Two articles we were required to read showed us the importance of our identity as native peoples. Both articles had different aspects of our identity we need to consider, Sharing one Skin, written by Jeannette Armstrong, showcased teachings of the Okanagan people. They believe that we as humans have four selves within, the physical self, the emotional self, the intellectual self, and the spiritual self. All these selves work together within us to put who we are into one being. These are important to our identity for not only our native ways, but for all human life on our earth.

Native American Identity by Perry G. Horse, this article went more into depth as to how our people live in our mixing pot of cultures with America specifically. Living in America as a native person comes with many challenges as expressed in this piece of writing, we are slowly losing ourselves to the many other cultural customs we are constantly surrounded by. Not only are we losing our sense of identity, but we are still fighting for the rights every human being deserves. Through our perseverance as Indigenous people, we are still here, but we are indeed losing ourselves and soon enough we won’t exist.

As someone who is a young Indigenous woman, this topic is held close to my heart. Being raised to know about these issues and how important they are and how vital it is to our people to solve them. As a whole native peoples, we have yet to deal with a lot of our unresolved trauma we have accumulated since first contact. Many of our young people in our communities have seen first hand what intergenerational trauma has caused in our communities. Not only do I want to bring awareness to our issues, but also our solutions and the things that are being done to counteract our problems. There needs to be hope and light and someone to offer solutions to such a large, dark, and heavy topic.

As of right now, all of our communities have unresolved issues due to intergenerational trauma. We have yet to address these problems and they have caused corruption in us as people, we have lost some of our values during the battle to survive. Every single one of our native communities is affected by this, our women are not being uplifted as they should be, and in turn they are raising our younger generations in unsafe mindsets and environments. If we want our younger generation to thrive like the ones before us, we need to deal with the trauma and issues we have as people and a community, even if it is uncomfortable, even if some of our leaders do not want to address it, we need to be the voices for our women and children who do not have their own. By uplifting our women and children we are creating a strong foundation for our people to once again stand strong and protect themselves and others from the dangers of intergenerational trauma.

Law/Jurisdiction, healthy, family and community, and environment all play a role in my topic. Not only do we need to put more laws into protecting Indigenous women and children, but we need a healthier mindset, our communities, our elders shame young women and children for the hardships they go through, if we were able to learn how to comfort and support our people together we can become whole once again. Our communities are truly rooted in our women, they raise our children and when the women have unresolved issues they then pass those onto our next generations, the cycle of handing off the current generations issues to the next has been going on since first contact, everything stems of how we are raised, what type of environment we raised in, and what we are surrounded by as children.

During the Indian Removal that began in the 1800s Indigenous women were faced with immense struggles, those women coming from Cherokee and Creek women especially. As the Indian Revomal became more prevalent the roles of women became more strenuous, many of the soldiers tasked with moving the Cherokee and Creek people were often cruel and would be dragged from their homes forcefully. As more than 700 Creek warriors were enlisted, they were promised their families would be safe and protected until they returned, but the trend of lies only continued with this. White soldiers would later come and burn down homes, take and assualt women and children, and kill the elders in the community.

Prior to the Indian Removal, the toxic influence of the Protestant missionary and general colonization was having major effects on women’s roles in their Indigenous communities. Disrespect towards women in the tribe was seen as something that was to be punished greatly for, punishments even went as far as death but with the constant influence of the white man and his ideals, women began to lose their sacred and protected places within their tribes. The important and sacred duties Indigenous women used to carry out for their tribes were now being given away for men to do, and more and more women were being forced into marriges with white men.

Not long after the Indian Removal Act, the assimilation era began. Richard Henry Pratt was a man who heavily influenced the assimilation of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. He started with a group of war prisoners, Pratt taught them English, gave them military uniforms, and forced them into labor. Pratt then showed off this group of men, claiming that the Indian could be civilized. This would be the start of the boarding schools, the first being The Carslisle Indian Industrial School, these schools would forcibly take Native children from their families and strip them of their cultural identity. As if the stripping of their families and culture was not enough trauma for these children to endure, mass amounts of abuse were reported, verbal, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse were all recorded to happen in these schools.

The issues we experience today are often the result of the traumas we have gone through in the past, we have gone over the traumas of the past, but what about the traumas of today? Modern issues on the reservation range from MMIWG2S (Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls and Two Spirit) to housing and employment difficulties. Due to the Dawes Act of 1887, reservations were created , these reservations were low in natural resources and often in remote places. These reservations were made to suppress Indigenous people’s culture, langauge, and tradition.

