NEWS: America: Raping Indians For Over 300 Years and Counting

CULTURE: America: Raping Indians For Over 300 Years and Counting

If you listened to NPR today, you might have heard this story. If not, go listen to it now. It's part of a series about tribal governments, Indians in America, and crime on Indian lands; other links are at the bottom of the page.

Isolated case? Not hardly.

It's not just a question of there not being enough officers, either. If a rape happens on Indian land, then the Indian police can investigate the crime--unless the rapist isn't an Indian. Then it falls under federal jurisdiction. According to NPR, this means that most rapes of Indian women--which are not committed by Indian men--go unprosecuted, even uninvestigated.

In other words, the American government's doing just what white guys have done to Indians ever since Europeans arrived on this continent.

Bitch_PhD is kinda myopic, so for her fellow nearsighted readers, the text from the image runs as follows:

American feminism draws on Inidian models as well as European ones (as do parts of the American constitution, actually); this book chapter traces some of the connections between American feminism and women's roles in different American tribes.

"I'm proud to be an American" etc. Fun times for everyone.
This is just another chapter in the book called "This World is Fucked"

well, if they wouldn't do so much meth.....

I don't understand why we don't love Native American culture more. We love just about every ethnicity and yet Native American culture is the only one that, if it disappears into normative culture, it's really actually gone.

Great piece, and an important and under-reported subject. The status of women on the rez need a great deal of attention, as this is, sadly an iceburg-tippy sort of thing.

The connections to the US Constitution are pretty specious, though, whatever the claims. Although it's been frequently claimed that Franklin cribbed the idea for the Albany Plan of Union (an abortive 1754 attempt at a colonial league for mutual defense against the French and their allies) from the Great League of the Iroquois/Six Nations, no documentation (that I've seen) exists that makes that connection explicit. Also, given that Franlkin, like most of the founders preferred to festishize Greek and Roman precidents, I'm guessing he missed the strong example right under his nose. You're giving him too much credit.

Yours in nit-pickery,

tbunny

Pilkington, that was a pretty dumb remark. Look @ everything the native americans have gone through, they have nothing left, so what else is there better to do? We took everything away from them and now native american woman just sit around hoping not to get raped.

Fear of lawsuits?

+1

its because then the American people would have to acknowledge the genocide we commited

Liticaphobia? I don't get the joke.

I see that there are some serious problems with the federal government runs things on indian land, but didn't a few things in this article seem a bit weird? It says the government doesn't provide enough money for indians to police themselves, and then goes on to blame "white guys" for their troubles.

But isn't the criminal ultimately responsible for the crime? If a guy goes out one night and rapes an indian woman, then points a finger at some washington official and says " he made me do it." is he to be believed? If I run a red light when there are no cops around, I'm still committing a crime, and I'm still responsible for the consequences.

I think the knee-jerk response of blaming "white guys" is a bit counter-productive here.

No one is blaming the white guys for the crime.

Just that the white guys aren't doing anything about it.

Roethke said it a little better, but I thought simpler might be best, in this case.

Not a joke. bairdduvessa said it right, about a minute after my lacklustre attempt.

Wow, I looked over the article again, and you are right, it says the rapes are mostly being done by non-native men.

Guess I failed my reading comprehension test for the day.

I have a hard time believing some of the things in this article, first of all, why can I get pulled over on a rez for speeding by tribal police? and I'm sure that if something happened in a casino on a rez- the tribal police would be able to to do something- otherwise whitey would be robbing the casinos left and right. So I don't feel they totally have thier hands tied.

A lot of these reservations are milking the government- I'm sorry I need to be the one who says it, but being that I am surrounded by native land, I see it. They are making a ton of money at the casinos, they get gas at a discount from the goverment and charge less, so more people go to tribal lands to fill up. They are charging upwards of 3x the normal fine on a traffice violation, and I just recently read an article about how an entire reservation didn't pay thier water bill for 3 years and then bitched when whitey turned the water off. their excuse for not paying? They weren't used to paying it. good one.

Where does all of this money go? Where does the money go the government is paying them for the injustaces our ansestors did to them? Maybe they should reprioritize where their money goes if this is such a huge problem. Becides, how does whitey even get onto tribal land? That requires traspassing..

Hopefully native women aren't just sitting around hoping to not get raped because they have nothing better to do. They could, maybe... get a job and contribute to the tribal police 'find the white rapist' fund.

Bitch, I have lived near tribal lands, and I wish they were a part of the USA. They need the resouces that we have, and the commerce. If they don't get the "gamblin thing" they suffer.

It really is like having a Bosnia 70 miles from you.

We integrated the black slaves, you would think we could bring in the native indians.

Yeah, I heard that story at work today.
What the fuck is wrong with us that after all this time we're still fucking over american indians? You'd think we would have gotten it out of our system after killing most of them.
Land of the free indeed.

This has to be the fourth or fifth time in the past couple of years that I've read an article about this.

For those that like statistics, this report, submitted in 1999, has some about halfway down the page that are pretty disheartening.

I don't think it's as simple as all that...I'm not privy to reservation politics, but I get the feeling that "integration" would be sort of like admitting that the native americans have some ownership of the US or something like that....like I said, shots in the dark. Most likely neither the Natives, nor the federal government can come to a satisfactory agreement about it and as a result the debate rages on.

It seems that by wanting the right to police themselves and their borders they are losing quite a bit of rights in general. Since they have their own police the state and county police haven't got much jurisdiction and since the federal government says they can't prosecute non-indians rapists go free and you're stuck paying a citation

but the real question is, why all the rapes? I mean, rapists can't be privy to all this info, I mean, there have got to be a few rapists who listen to npr who are NOW aware of it, thanks a lot, but before? So they are deliberately seeking out memebers of a certain ethnic group, so shouldn't that fall under hate crimes or something? Isn't that more severe and therefore a higher priority with respect to prosecution and conviction (not that rapists aree really all the easy to convict, looking at the current record of NON RACIALLY motivated rapes.)

ugh, that shit just makes me sick. and the idea meth/nothing better to do thing made me throw up in my mouth a little...I mean, there's comments like that on SG and we wonder why the country at large has a poor opinion of them? Sure they aren't the peace pipe smoking, feather and fringe wearing noble savages from the westerns of yore, but give them a little respect. I suspect there may have been some sarcasm there, but try a little harder next time to make it less dry and more over the top to make sure no one is confused that you're being cynical and we should all just chill.

One last thought...the Amish have a similar arrangement with the government, both state and federal. I'm willing to bet that they don't have the same problem,<sarcasm> which is strange what with all thoseMilky white young virgins running around in petticoats </sarcasm> (i really hate to bring up the whitey mcwhiterson thing again, but honestly people, anyone can fucking see it...just because you aren't racist and nobody you know is racist doesn't mean that there still aren't a lot of racists out there...can you honestly say you know even 3% of the entire population of America well enough to say they aren't racists?)

neither are the white girls, the black guys, the black girls, the hispanic guys, the hispanic girls, etc.

currently 13 women hold seats in the senate and 61 in the house of representatives.

apart from bitch_phd's myopic, tiresome, and ultimately dissociative focus on blaming men for things it's an excellent article. this is definitely a problem that needs more time in popular media and, ultimately, some real tangible solutions implemented by our government.