Native American women in the United States are currently experiencing a crisis of violence and sexual abuse.
They go missing by the thousands and at rates considerably higher than those of white women, although with less media attention. In one study by the Sovereign Bodies Institute involving 2,306 missing women and girls, more than half were homicide victims.
The case of Kimberly Bearclaw Iron provides a heartbreaking example of this tragedy. She grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, but went missing in September 2020 from her home in Billings, Montana, leaving behind her three children. She was twenty-one years old and a devoted mother. After several days, she called her dad from Nevada in tears, desperate to get home, although she did not give her location. She continued to call her dad occasionally over the next month—always from an untraceable number and on speakerphone, which disconnected abruptly. She never answered when he would call back. She would tell her dad she was OK, but he did not believe her. He felt something was definitely wrong. Then the calls stopped.
Her family fears she is a victim of sex trafficking. While Native Americans make up only 1.1 percent of the U.S. population, they have been shown to comprise a much larger share of sex trafficking victims in several states. Iron is still missing.
More than half of Native American women experience sexual violence at some point during their lifetimes, and one out of three are raped. On some reservations, people say they do not know a single woman who has not been raped, and they tell their daughters what to do when—not if—they are raped, according to legal scholar and advocate Sarah Deer. Most disturbing: Non-Indigenous perpetrators commit an estimated 86-96 percent of the sexual abuse of Native women and are rarely brought to justice. Amnesty International concludes that this is due to the “complex interrelation between federal, state, and tribal jurisdictions that undermines tribal authority and often allows perpetrators to evade justice.” The trauma from the current state of abuse is devastating.
Violence against and sexual abuse of Native American women was almost unheard of in traditional societies. Prior to colonization, Indigenous women in what became the United States were honored and were essential to maintaining tribal cultures. As a Cheyenne proverb states, a tribal nation is “not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.”
During European colonization, however, the rampant sexual abuse and murder of Native women constituted an integral strategy of conquest and genocide. Amnesty International and other organizations assert that this strategy normalized and now fuels today’s high rate of violence against and sexual abuse of Native American women, as well as the impunity enjoyed by their attackers. Native American women are still experiencing the brutality of colonization.
The systematic rape of Native women began with the Spanish. During Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Caribbean, Taíno women were raped. Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 was larger, with seventeen ships carrying 1,200 soldiers, sailors, and Catholic friars. Arriving on the island that Columbus renamed Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the troops were said to have gone wild, raping Native women and killing, torturing, and enslaving Native peoples with extraordinary brutality.
According to historian David E. Stannard, Native women were “gambled away in card games and traded for other objects of small value, while stables of them were rented out to sailors who desired sexual accompaniment during their travels up and down the coast.”
In a letter to the nurse of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s son, John, Columbus reports that “there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.”
As a Cheyenne proverb states, a tribal nation is “not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.”
Rape of Native women by the Spanish continued during their occupation of California (1769-1821), as detailed in a letter written in 1773 by Franciscan priest Junípero Serra to Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli and others. “The soldiers, without any restraint or shame, have behaved like brutes toward the Indian women,” Serra wrote. They would “lasso Indian women—who then became prey for their unbridled lust. Several Indian men who tried to defend the women were shot to death.” Serra blamed the military commanders and the governor, who condoned the soldiers’ assault on the Native women.
In addition to sexual abuse, the murder of Native women by U.S. soldiers and settlers was pervasive during the Indian Wars (1600-1900) and was part of the strategy of Indigenous extermination. Native women were singled out for slaughter because of their ability to sustain the tribes through childbearing.
Military historian John Grenier explains that the “first way of war” in the United States included killing Native women and children and brutalizing other Native noncombatants. “Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity.”
Andrew Jackson biographer Michael Paul Rogin concurs: “America was continually beginning again on the frontier, and as it expanded across the continent, it killed, removed, and drove into extinction one tribe after another,” he wrote in the book Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. Their “destruction symbolized the American experience.”