Housing on the reservation is something that is often overlooked, the inadequate housing on the reservation is a prominent issue in our communities, nearly 40% of the homes in our Native communities are problematic. Oftentimes are overcrowded, do not have running water, no heating and cooling, and horrible kitchen facilities. Along with the issues with housing, the employment problem has only grown over the years. The rates for unemployment fall from 20% to 80%, these issues not only affect us now, but the future generations. Children are growing up in unsafe and horrible conditions and we have yet to address it.

According to surveys done in recent years, 80% of Indigenous women experience some type of violence during their life, nearly twice the amount of Native women will be raped and sexually assaulthan any other racial group of women in America. MMIWG2S was created to protect our people and address the crisis at hand. This movement has sparked a large amount of support, more marches, data collection, putting information out there, and forcing change in government.

Trying to prosecute the people that commit violence against our women and children is something that we always seem to fall short in. Majority of the time the offenders are Non-Native men, nearly 9 in 10 victims violent crimes such as rape and sexual assault reported that the assailants were not Native people. Prosecuting these assailants is difficult as in 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that tribal courts could, at most, prosecute 1 out of 10 people who commit crimes against Indigenous women and children. For the rest of the offenders, the only hope is to send the case to a federal attorney to try and get it in a U.S district court, though this is often denied.

Truths from the Current Generation

When having conversations with people in my generation, there has been a common theme, that being, a lot of young men don’t know a lot about the current issues women and children deal with in our communities. Sometimes it’s hard to be educated about certain topics, they’re dark and heavy, they can bring our moods down, but it’s important to push through those feelings and know what our people deal with in their lives. Typically when talking to female-identifying people, they tend to have a stronger and solid understanding of the current issues. When talking to a senior from SFIS, we found ourselves sharing similar understandings and opinions, “When someone has a child, and they themselves have yet to resolve their own trauma, it just continues the cycle all over again. I don’t think someone with unresolved issues could properly parent their child.” Continuing the cycle is something we as Indigenous people have been doing for generations, we may not mean to do, but the pride we hold in wanting to seem strong is keeping us from healing.

The globalization of Indigenous peoples has grown exponentially, especially since there are so many different kinds of Indigenous peoples around the world and the media covers almost everything at all times. Indigenous people face many hardships and different types of discrimination, just like how we have our own fight for justice in the legal system other Indigenous peoples are fighting for the same rights, not having any support from a legal system leads to people being vulnerable to violence and abuse from outside people with no repercussions. The media also depicts peaceful protests Indigenous people hold in attempts to protect their land and culture as terrorist acts, the discrimination Indigenous people face from the government is why we make up 15% of the poorest population. Not only are they affected by the ways of governing but also by the high rates of mistreatment of women, Peru and India have extremely high rates of STD’s with no medical aid and are more likely to have some form of violence enacted them. Indigenous women in Panama and Russia are six times more likely to die during childbirth as they are denied proper health care options.

Media is quite possibly one of the biggest issues we face as Indigenous peoples, an especially big issue for Indigenous women. As we know, Indigenous women are more likely to be taken and murdered, along witht he fact that a majority of their cases will never be solved. Typically the media would be of great help when it comes to a missing or murdered women, but in our case they do no coverage at all. Many familes that have lost daughters and sisters continue to argue that if they were white women the media would be all over the increasing number of cases. Yamin Jiwani (A Canadian Professor) speaks about how the media constantly depicts Indigenous women in a negative light, “ She argues that these stereotypes emerge not only because of the topics that made news, but because little social or historical context is ever given to explain the causes or circumstances. Instead there is a tendency to focus on how benevolent government agencies are trying to help.”

Media itself is damaging in ways of mostly only sharing the struggles of our people, but the stories and cases that are used by the media have a lack of proper and accurate representation and information. Often times when Indigenous women go missing or are found murdered, the police records, (if any are taken) label them as white women. This leads to major under reporting and wrong data being shared with the rest of the world. Not only is the information being put out in the media wrong, but reporting a missing loved one is a challenge in itself, typically when dealing with the disappearance of an Indigenous woman, law enforcement questions the disappearance itself. The questions asked to the family are most often, “Are you sure she didn’t just run away?” and “Was she drunk or on drugs?” the stereotypes of Indigenous peoples portrayed in the media not only affect how people view us in our day to day lives, but also it also affects how much care law enforcement will put into solving and helping Indigenous women.