my Native sisters
that you can’t treat me bad because you look like a full Native and I don’t. I’m
half Native too and we should all get along and love each other and help each
other. You can’t treat somebody different just because they look different. I’m
just as much this part as that part, even though I’m separated out as African or
Black. Don’t cut me up and divide me in half. Respect me as a woman, as a
whole person. Give me my props. Give me my worth."
Race and ethnic prejudice is integral to prostitution. Sex buyers purchase women in
prostitution on the basis of the buyer's ethnic stereotypes; in this study, stereotypes about
Native women.
“When a man looks at a prostitute and a Native woman, he looks at them the
same: ‘dirty’.”
Forty-two percent of the prostituted women we interviewed had been racially insulted by sex
buyers and/or pimps. The racist verbal abuse (savage, squaw) was linked to sexist verbal
abuse (whore, slut). Racist generalizations about alcohol abuse were common. Hatred of the
women's skin color was reflected in comments such as
“Why don’t you go back to the rez – go wash the brown off you.”
These racist remarks were the ones that could be written down. Some were unprintable. For
some sex buyers, the racist degradation was sexually arousing and was integral to his sexual
use of Native women. Native American women were fetishized as exotic others. One woman
we interviewed described johns' obsessive attraction to Native women.
“It was taboo to be with a Native woman. When guys asked my ethnicity and I
said [Native], they wanted to come right there on the spot."
In some cases, johns wanted to role-play colonist and colonized as part of prostitution,
“He likes my hair down and sometimes he calls me Pocahontas. He likes to role
play like that. He wants me to call him John”
The process of colonization, one woman said, reduced Native women to commodities to be
bought and used. She saw the same commodification in today's sexual objectification of
Native women.
“You can’t walk down the streets anymore because they’re pulling people over
asking ‘how much you worth?’”
Another native womyn said that“Women like myself need someone they feel they can trust without being
judged by how they lived their life. We didn’t wake up and choose to become a
whore or a hooker or a 'ho as they call us. We need someone to understand
where we came from and how we lived and that half of us were raped, beat,
and made to sell our bodies. We need people with hearts.”
Monica, a member of the Metis Nation, indicates“Being racialized… has kept me silent to the systemic abuse I’ve experienced
due to not being validated as a person. It has allowed me to be silent to the
physical and sexual abuse I’ve experience by clients, society, lovers due to not
being believed or [with the belief that] I perpetrated it. The experience has led
me to speak out .. about the injustice women of colour, immigrant, and migrant
sex works experience through policy brutality. It has also pushed me as an
advocate to make sex work and trans a platform to bring awareness, inclusion,
and accessibility to many communities and services”
Contention Two: Our Method
The dominant narrative of native sex workers and the native womyn is that of
uncleanliness and unchasity- this narrative places womyn in a position of sexual
slavery within the settler state- a reconstruction of Native womanhood is the
first act of complete decolonization
Gibson ‘03
[Lisa, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, “Innocence and purity vs.
deviance and immorality: the spaces of prostitution in Nepal and Canada,” September 03, pg.
36-49//wyo-hdm]
Although it is impossible to verify, most authors maintain that prostitution among Aboriginal communities did not
exist before contact with the Europeans, but rather developed in conjunction with
colonisation (Armstrong 1996; Carter 1997; Fox-Povey 2003). However, early records of the sex trade between
Aboriginal communities and Europeans demonstrate the pervasiveness of the ‘squaw’
stereotypes in defining male sailor’s experiences of the New World. In his examination of the sex trade
between the Nuu-chah-nulth and Europeans at Nootka Sound on Canada’s west coast in the eighteenth century, Fox-Povey (2003) references the
journals of sailors who visited the area. Stereotypes
of uncleanliness and unchastity are replicated
throughout these narratives and several men describe the process of sailors stripping and
washing Aboriginal women on board ships. One sailor describes ‘taking as much pleasure in
cleansing a naked young Woman from all Impurities in a Tub of Warm Water, as a young
Confessor would to absolve a beautiful Virgin who was about to sacrifice that name to
himself’ (cited in Fox-Povey 2003: 5). It is an attempt to transform the ‘squaw’ into the ‘Indian princess’
to rationalize his sexual relations with her. Although Fox-Povey (2003) states that most of these women were
‘sex slaves’, he also acknowledges that some women were working as prostitutes under their
own agency. However, in his description of the Nuu-chah-nulth women as slaves with ‘no choice’, ‘no pay’ and ‘no power’ (6), Fox-Povey fails to
interrogate the ways in which women may have been engaged in resistance even within the confines of
their ‘sexual slavery’. Even this account of the sex trade replicates the tendency of the trafficking discourse to equate sex slavery with
prostitution.¶ Much of the historical documentation of Aboriginal women’s engagement in sex
work has tended to understand sex work within a particular ideological framework that
mirrors trafficking discourses. Carter (1997) documents a Cree chief of the Edmonton area who in 1883 complained to the Prime
Minister that young women were being ‘reduced to prostitution’ because of starvation, a practice
that was unheard of before colonisation (187). The implicit definition of sex work as negative
seems to permeate understanding of prostitution in the colonial context. Carter (1997)
documents how after 1885, there was a concerted effort by the NWMP and government
officials to confine Aboriginal women to reserves through the introduction of a pass system in
order to keep women ‘of abandoned character who were there for the worst purposes’ (Carter
1997: 187) out of towns and villages. Aboriginal women who were seen in towns and villages were assumed
to be working as prostitutes. Thus the social exclusion that Aboriginal women working as
prostitutes faced became translated into a physical exclusion. The Indian Act also legislated
control of Aboriginal women classified as prostitutes which made their prosecution much
