Native American Women: a CCOT Overview of Their Roles and Issues

This native american CCOT essay with focus on the history of the Native American women in America and how their past shaped the outcome of their future health issues. The past of native American women during the colonization period affects how they are viewed now in society. Acknowledging the loss of authority in the family and the outcome it has on the family dynamic today. As well as Native American ideas and practices and the effect it has on their health. Lastly focusing on the contemporary social issues the female group faces in America. The poor quality of health of Native American women can be in association to how they were treated in the being of the colonization. 

Women are among the most maltreated human beings in the nation and across the world. Suffering from a variety of toxic circumstances, such as, rape, sex trafficking, physical abuse, low paying wages, substance abuse as well as many other things. While in the same light women are supposed to be soft spoken, delicate, domestic, and subservient beings. Most of the women who are at a risk of enduring such toxic and detrimental conditions belong to a minority group. Minority women throughout history have been abused, neglected, and shamed as a result of their race. Still until this day minority women are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of priority in America. Rates of crime, incarceration, poverty, and poor health are on the rise in American minority women. Of the minority groups in America, Native American or American Indian women are among the two top group of women who suffer the most. Native American women have been struggling in the states for of centuries. Throughout history, Native American women and their families were forced to give up their land, conform to a new culture and fight for the safety. Native women have been tortured and scarred by these events which has taken a toll on their health.

Once the settlers moved on to the native’s land, Native people’s ideas and values were questioned and mocked. European men believed that the native people’s practices between man and women were not natural. Through Colonization—the displacement and undermining of societies, including their values, cultures, beliefs, and ways of life by outside peoples. Colonizers used churches and schooling, to force their culture on the native people. “Missionaries, with their goals of converting and “civilizing” native people, were a vital part of colonization; they provided the ideological counterpart to economic and political manipulation and exploitation.” At boarding school “they taught the children to be women according to Anglo-American standards: girls learned domestic tasks like sewing, cooking, and cleaning”. Sifters, native american women’s lives, oxford university press. Still even after trying to force their Eruo-American was on the native women they were still looked down upon. “Women were drudges, squaws unsuited for shouldering the burdens of conquest or resistance, bystanders in the trials and tribulations of a male world”. European mean used terms like drudges to describe the women, meaning they were a person made to do hard menial or dull work. Which is not the way they would describe or expect their own wives to be subjected to. Squaw or Squawa is offensive racial slur that was used towards native women a misogynistic term that is still used.

Euro-American men took another step in trying to undermine the native women and their positions based off of their own practices towards women. The men insisted on dealing with Indian men in trade negotiations, and ministers demanded that Indians follow the Christian modes of patriarchy and gendered division of labor that made men farmers and women housekeepers. However, before the settlers and colonization, it was believed that Native American women had greater authority and autonomy, compared to European women. After the questioning of their position in their family, and community life, women started to lose their power. Author Devens, C. stated that “as men grew more receptive to introduced practices and values that they hoped would allow them to deal successfully with whites, women stood only to lose status and autonomy”. The effects of colonization have been internalized in many Native communities, thus leading Native people themselves to continue devaluing indigenous women. 

As this process continues, indigenous people may adopt these foreign ways and force other indigenous people into conformity as they take on negative views of their own traditions, belief systems, and ways of life. Because they are deeply intertwined, it is not possible to separate issues of the health and well-being of indigenous nations (i.e., sovereignty, decolonization) from the health and well-being of First Nations women 

Throughout U. S. history, Euro-Americans committed countless acts of violence against Native people. Such acts include extermination or genocide, theft of Indian lands and resources, captivity and enslavement, forced removals from homelands, and schooling aimed at destroying Native cultures. Colonization, racism, and oppression all fan the flames of violence. Stress from such historical trauma, discrimination, life events and physical or sexual abuse leads to Native women using cultural buffers to cope. Such cooping buffers include enculturation, spiritual coping or traditional health practices. By women using their own coping strategies leads to the outcome of their negative health. Health outcomes from their traditional practices leads to increase health risk such as HIV, cardiovascular, alcohol and drug use as well as a decline in mental health. Indigenous women experience the highest rates of violence of any women in the United States. Native American women report domestic violence more than any other population. the violence experienced by Native women is often perpetrated by someone of a different race. This is the case for 90% of sexual assaults and 75% of intimate victimizations. Such mistrust isn’t new to the Native women a study by the U.S General Accounting Office discovered that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Services. Regions sterilized over 3,000 American Indian women without their permission between 1973-1976. Durig this time it was also discovered that 36 of theses women were under 21 and forced to be sterilized despited having court orders to not sterilized anyone under the age of 21.

These men misunderstood tribal kinship systems, gender roles, social values, and tribal spirituality. Their observations reflected their cultural biases and, perhaps, reflected a desire to manipulate reality to accommodate expectations that American Indian women were to be held in low regard in their tribal societies because women were subservient to men in European societies.

After the destruction of tribal life American Indian women were taken as “squaws” by traders, trappers, and military men. They endured slavery, abuse, scorn, and outrage. At that time Indian women were viewed by Whites as sub-humans, fit only to kill or to rape. As the depersonalized squaws, they were powerless.

Of all Indigenous female roles, perhaps none is as omnipotent as the medicine woman/traditional healer. American Indian women have a special connection to the spirit world that empowers them to heal. This gift is natural, as these women are wise to ways of the human heart. From earliest times to the present day, in all cultures, women have traditionally been society’s healers as healing has been regarded as the natural responsibility of mothers, wives, and grandmothers—a natural manifestation of the feminine principle

Reference

• Deirdre Almeida (1997) The Hidden Half: A History of Native American Women's Education. Harvard Educational Review: December 1997, Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 757-772.
• Green, R. (1980). Native American Women. Signs, 6(2), 248-267. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173925
• Lajimodiere, D. K., (2013). American indian female and stereotypes: warriors, leaders, healers, feminists; not druges, princesses, prostitues. Multicultrual perspectives, 15(2), 204-109.DOI: 10.1080/15210960.2013.781391
• Devens, C. (1992). Countering colonization: native American women and great lakes missions. (1-1810
• Weaver, H. (2009). The colonial context of violence; reflection on violence in the lives of native amrican women. Journal of interpersonal violence. 24(9)1552-1563