Overly Sensitive Student

Sep. 13, 2012 at 9:48pm with 508 notes

TW: Racism, Sexual Violence, Rape, Sexism. When people say that mistreatment of Indigenous folks in America was hundreds of years ago.

No. Just no.

The Indian Child Welfare Act, is not reparation for events that took place 300 years ago.

The reason is it NOT OK to dress up like this or like an Indigenous culture, is not because of events that took place 300 years ago.

Indigenous cultural appropriation is not offensive because of events that took plea 300 years ago. It is offensive and racist because the colonization of Indigenous cultures has spanned decades and continues to take place in violent and racist manners.

A study released by the General Accounting Office in November of 1976 reported that Native women were being sterilized without their consent. 25% of Native women of childbearing age were sterilized without their consent. Some reservations had sterilization rates as high as 80%.

Depro-Provera was used on Native Women during the 1980’s, BEFORE it was approved by the FDA in 1992. Disabled women were administered depro-provera at particularly high rates to keep them from having their periods, and therefore “cleaner” for their caretakers. It was also used to regulate their emotions. One doctor, Raymond Jannet stated “Depo Provera turned them back into their sweet, poor handicapped selves.”

In 1982 a video game titled “Custer’s Revenge” centered around players gaining points everytime they raped a Native woman, in the form of General Custer. The game’s slogan: “When you score, you score.”

During the Mowhawk Crisis of 1990 in Oka, white mobs forced a woman who had just given birth and was hemorrhaging, to “spread her legs” to prove it, before allowing her to leave the reservation to get medical care.

Two Native women went to Oka to film the crises and were arrested and detained for 11 hours, despite having no charges filed against them. They were held in a room covered with pornographic images, and not allowed to go to the bathroom unless they allowed the male police officers to watch.

These are just a FEW examples of the continual sexual violence and the colonization of Indigenous peoples in the U.S.A. The Justice has reported that 1 in 3 Native women experience sexual violence, that is twice the national average.

The near genocide of indigenous cultures, through colonization after European contact is nothing to be forgotten or moved past either. It was a violent, calculated, racist practice. The events that took place were horrific. And do not exist within a vacuum in the past. Indigenous peoples continue to be colonized through forms of media that allows for their continual mistreatment.