easier than white women working in the sex trade (Backhouse 1985). Although such legal methods of discrimination
have been abolished, the historical basis of subordination continues to influence spatial relations today.¶ Today, Aboriginal women continue to face
limited economic options in reserves, while they must contend with racist stereotypes in the off-reserve system. In
the search for work
in a culture which ascribes particular identities to Aboriginal women, Razack (2002) notes that the Stroll
often becomes the only possibility for employment. In the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, a notorious ‘skid row’ of
Canada, the high numbers of Aboriginal women sex workers has become normalised. In
Vancouver, often the only contact that non-Aboriginal people have with Aboriginal women is
in the Downtown Eastside, a reality that reinforces racist and sexist stereotypes of the
‘squaw’. However, in assuming that prostitution arises out of desperation and lack of choice,
there is the danger in reinforcing the image of the prostitute as ‘victim’ . Poverty and lack of
choice are not conditions inherent to sex work, as noted by Pheterson (1986), but rather to the unequal
social relations of race, class and gender that Aboriginal women face. It is the racialised
‘whore stigma’ in the context of prostitution, rather than the actual sex work itself that has
had a far more damaging effect on Aboriginal women sex workers. Although many Badi women
and most Aboriginal women do not work in the sex trade, even those that do cannot be assumed
to be either victims of patriarchy or, alternately, the embodiment of evil. The space of
prostitution may also act as a space of resistance. As Law (2000) argues, sex workers may negotiate
the tension between their ‘free will to enter prostitution and the constraints that make this
particular type of employment an opportunity for them’ (121). Thus, it is not exclusively a site of oppression. Anne
McClintock (1994) describes the incongruities that play out in the act of sex work in the following way: ¶ The moment of paying a
female prostitute is structured around a paradox. The client touches the prostitute’s hand in a
fleeting moment of physical intimacy in the exchange of cash, a ritual exchange that confirms
and guarantees each time the man’s apparent economic mastery over the woman’s sexuality,
work, and time. At the same time, however, the moment of paying confirms precisely the opposite: the
man’s dependence on the woman’s sexual power and skill. (106)¶ Still, it is vital to recognise that
sex work may be the only source of income available for many of these women, particularly
when discursive and material conditions normalise their identities as prostitutes. For Badi women who
have few options available and for whom prostitution is constructed as a ‘social norm’ (Cox 1992), sex work is an important means
of economic survival for a group who is already extremely marginalised as ‘untouchable’. For
Aboriginal women sex workers, sex work again may be one of the few means of generating an
income for themselves or their families against a backdrop of continued colonisation which
has brought about far greater levels of poverty than in the rest of society. ‘Choice’ is then
mediated by various material and symbolic limitations. However, in portraying women as mere
victims, we deny the agency they may be exercising, even within the constraints of their
oppressive and often violent circumstances . We also deny their active resistance.¶ The
different politics of physical space and discursive constructions limit the life choices and
empowerment possibilities of Aboriginal and Badi women in differing and similar ways. Although
the ‘first world’-‘third world’ binary may not accurately define global and local power relations, Badi women do have less access to wealth,
development, than Aboriginal women in Canada. They are also much smaller in number and have been discursively defined as much more
homogenous. Moreover, they face very ingrained understandings of caste and understandings of the country as inevitably underdeveloped. The
reductionist understanding of prostitution as represented in the dominant trafficking
discourse has significantly limited the empowerment options of Badi women because Nepali NGOs focus almost
entirely on ‘victims of trafficking’. Empowerment is not thought to be possible for sex workers. At the same time, because it is has been assumed that
all Badi women will certainly become prostitutes, they are not seen as having any other life choices, though women within the community are
beginning to dispute this assumption. Gurung (2002) documents several young Badi women who are enrolled in various higher education programs
with the goal of challenging the boundaries around their accepted professions. However, because many Nepali NGOs are dominated by middle class
women who have been socialised into the acceptance of Brahmin-Chettri norms, the NGO sector needs to examine the ways it may be reproducing
particular forms of social exclusion. While many of these women may reject the caste system, Brahmin-Chettri norms may still inform their
understanding of gender and sexuality, such as in the case of Maiti Nepal. ¶ For
many Aboriginal women, writing has
become a powerful form of resistance and means of self-empowerment. In the social
movements for the reclamation of cultural traditions and Native identity that have been
taking place since the 1960s, Aboriginal women have been active in what Anderson (2000) terms the
‘reconstruction of Native womanhood’ through the process of ‘resistance-reclamationconstruction-action’. As teachers, filmmakers, authors, grandmothers and leaders of various Native women’s organisations,
Aboriginal women are actively reclaiming their Native womanhood . It is a movement arising
out of the direct experiences of the women who are involved in the movement. As Eschle (2001)
writes, it is those who are located materially, socially, historically and politically in subordinate positions that have critical insight into relations of power
and strategies for change. Thus,
it is vital that the paths of resistance, agency and action arise from those
who experientially understand such the intricacies of unequal social relations of race, class,
caste and gender.
Although the numbers and diversity of Aboriginal women is far greater than of Badi women,
Aboriginal
women may share their strategies for shaping a better future and reclaiming their identities
as strong and powerful women with Badi women. In this way, global solidarities can become important
for the journeys of resistance-reclamation-construction-action for all groups who share similar experiences of
oppression.
