Culture of Resistance

“Clothes bigger than my size, check. Nerdy glasses, check. Veil covering any hint of hair, check. Makeup-free face, check. I don’t think I can possibly look any plainer. All I need to do now is to just look straight ahead and I should make it to work without being humiliated.”

Sara was wrong. […]

Harassment « Enough

By R. M. Arrieta, Apr 17, 2012, via @Native_NewsNet

“Sundance in Red” is part of the Traded Moons exhibit at San Francisco’s Galeria de la Raza.   (Artwork by Geri Montano)

Many people have read or heard reports of the global crisis of sex trafficking and prostitution. But few are aware of how disproportionately Native American women and girls are impacted. 

In San Francisco, native artist Geri Montano examines this critical overlooked issue in her exhibit, “Traded Moons,” which runs from April 14 to May 12 at the Galeria de la Raza gallery.

Montano told In These Times, “I acknowledge sex trafficking is a crisis overseas and in many cultures around the globe. It’s reached crisis proportions. But being of Native descent and rarely hearing about the sex trafficking which affects Native American women here in the U.S. and First Nations people…, I was moved to bring this to public attention.”

Montano addresses this ongoing crisis in her mixed medium work, which includes collages, sketches, drawings and images of indigenous women and girls, surrounded by symbols of native culture.

In “Sundance in Red,” a young girl with long black braids wears a red fur-lined dress and oversized red high heels, a pair of handcuffs dangle from one wrist. Paper doll cutouts surround the image. Another work, “7th Moon,” shows a young girl wearing her hair in traditional Hopi buns and necklace, in a garter belt, black stockings and red shoes. There are moon images around her. She stares out at the viewer.

Says Montano, “The forced removal of native children and the trauma of relocation and abuse correlates strongly to sex trafficking. There is a socio-political link. Traffickers target women and girls who are living in vulnerable conditions due to poverty, previous abuse, or during times of political upheaval.”

A bill introduced in October by U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii)—S.B. 1763, or the Stand Against Violence and Empower Native Women (SAVE Native Women) Act—would provide Indian Country with jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit crimes on Indian lands, improve the Native programs under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and improve data gathering programs to better understand and respond to sex trafficking of Native women. It would also require the National Institute of Justice to include women in Alaska Native Villages and sex trafficking in its study of violence against Indian women.

[…]

More on In These Times: Native Women and Sex Trafficking: An Overlooked Crisis

Utterly shameless, endlessly judgmental, the US pro-life movement shows no sign of halting their attacks on abortion rights.

Deborah Orr, April 14, 2012

Thankfully, the “culture wars” in Britain have never been as savage as in the US. Hopefully, they never will be. There, Republican politicians feel pressure to stay away from “gay issues”, at the very least. Here, a Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, is eager to distance himself from homophobic adverts on buses. There, Republican politicians to declare themselves “pro-life”. Here, Conservative MPs who want to make an issue out of the subject – such as Nadine Dorries – are patronised and demeaned by their leader.

Nevertheless, the constant assault on abortion rights in the US remains alarming. The big idea now is to limit terminations to pregnancies at such an early stage that a foetal heartbeat cannot be detected – at about six weeks. Worse, the wheeze is to insist that this heartbeat must be searched for using a long, electronic vaginal probe – both prohibitively expensive and grotesquely intrusive.

Most ghastly of all is the disregard for the kind of life the child of an unwanted but insisted-upon pregnancy may have. There is a long history of exploitation of children whose adoptions were arranged by the church. It has no right to claim itself a system that has answers. Even the privations visited on a woman forced to give birth pale next to this.

Yet the pro-lifers keep on. It’s a wonder they don’t just peel women off those foetuses, then throw the women away, like one peels a boiled egg and discards the shell. Then, decides, after all, that one really, really doesn’t fancy a boiled egg.

Deborah Orr | World news | The Guardian