America’s Founding Fathers also supported the extermination of tribes, including women and children. While George Washington stated that peaceful means should be used with tribes whenever possible, in his 1783 letter to James Duane, Washington called Native peoples “savage as the wolf . . . both being beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape.” In 1779, Washington instructed Major General John Sullivan to lay waste to all the settlements of the Iroquois so that their homelands “may not be merely overrun but destroyed.”
Sullivan demolished forty of forty-one Iroquois towns, cutting down orchards and crops, burning villages, and destroying more than a million bushels of corn, according to historian James Wilson. Meanwhile, Colonel Daniel Brodhead massacred hundreds of Iroquois women and children.
In his 1807 letter to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, Thomas Jefferson explained that any Native tribe that attacks will be met with the hatchet, which would not be put down “till that tribe is exterminated.” He added, “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”
President Andrew Jackson called Native peoples “savage dogs.” When addressing Congress in 1833 about several Southern tribes, he said they have “neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement . . . . Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”
The 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, in southeastern Colorado, provides a heart-wrenching example of the murder of Native women. The massacre followed a campaign by the Rocky Mountain News urging the annihilation of Native Americans. “They are a dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race and ought to be wiped from the face of the earth,” the newspaper’s editor wrote in 1863.
This slaughter of about 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people happened after a group of Native Americans killed a family of white settlers. Although the group’s tribal affiliation was unknown, Colorado Territorial Governor John Evans issued an emergency proclamation authorizing citizens to kill all “hostile Indians” they could find.
As a result, Colonel John Chivington, a “rabid Indian-hater,” famous for saying, “Kill and scalp all, little and big,” and “Nits make lice,” attacked the tribes encamped at Sand Creek with 700 heavily armed soldiers. Before the massacre, Chivington had been informed that the tribes at Sand Creek were harmless, disarmed, “camped under a white flag of truce,” and were prisoners of war, according to Stannard and fellow historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
Without provocation or warning, and when the men were away hunting, the soldiers attacked the encampment of mostly women, children, and the elderly. Nearly all were killed, and their deaths were followed by mutilation “in the most horrible manner,” according to Lieutenant James D. Connor. All were scalped, and women’s genitals were cut out by the soldiers, who then stretched them “over the saddle-bows” and “wore them over their hats.”
Prior to “mass Euro-American invasion and influence, violence was virtually nonexistent in traditional Indian families and communities.”
The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) provides more crushing evidence of the sexual abuse of Native women as a tool of genocide. The gold rush brought a flood of miners and ranchers imbued with a hatred of Native Americans. Native women were raped, forced into prostitution, and murdered in great numbers, according to Wilson.
In 1851, California Governor Peter Burnett announced that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged . . . until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Consequently, more Native peoples probably died because of cold-blooded genocide in California than anywhere else in the United States.
A New York Century reporter wrote in 1860 that “history has no parallel to the recent atrocities perpetrated in California. Even the record of Spanish butcheries in Mexico and Peru has nothing so diabolical.”
The Indian Wars were fiercely fought on both sides. However, Native tribes were outnumbered and outgunned, and lost most of the battles. By 1900, the tribes in the United States had been brought almost to extinction. Only about 250,000 Native Americans were still alive in the United States, from an estimated population that ranged from five to fifteen million before 1492, according to Dunbar-Ortiz and other scholars. While the spread of European diseases was a major cause of the loss, deliberate tribal extermination, elimination of food sources, starvation, and poverty were also contributors.
Stannard describes the population loss as “the worst series of human disease disasters” combined with the “most violent programs of human eradication that this world has ever seen.” It is the “most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”
The brutality of colonization can be traced back to 1493 and the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal framework based on a fifteenth-century papal bull holding that lands not inhabited by Christians are available to be “discovered” by Christian rulers. It calls for the spreading of Christianity and for “barbarous” nations to be brought into the Christian faith. Another 1455 papal bull sanctions the enslavement and defeat of non-Christians as enemies of Christ and calls for the theft of their possessions.