Thus, Hunter and I affirm a decolonization of settler sexuality by subverting the
Indian Princess/ Squaw binary
Our performance centers the discussion of native sex workers on their
resistance stories — only by hearing the stories of native sex workers can we
begin to disrupt the discourses of colonialism that allow for the disposability of
native womyn through the indian princess / squaw dichotomy
Hunt ’13
[Sarah, PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. Her current
research examines how Canadial law and Indigenous law are being used to address the
normalization of violence against Indigenous people in BC and how “law and “violence” are
understood in these relations of legal pluralism. She has worked as a community-based
resaecher and advocate in Indigenous communities across British Columbia. A member of the
Kwagiulth Band of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, “Decolonizing Sex Work: Developing an
Intersectional Indigenous Approach,” Selling Sex: experience, advocacy, and research on sexx
work in Canada, pg. 87-88//wyo-hdm]
At a material level, colonial ideologies in Canada came to be rendered real through law, violent acts of dispossession, and grounded
and embodied colonialism. The Indian Act is one way that colonial ideologies became, quite literally, the law of the land. Colonial
measures were justified partially through depicting Indigenous women as lewd and licentious,
as colonial agents worked to legitimize the constraints placed on their activities and
movements (Carter 1993). In some areas, this included a pass system in which Indigenous women
must obtain permission from Indian Agents (federal employees) to leave their reserves (RCAP 1996).
This 1885 measure, which kept Indigenous women away from cities, was justified by fears of white settlers
and government agents that they would bring their supposed immorality to virtuous white
women or end up working as prostitutes. The confinement of First Nations on Canadian reserves remained until
about the 1950s, when Indigenous people began moving to urban areas in efforts to access resources and opportunities. The
connection between First Nations people and reserves is determined by the Indian Act, which funnels resources and rights through
bands and their reserve lands.¶ Violence and sex were also intertwined through colonialism and the Indian Act, as is evident in the
widespread sexual and physical abuse in church-run residential schools.3 Indeed, as Smith (2005, 12) writes, "The
extent to
which Native peoples are not seen as 'real' people in the larger colonial discourse indicates
the success of sexual violence, among other racist and colonialist forces, in destroying the
perceived humanity of Native peoples." In the early days of Canadian colonialism and settlement, Indigenous women
were partners of white men, fulfilling a reproductive and familial role until the arrival of European women. However, the sexual
availability of Indigenous women became seen as a threat when greater numbers of European women immigrated to Canada, and in
1921, the House of Commons considered a Criminal Code amendment that would make it an offence for any white man to have "illicit
connection" with an Indigenous woman (Carter 1993). Thus, ideas about Indigenous women were linked to the powerful technologies
of the law, as "officials propagated an image of Aboriginal women as dissolute, as the bearers of sinister influences, to deflect
criticism from government agents and policies" (ibid., 150). The legacy of colonialism lives on, as poverty and unsettled land claims
shape the lives of Indigenous people to this day, with First Nations band governance defined and overseen by Ottawa. Interpersonal
violence is just one of the ongoing manifestations of Canada's colonial relationship with Indigenous people. Although they cannot
replace experiential knowledge, statistics do shed light on these violent realities. In the 2004 General Social Survey on Victimization,
4 in 10 self-identified Aboriginal people aged fifteen and over reported that they were victimized at least once in the past year
(Brzozowski, Taylor-Butts, and Johnson 2006).4 This proportion was well above the level of 2.8 out of 10 for non-Indigenous
Canadians. In the same study, Aboriginal people were three times more likely than other Canadians to be victims of violent crime,
specifically sexual assault, robbery, and physical assault; this trend was highest among people aged fifteen to thirty-four, which was
2.5 times higher than for other age groups. The 2009 General Social Survey found that Aboriginal women were three times more
likely to be victims of violence than non-Indigenous women (Brennan 2011), with 13 percent of Indigenous women reporting violence
in the previous year. The mortality rate due to violence is three times higher for Indigenous women than for non-Indigenous women, a
rate that rises to five times higher for the twenty-five- to forty-four-year-old age group (HealthCanada 2000).¶ Indigenous
people have responded to the racist and sexist stereotypes and the realities of violence in our
communities through writing, art, advocacy, and other acts of resistance. A number of Indigenous
women writers have spoken back to the stereotypes of squaw, Indian princess, and sexually
available brown woman, as well as the violence justified by these images of us (see Acoose 1995;
Dumont 1996; Maracle 1996).¶ But has Indigenous women's refusal of these sexual stereotypes resulted in simultaneously distancing
ourselves from women who are working in the sex trade? We
need to examine the moralistic stance against sex
work, and the conflation of sex work with exploitation, to see how we have internalized both
this stereotype and its opposite. Although resistance to degrading and dehumanizing stereotypes of Indigenous people is
important, it is simultaneously essential to look at how our responses affect - or fail to affect - the material
reality of violence. In discussions about colonial violence, Indigenous sex workers are often
invoked as voiceless, placeless victims, in memory of past injustices. The remembering and calls for
justice are important, but the conversation must not stop there. We need to move away from
positioning ourselves as advocates for, and saviours of, some disempowered sister-Other and instead facilitate a process that
centres the voices of sex workers themselves. Otherwise we risk reproducing the discourses
of colonialism that constitute Indigenous women as without agency.
