Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights

2. Gendered Racialized Sexuality: The Formation of States

33 two Gendered Racialized Sexuality The Formation of States It is important to honour the missing and murdered women. It is unacceptable to marginalize these women. The Creator did not create garbage. He created beauty. —david smoke1 The Canadian TRC specifically addressed sexual abuse of Indian children in residential schools. As a separate issue, Canada and the United States also came under human rights scrutiny from Amnesty International for failing to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence. These campaigns to educate and advocate have much to teach us about how violence against Indigenous women is presented to two different nation-state publics. In Canada: Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada and Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA, Amnesty International (AI) cites rape, murder, and daily violence against Indigenous women at the epicenter of an endemic violence that Indigenous peoples experience in both countries.2 AI protests actually join a tsunami of literature, narratives, and analyses produced by Native women themselves over the past four decades. However, it was Amnesty’s worldwide reputation as a pioneering human rights NGO that lent a discursive weight that the women did not have alone. The reports highlight the different discourses that exist in Canada and in the United States for explaining this violence. How AI’s campaigns frame the violence against Indigenous women illustrates how such violence lends its moral force to other political aims, both Indigenous and nation-state. AI’s spotlight on gendered sexual violence focuses attention 34 • Therapeutic Nations on the fact that Canada and the United States were both constituted in this violence. The political and social destruction of Indigenous societies was in part accomplished by discipline of children’s bodies, as in the residential schooling systems, or in unchecked violence perpetrated on Aboriginal women’s bodies. There is also an affective aspect of this discipline that mostly goes unmarked in histories and literatures of colonization. In the first section of this chapter, I compare these two important Amnesty reports in the way they present gender violence against Indigenous women to their respective Indigenous and nation-state publics. I explore first how this violence is expressed in Canada as an aspect of a long, reprehensible relationship now under reconciliation, while in the United States it is posed as a major deterrent to self-determination for American Indian nations. I consider the way Sarah Deer, a leading indigenist legal scholar and activist, poses the question of self-determination and gender violence. In the second section I contextualize this violence by returning to well-discussed nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial projects to review how gendered raced sexual violence becomes constitutive to the nation-states. There I pose different questions about the shame that was produced by a Canadian public’s discipline in what amounted to an apartheid . I then speak to how affect mobilizes present political assessments of profaned Indian women and their families. On the other hand, such an analysis brings us back again to the import of the campaigns for justice that North American Indigenous women posed to AI and the transformational potential in women’s statements of respect for life. Disappeared Produced cooperatively with the Native Women’s Association of Canada, Amnesty International’s Stolen Sisters documents the long record of disappeared Aboriginal women, some never found after decades of inquiry.3 It is also the account of the found and abused bodies of Aboriginal sisters, mothers, and aunts, whose deaths barely register as crimes to the Canadian justice system. AI positions the disappeared and murdered women at the epicenter of a deep-seated disrespect Canada holds for Aboriginal life made manifest. From the statistics, it would appear that it is hardly a crime to rape, kill, and “disappear” an Aboriginal woman, and perhaps even less notable if she has become “untouchable” or homeless or has entered the sex trade. Stolen Sisters situates this gendered violence within a long history of colonial violence against Indigenous people stemming from the formation of the Gendered Racialized Sexuality • 35 Canadian state. Through innumerable cases Stolen Sisters identifies and tracks the considerable Canadian indifference to Indigenous women’s lives as a recognizable history. Here AI can refer to an already released Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) national investigation that admits to the systemic violence that formed these Canadian–Indigenous colonial relationships...