I recently read an opinion piece by Henry Louis Gates Jr., someone I have long admired. He addressed the divisive attempts to erase Black history. This is clearly an important topic that racism, politics and privilege have been able to suppress for many years, and anything that works to reject the current dark environment mired in hate working to erase critical race theory and the words of so many important people in our history is a good thing in my book.
It also got me thinking about the plight of women and how many analogies can be drawn and how the governing powers and the all-mighty, starchy literary canon have managed to keep marginalized women and their words buried under the concrete pillar of racism and behind the gates of convention for generations, their voices drowned out by a loud rhetoric whose buzz has numbed a population.
The gatekeepers of language have for so long buried the words of women in the name of the literary canon, that bastion of purported truth that deems which books should be read by students. From generation to generation, this canon dominated by white male writers has been handed down, ignoring those unconventional voices like Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, writers of color and those writers who explored subjects outside of the post-Victorian playbook like LGBTQ. Fortunately, I was introduced to these wonderful authors when I took graduate courses in intermodernism, a term coined by Prof. Kristin Bluemel. It opened my eyes and ears!
In the Native American communities, those racist trenches are even deeper for the women living there.
From addictions and domestic abuse to suicide and mental illness, insufficient reparations and holes in the justice system have taken their toll on Native American communities for generations despite efforts from others in the community to emphasize that you are not what happened to you. The pull from the past has proven to be much stronger in far too many cases.
Today, Native women are murdered at a rate 10 times the average, and it is estimated that four out of five have experienced violence in their lifetimes. Many of these women and girls are lured into human trafficking. This crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) has deep roots in colonization and genocide and can be attributed to the lack of legal protections as a result of the systematic erosion of tribal sovereignty stretching back more than 500 years.
There are many people who still try to suppress this truth, or even rip the pages out of history books—literally in some cases, when you consider how books are being taken off shelves. They express racist and homophobic beliefs, would like you to believe there was "nothing here," because if there was “nothing here," then the blood on the hands of their ancestors would not exist, and they could absolve themselves of their complicity.
By erasing Natives from their history, they seek to render them invisible, and they smother their voices as well as the hearts and voices of the children. For the Native American communities, the tears never stopped falling. And those tears have soaked through generations of families.
MMIWG is a movement that advocates for the end of violence against Native women. It also seeks to draw attention to the high rates of disappearances and murders of Native people, particularly women and girls.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to support their efforts.
Yesterday’s children and their legacy, today’s children and the children of the future deserve better. They deserve a choice. They deserve a voice and a place in our history books.
For more information, visit www.niwrc.org/resources/pocket-guide/when-loved-one-goes-missing-understanding-and-responding-crisis-missing-and
--Heather Mistretta