The process of colonization translated the virgin/whore dichotomy into the
Indian princess/squaw binary—this inherent sexualization has normalized all
violence against native womyn, and the stigmatization of native prostitutes has
resulted in the dehumanization and psychological and sexual violence of all
native womyn
Gibson ‘03
[Lisa, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, “Innocence and purity vs.
deviance and immorality: the spaces of prostitution in Nepal and Canada,” September 03, pg.
36-49//wyo-hdm]
As I have shown in the previous sections, the colonisation of Canada was dependent on the imposition of European norms of
morality, behaviour and racist hierarchies. Because European
explorers came to understand the ‘New World’
according to their familiar terms of reference, the construction of ‘the Aboriginal woman’
came to reflect the pre-existing virgin- whore dichotomy that operated to control the
behaviour and socialisation of European women. In the context of racialised, sexualised and
classed ideologies of the Euro-Canadians, the virgin- whore dichotomy became translated into the
dichotomous framing of the ‘Indian princess’ and the ‘squaw’, a construction that continues to
place boundaries around the representations of Aboriginal women.¶ Rayna Green’s (1975)
examination of the ‘Pocahontas Perplex’ traces the construction of the Indian ‘queen’ and
‘princess’, and the subsequent ‘squaw’ which emerged as her contrary identity. Green (1975) argues
that from 1575 until 1765, the image of the bare-breasted, Amazonian Native American Queen
reigned as the familiar Mother-Goddess figure which embodied ‘the opulence and peril of the
New World’ (702). The Queen’s daughter, the Princess surfaces at the end of the eighteenth century when the colonies begin
to move towards independence, and is younger, leaner, and framed as Brittannia’s daughter. The princess becomes distinctly
Caucasian, though her skin colour is slightly darker than her white counterparts, and she is portrayed as virginal, exotic, submissive
and less Latin than her mother. The
legend of Pocahontas, the Indian woman who saved John Smith
from a supposedly torturous death has become the quintessential ‘Indian princess’. Her
subsequent marriage to John Rolfe and move to England exemplify the requirements of the
‘Indian princess’ in rejecting her own culture, embracing the white man’s sense of morality
and rescuing or helping the white man (Green 1975). In fact, the model ‘Indian princess’ is not really
Indian at all. As Acoose (1995) argues, ‘before a so-called good Christian white man could have
relations with an “Indian” woman...she had to be elevated beyond an ordinary Indigenous
woman’s status...[S]uch Indian women were thus accorded the status of royalty’ (43). Thus the
‘Indian princess’ not only justified white relations with Aboriginal women but also fed into
what Klein and Ackerman (1995) call the ‘self-deceptive lure of royalty’ through which white
settlers could express pride in their ‘royal’ Indian ancestry. However, the death of Pocahontas in England in
1617 is rarely part of the story (Klein and Ackerman 1995: 6)¶ The ‘squaw’ is the darker counterpart to the
‘Indian princess’ and the more common identity ascribed to Aboriginal women. Emma Laroque, a
Métis woman scholar has commented that:¶ The portrayal of the squaw is one of the most degraded,
most despised and most dehumanized anywhere in the world. The ‘squaw’ is the female
counterpart to the Indian male ‘savage’ and as such she has no human face; she is lustful,
immoral, unfeeling and dirty. Such grotesque dehumanization has rendered all Native
women and girls vulnerable to gross physical, psychological and sexual violence ... (in Manitoba
1991: vol.1, ch.6)¶ The image of the ‘squaw’ is constructed through tales of ‘Indian whores [and]
their alcoholic and sexual excesses with white trappers and hunters’ (Green 1975: 711). Even visual
representations of the ‘squaw’ portray her as darker and more ‘Indian’ than her counterpart
(ibid). Green describes how ‘the presence of overt and realised sexuality converts the image from
positive to negative’ (Green 1975: 711), or from the ‘Indian princess’ to the ‘squaw’. This sexualised
understanding of the ‘Indian woman’ in the colonial context served very specific purposes,
particularly in providing a justification for white men’s sexual deviance. As Acoose (1995) argues, the
‘lustful’ nature of the ‘squaw’ became a way of resolving the conflict between a Christian
sense of morality and the European desire for Aboriginal women. Moreover, the moral reform
movement of the 1880s also exploited images of the dirty ‘squaw’ ‘in an effort to keep the
races segregated and to keep the white race pure’ (Anderson 2000: 104). This corresponded to the
institution of the virgin-whore dichotomies in Victorian England through such legal
mechanisms as the Contagious Diseases Acts. In the same way that the Contagious Diseases
Acts threatened any woman who behaved like a prostitute (Walkowitz 1980), the ‘squaw’ identity
threatens to define all Aboriginal women as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ through expressions of
sexuality. Even Pocahontas, particularly Walt Disney’s version, is presented as oversexualised, an image
that has become a controlling metaphor for the experience of all Aboriginal women. It is her
sexuality, constructed through tropes of race, that defines whether the Aboriginal woman fits
into the good category or the bad.¶ Sarah Carter (1997) examines how the stereotype of the squaw was
systematically embedded in the Canadian west in the late nineteenth century in order to
clarify boundaries as social and geographical space was marked out. Following the Red River Rebellion of
1885, Aboriginal women were depicted as lewd and licentious, particularly in the press, in order
to legitimate constraints placed on the movement of Aboriginal women off-reserve. Moreover,
the deplorable state of housing, lack of clothing and footwear and high mortality rate was
explained by supposed cultural traits and the poor housekeeping habits of Aboriginal women.
Government publications even stated that tuberculosis and other diseases were being spread
rapidly because the ‘love of dancing during long winter evenings raised the dust that hadn’t
been attended to during their idle daylight hours’ (Carter 1997: 161). Writing in 1895, Withrow asserted that
‘the majority of [Indian women] are discontented, dirty, lazy and slovenly’ (114). Such
affirmations were vital in deflecting criticism from the government officials and Northwest
Mounted Police (NWMP) who unofficially recognised that they were responsible for the terrible
conditions on reserves.¶ The ‘squaw’ image also served to normalise the violence
experienced by Aboriginal women.
Anderson (2000) describes how
the narrative of Native women as
‘easy’ justified the sexual assault perpetrated by state officials during the colonisation
process . Violence became constructed as a norm of Aboriginal society. It was said that in
their own societies, Aboriginal women were ‘accustomed to being treated with contempt and
to being bought and sold like commodities’ (Carter 1997: 183). Even today sexual violence is a
regular experience for many Aboriginal women and girls (Maracle cited in Anderson 2000: 110). The
equation of Aboriginal bodies with sexuality and violence that was an integral part of white
settler domination is a process that continues to have a profound impact on Aboriginal
women. The historical perceptions of Aboriginal women as easy squaws continue to have a
devastating impact on all Aboriginal women today. The lack of protection from the law that
Aboriginal women had when they suffered abuse in the late 1800s, as documented by Sarah Carter
(1997), has not changed much over a century later. The historical myth of Aboriginal women
epitomised in the Indian princess-easy squaw dichotomy has continued to inform
understandings of Aboriginal women by dominant white society, understandings which also
have serious implications for the policing of Aboriginal women and Aboriginal sex workers .
Laroque (1996) argues that the there is a direct relation between the racist, sexist and dehumanising
stereotypes, such as of the squaw, and violence against Native women and girls (12). The
Aboriginal Justice Inquiry’s investigation into the 1971 brutal sexual assault and murder of
Helen Betty Osborne in The Pas, Manitoba at the hands of two white men demonstrates the
alarming power that such stereotypes continue to hold (Manitoba 1991). After an extensive
examination of the case, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry concluded that Helen Betty Osborne:¶
fell victim to vicious stereotypes born of ignorance and aggression when she was picked up by
four drunken men looking for sex. Her attackers seemed to be operating on the assumption
that Aboriginal women were promiscuous and open to enticement through alcohol or
violence. It is evident that the men who abducted Osborne believed that young Aboriginal
women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification (Manitoba 1991: vol. 2, ch. 5).¶
Such assumptions are not limited to this case but have played out in numerous instances of the
murder or disappearance of Aboriginal women and girls, particularly if the women are
labelled as prostitutes.¶ The murder of Pamela George, a woman of the Saulteaux (Ojibway)
nation who had sometimes worked as a prostitute, on 17 April 1995 by two white men
demonstrates a similar pattern in the power of particular discourses to impact the experiences
of Aboriginal women. The history and colonial patterns of domination that played a role in her murder were never
considered in the trial which eventually found the two white men guilty of manslaughter, and not murder. Razack (2002) relates how
the police’s description of the Stroll in the trial portrayed it as a ‘world of drugs and prostitution, and most of all, as a space of
Aboriginality’ (141). Consequently, Pamela
George became reduced to another faceless Indian
prostitute. Razack (2002) writes that the two white men who bought the services of Pamela George,
an Aboriginal woman in prostitution, and who then beat her to death were ‘enacting a quite
specific violence perpetrated on Aboriginal bodies throughout Canada’s history, a colonial
violence that has not only enabled white settlers to secure the land but to come to know
themselves as entitled to it’ (128-9). However, the court case de-raced the violence and labelled it a
generic act of patriarchal violence against women.¶ The police and the justice system regularly
respond differently to cases of violence experienced by Aboriginal women sex workers. In the
past fifteen years, almost sixty women have disappeared from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, over half of whom are Native,
and across the country it is believed that over 500 Aboriginal women are missing (Luman 2003). Razack (2002) notes that the
police’s failure to respond to the disappearance of Aboriginal women is often justified through
their involvement in prostitution and their practices of moving from place to place. Yet, as Denise
McConney (1999) writes, ‘ongoing displacement, relocation, and search for a safe place...is a
consistent theme in the lives of most native women’. This ongoing displacement and their
construction as prostitutes has become an excuse for the justice system to disregard the fate
of these women. It is also evidence of the lack of value placed on the lives of Aboriginal
women sex workers.¶ While the threat of the squaw identity threatens all Aboriginal women,
the tangible performance of this role only intensifies the discrimination in law which assumes
that all prostitutes have consented to the violence that they experience, as discussed by Balos and
Fellows (1999). ‘Squaws’ who not only express overt sexuality and loose morality but also ¶ engage
in sex work in exchange for money merely reinforce the destructive stereotypes that
predominate. Thus, the dehumanising stereotypes of the squaw continue to normalise their
social and physical segregation and normalise the violence they experience. If Aboriginal
peoples have experienced the most entrenched racial discrimination of any group in Canada
(Manitoba 1991), Aboriginal women sex workers represent probably the most degraded and
marginalised group in Canada.
We recognize that we speak from positions of privilege, utilizing the narratives
and stories of others allows us to be reflexive of our own relationship to sex
work
Hubbard 99
(Phil, Area, “Researching Female Sex Work: Reflections on Geographical Exclusion, Critical
Methodologies and ‘Useful’ Knowledge,” 1999, Wiley Online Library) /wyo-mm
Hence, by providing practical support to sex workers, some researchers have found themselves in
a position where they have been able to involve these women in the construction of
knowledge about recount life stories is seen as being consistent with the politicized aims of
feminist research, allowing a research alliance to be formed whereby an intellec tual space ¡s
created for women’s voices to be listened to and acted upon (Dyck 1997; Gray 1997). This approach
ostensibly negates the possibility that the researcher will privilege ‘academic’ knowledge
over the lived experiences of prostitute women , with O’Neill (1997) contending that the stories
generated from such conversations enable the construction of knowledge that resists the
exclusionary tendencies of masculinist research. By including the voices of prostitute women,
such knowledges have un doubtedly allowed issues to arise that challenge popular
understandings of sex work . For example, McKeganey and Barnard’s (1996) work with prosti tutes in Glasgow paints a
picture of street culture in which notions of community feature strongly, and women working without due regard for personal safety
are subjected to peer group pressure. Other narratives
have similarly stressed that sex workers adopt a
‘professional’ attitude to their work, separat ing it from their home life and taking elaborate
precautions to avoid emotional intimacy with their cients (see Scambler 1997). At the same time,
pressing issues facing prostitute women—including harassment from police, imprisonment
due to fine default and the ever-present threat of violence— have also been highlighted. As such,
it might be speculated that such research is succeeding in shift ing the academic debate about prostitutes away from disco.
2AC
Their method of queerness operates on the genocidal logic of biopower that
fuels the hegemonic knowledge structures of the west and fuels the death drive
against queers of color- only starting from the racialized subject solves
Smith ‘10
[Andrea, (Cherokee) co-founder of the Boarding School Healing Project and INCITE! Women of
Color Against Violence, a national grassroots organization that utilizes direct action and critical
dialogue. Smith has published widely on issues of violence against women of color and is one of
the nation's leading experts on the topic, as well as a highly-sought after speaker. Smith
currently teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. “Queer
Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies,” Volume 16, Number 1-2, 2010, pp. 42-68 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press//wyo-hdm]
In addition, while both “tradition” and “the future” must be critically engaged, it does not follow that they can be dismissed. As with
identity, the
notion of a tradition-free subject simply reinstantiates the notion of a liberal subject
who is free from past encumbrances. As Elizabeth Povinelli’s work suggests, the liberal subject articulates itself as an
autological subject that is completely self- determining over and against the “genealogical” subject (i.e., the indigenous sub- ject)
trapped within tradition, determined by the past and the future.32 Essentially then, this call for “no future” relies on a
primitivizing discourse that positions the [white] queer subject in relation to a premodern
subject who is locked in history. The “Native” serves as the origin story that generates the
autonomous present for the white queer subject. As Jasbir Puar notes, this articulation of
queerness as “freedom from norms” actually relies on a genocidal logic of biopower that
separates those who should live from those who must die. 33 That is, for the queer subject to
live under Edelman’s analysis, it must be freed from genealogical, primitivist subjects who are
hopelessly tied to reproductive futures. This impulse is similar to Warner’s juxtaposition of a
transgressive queer subject with the racialized subject trapped within identity and ethnic
organization. Puar terms this tendency a “sexual exceptionalism” that mirrors U.S.
exceptionalism, in which a white queer subject reinscribes a U.S. homonormativity by
positioning himself/herself in an imperialist relationship to those ethnic subjects deemed
unable to transgress . “Queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse. . . . ‘Freedom from norms’ resonates with liberal humanism’s authorization of the fully self- possessed
speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousess, enabled by the
life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing mod- ern individualism over the
ensnaring bonds of family.”34 If we build on Silva’s previously described analysis, we can see that the Native
queer or the queer of color then becomes situated at the “horizon of death” within a “no
futures” queer theory: such individuals must free themselves from their Native identity and
community to become fully self-determined subjects . They must forgo national self- determination for
individual self-determination; they cannot have both. Racialized subjects trapped within primitive and
pathological communities must give way to modern queer subjects. Puar’s analysis of
biopower suggests that modern white queer subjects can live only if racialized subjects
trapped in primitive and unenlightened cultures pass away. For instance, some LGBT organizations
supported the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan because the bombing
would supposedly free queer people from the Taliban. Apparently, throw- ing bombs on people frees them. But
of course, it was not actually queer people in Afghanistan who were the real subject of
liberation—rather, modern queer subjects in the United States could live only if a sexually
savage Afghanistan were eliminated. To quote Puar: “Queerness as automatically and inherently
transgres- sive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer
liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually patho- logical and defiant
populations targeted for death (queerness as population).”35 Meanwhile, as Puar, Silva, and Povinelli imply, the
white queer subject, despite its disavowals, is firmly rooted in a past, present, and future
structured by the logics of white supremacy — it is as much complicit in, as it is transgressive
of, the status quo. Rather than disavow traditions and futures, it may be more politically
effica- cious to engage them critically.
(as well as feminist organizations)
Queer politics formed without first questioning the settler state and thus
created a new type of settler subject that engages in homonationalism, reifing
the colonialist state and its legitimacy
Morgensen 2010
[Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler
Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.
5http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1
-2.morgensen.html#]
I am compelled by Puar's analysis, which I extend at the intersections of queer studies and Native studies. Puar presents the term
homonationalism to explain how racialized sexuality and national terror interact today. I
interpret homonationalism as
an effect of U.S. queer modernities forming amid the conquest of Native peoples and the
settling of Native land. The terrorizing sexual colonization [End Page 105] of Native peoples was a
historical root of the biopolitics of modern sexuality in the United States. Colonists interpreted
diverse practices of gender and sexuality as signs of a general primitivity among Native peoples. Over
time, they produced a colonial necropolitics that framed Native peoples as queer populations
marked for death. Colonization produced the biopolitics of modern sexuality that I call "settler
sexuality": a white national heteronormativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender
by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects. Despite having formed in the United
States to serve Anglo-American landowning classes and the Euro-ethnics they absorbed, settler definitions of modern
sexuality became hegemonic for all non-Natives, as well as for Native people who sought ties
to sexual modernity. Settler colonialism thus conditioned the formation of modern sexuality in
the United States, including modern queer subjects and politics. By the mid-twentieth century U.S.
sexual minority movements had formed on normatively white and national terms, which
could include reversing the discourses marking them as primitive and embracing a primitive or specifically
Native sexual nature. Non-Native queers of color long remained marginal to such projects or
critiqued them, as their participants or as the organizers of queer of color coalitions. But over time non-Natives
were able to form shared identities and movements to claim modern sexual citizenship in the
settler state. Under such conditions, queer movements can naturalize settlement and assume
a homonormative and national form that may be read specifically as settler homonationalism.
My reading of settler homonationalism extends a larger project in which I am centering settler colonialism as a
condition of the formation of modern queer subjects, cultures, and politics in the United States.5
Narrating Native histories of sexuality and gender while absenting Native people from sexual
modernity produces U.S. queer projects as settler formations. Such projects remain distant
from Native queer activisms that challenge the colonial formation of modern sexuality, by
denaturalizing settlement, reimagining subjugated Native knowledges, and fostering Native
survivance within broader work for decolonization. Inspired by Native queer activisms and Indigenous feminist
and queer critiques, my historical and ethnographic work traces the processes that made settler definitions of sexual modernity
normative in U.S. queer projects. I conduct this work as a non-Native and white participant in the multiracial U.S. queer cultures and
politics I critically engage, and from within allied and dialogic relationships with Native queer activisms and Indigenous queer and
feminist work in Native studies. My work invites new conversation among queer of color, queer diasporic, and Indigenous queer
critiques and all critical queer projects in the United States that [End Page 106] would disrupt homonationalism, by calling all to
mark and challenge its settler formation.
Colonialism was the original death drive that perpetuates cycles of violence
against the periphery, only our decolonial project can solve
Santos ‘03
[Sousa, professor at the University of Coimbra, School of Economics, April
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2003/63/santos.html, 7/1/09, M.E.]
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the
West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to
save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name
of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed
to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is
how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial
wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is
in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war
against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be.
It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western
illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian
illusion manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality, and that the
problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to ultimate consequences. If there is
unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of market
laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due,
rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists . This
political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical
rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo. Inherent to it is the
notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore,
seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of
racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the
destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be
able to privatize the state and international institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a combination of political
democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public
opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic
rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only
preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its
destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market
radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the
idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers
and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of
innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the NonGovernmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three
months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the
health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that,
historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the
imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling
efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers,
both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation ,
legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room
for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of
combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of
democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction
We already challenge the prison industrial complex prison expansion is a tool of
colonization
Stormy Ogden 14, “The Prison-Industrial-Complex in Indigenous California”, pp. 57-58 in
“Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex”
I write this chapter from the position of a California Indian woman, a tribal woman of Yokuts and Pomo
ancestry. I also write as an ex-prisoner and a survivor of colonization. At the beginning of the colonization process two tools of
genocide were forced upon Native people: the bottle and the bible. Along
with these tools the traditional ways of
behavior and conduct of Native people were criminalized . State and federal governments
defined Native Americans as deviant and criminal through such procedures as the Dawes Act.
With the enforcement of these new laws, Native people were locked up in a spectrum of
“punishing institutions ,” including military forts, missions, reservations, boarding schools, and more recently, state and
federal prisons. Historically, the most brutal methods of social control have been directed at a
society’s most oppressed groups. In North America, the groups that are most likely to be sent to jail
and prison are the poor and people of color. A large proportion of people who end up behind
bars are indigenous . On any given day, one in twenty-five Native Americans are under the
jurisdiction of the criminal justice system, a rate that is 2.4 times that of whites. Native
American women are particularly targeted for punishment. For example, Native American women
in South Dakota make up 32 percent of the prison population but only 8.3 percent of the
general population. Angela Y. Davis describes the prison-industrial complex as a complex web of
racism, social control, and profit . The experience of racial subordination, repression, and
economic exploitation is not new to the Native people of these land. From the missions to the
reservations, California Indians have struggled for survival in the face of an array of brutal mechanisms designed to control and
eliminate the region’s first peoples.
The prison-industrial complex was built on the ancestral lands of
the indigenous people of this continent and has contributed to the devastating process of
colonization . It is essential for prison scholars and activists to understand the colonial roots of the prison-industrial complex
and to make visible the stories of Native prisoners.
Queer criticism creates a subjectless identity that recreates settler colonialism
Smith, 2010 (Andrea, “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The heteronormativity of settler
colonialism.” GLQ Vol 16, # 1-2, project muse, MB)
At the same time, however, Native studies also points to the limits of a “postidentity” politic or
“subjectless” critique. Sarita Echavez See, Hiram Perez, and others who do queer of color critique in particular have argued
that within the field of queer studies, this claim to be “postidentity” often retrenches white,
mid- dle-class identity while disavowing it.15 For instance, in Fear of a Queer Planet, Warner concedes that
queer culture has been dominated by those with capital: typically, middle-class white men. But then he
argues that “the default model for all minority movements is racial or ethnic . Thus the language of
multiculturalism almost always presupposes an ethnic organization of identity, rooted in family, language, and cultural tradition.
Despite its language of postmodernism, multicul- turalism tends to rely on very modern notions of authenticity, of culture as shared
meaning and the source of identity. Queer culture will not fit this bill . . . because queer
politics does not obey the
member/nonmember logics of race and gender.”16 He marks queer culture as free-floating,
unlike race, which is marked by belong- ing and not-belonging. To borrow from Silva’s Toward a Global
Idea, the queer (white) subject is the universal self-determining subject, the “transparent I,” but
the racialized subject is the “affectable other.” But if queerness is dominated by whiteness, as
Warner concedes, then
it also follows a logic of belonging and not- belonging. It also relies on a shared
theory, when it privileges difference over
sameness absolutely, colludes with institutionalized racism in vanishing, hence retrenching,
white privilege. It serves as the magician’s assistant to whiteness’s disappearing act.”17 To
extend Perez’s analysis, what seem to disappear within queer theory’s subjectless critique are settler
colonialism and the ongoing genocide of Native peoples. The analysis that comes from queer
theory (even queer of color critique), then, rests on the presumption of the U.S. settler colonial state.
culture — one based on white supremacy. As Perez notes: “Queer
Thus this essay puts Native stud- ies into conversation with queer theory to look at both the possibilities and limits of a postidentity
analytic.
Construction of the marginalized queer subject in modern politics is assumptive
of the erasure of the Native subject
Morgensen 2010
[Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler
Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.
5http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1
-2.morgensen.html#]
Focusing on settlement also marks the way that theories of degeneration assigned to modern queers in the early-twentieth-century
United States presumed Native disappearance. As degenerates, modern
queers appeared as failed subjects,
incapable of representing either white civilization or authentic primitivity. Yet this framing also
naturalized them across racial differences as non-Native, in that it presumed that authentic
Native people had already disappeared from the modern and settled spaces where queer
degenerates would be found. If living Native people ever did appear in those spaces, they
tended to present as out of place. For instance, Nayan Shah's compelling history of sexuality and migration cites a
California police report from 1918, which criminalized a relationship between a South Asian migrant man and an American Indian
youth by narrating it as sexual predation. This regulatory moment occurred amid recent histories of scalp bounties and massacres
targeting Native peoples across Northern California, including only two years after the death of Ishi, famed survivor of the Yahi tribe.
How might popular narratives of lost Native authenticity have shaped the police description of the youth only by his town of origin
(Truckee) and his assimilation into a multiracial underclass? How, still, might tales of sexual primitivity persist, as his framing as the
passive object of his racialized partner's desire suggests (without naming) the logic of berdache?49In turn, Siobhan Somerville and
Kevin Mumford have shown how popular stories and social practices in the early twentieth century linked homosexuality to
miscegenation, including representing it as emblematic of white "slumming" for sexual adventure in African American districts of
New York City and Chicago.50 Yet
in the Northeast, blackness already connoted historical
miscegenation with Indianness. Amy den Ouden has explained how in the wake of normative associations of Native
people with blackness in New England, Native communities with [End Page 119] black family lines could be marked by white
authorities as racially inauthentic, thereby delegitimating their Native identities and land claims. In light of this, by the early
twentieth century, how did discourses on sexual perversion tie Indianness and blackness to homosexuality, and how did they
interlink? Did the histories of black-Indian communities and of their regulation shape modern racial theories of homosexuality?
What would a queer history of homosexuality and miscegenation look like if Indianness —as
an identity, or an object of colonial discourse —were crucial to analysis?51
Their queer methodology is bad- it arose on stolen land and thus colonialism
created the conditions for its rise as well as informed its politics
Morgensen 2010
[Scott, 2k10, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 16, Number 1-2, “Settler
Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities, 2010.
5http://muse.jhu.edu.ezprox.bard.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1
-2.morgensen.html#]
While I argue that homonationalism
arises whenever settler colonialism is naturalized in U.S. queer
projects, tracing this process demands more than simply adding the word "settler" to the term. Puar examines homonationalism
as a formation of national sexuality linked to war and terror, and both must inform a theory of [End Page 107] settler
homonationalism. Puar argues that in
the biopolitics of U.S. empire, homonationalism makes the
subjects of queer modernities "regulatory" over queered and "terrorist" populations that are
placed under terrorizing state control. In kind, a theory of settler homonationalism must ask
how in the United States, the terrorizing sexual colonization of Native peoples produced the
colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality that conditioned queer formations past and present.
My essay reinterprets historical writing on sexual colonization and on modern queer formations to explain how these
processes relationally positioned varied non-Native and Native people within a colonial
biopolitics. But this account rests, first, on linking insights in Native studies on gender and sexuality to feminist scholarship on
biopolitics in colonial studies.