In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court, citing the papal bulls, upheld essentially that ownership of land in the United States derived exclusively from Europeans’ “discovery,” thus obliterating any prior Native inhabitants’ claims. The doctrine provided colonists the rationale for viewing themselves as vastly superior to Native peoples and justified stealing their lands, destroying their cultures, eradicating tribes, and brutalizing Native women.
Before the arrival of Columbus, according to scholars, Native American women were traditionally esteemed, and played a critical role in sustaining Native communities. Elderly women played a primary role in socialization and cultural transmission.
About 600 tribes inhabited the American continent north of the Rio Grande before 1492. These tribes had been here for at least 15,000 years and likely much longer, according to Wilson. Many had advanced civilizations and extensive trade networks. Most were excellent farmers. While early colonists marveled at the “wilderness” they had “discovered,” North America had “not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years,” according to the Ojibwe historian David Treuer. Native peoples shaped the land, cared for it, and held it sacred for millennia.
In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld essentially that ownership of land in the United States derived exclusively from Europeans’ “discovery.”
Although cultures obviously differed substantially across tribes, shared spiritual beliefs and rituals provided important commonalities, including the respectful treatment of women. There were “universal underlying values that permeate what can be considered a Native worldview and existence,” according to Native American scholars Michael Tlanusta Garrett and Tarrell Awe Agahe Portman.
Portman and Garrett explain that many tribes speak of the “Circle of Life” or “Web of Life.” The world can be conceptualized as a huge spider web “in which each strand is dependent on every other strand for existence and for balance.”
The Salish say that “all creation consists not only of mankind, but of all creations in the animal world, the mineral world, the plant world—all elements and forces of nature. Each has a spirit that lives and must be respected and loved.” Such belief systems underlie many aspects of tribal life, including codes of conduct, ceremonies, governance, and respect for Native women.
Rape of and violence against women were rare to nonexistent in most tribes, according to Amnesty International and many scholars. Significantly, Native men did not rape colonial women who were prisoners of war in Native encampments.
Professor Lisa Poupart, a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Anishinaabeg, explains that prior to “mass Euro-American invasion and influence, violence was virtually nonexistent in traditional Indian families and communities. The traditional spiritual worldviews that organized daily tribal life prohibited harm by individuals against other beings. To harm another being was akin to committing the same violation against the spirit world.”
Tribes were usually egalitarian with a complementary relationship between women and men and special respect granted to children, elders, and Two-Spirit people. The roles of men and women tended to be balanced and of equal importance, power, and prestige. Both were integral to tribal culture and success. Women generally owned the home and did much of the farming, gathering of plants, and raising of children. However, they often participated in social, economic, and political decision-making as well.
The Six Nations of the Iroquois, as well as the Lenape or Delaware, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Pawnee, Otoe, Missouri, Crow, and Navajo, were matrilineal societies. Membership in the tribe, clan ownership, inheritance of personal property, and hereditary rights to public office developed through the female line. Women often had the final say when the council disagreed, and could stop the tribe from going to war. There were sometimes female chiefs.
In many tribes, leadership was viewed as a shared responsibility, according to Dunbar-Ortiz and others. Gender roles were fluid, with men sometimes performing a traditionally women’s role, and vice versa. Historical accounts tell of the bravery of women warriors.
Prior to colonization, tribal warfare was often ritualized rather than unbridled, with the quest for individual valor (“counting coup” by merely touching an enemy) the primary aim, according to historians Stannard and Dunbar-Ortiz. It usually resulted in few deaths. While this low death rate was likely not always the case, the ritualized approach was in keeping with the sense that harm to another was harm against the spirit world.
The brutal treatment of Native Americans during colonization constitutes one of the most violent periods in world history. Unconscionably, this brutality continues for Native American women to this day, resulting in unbearable trauma and degradation for generations. Most U.S. citizens know little of this history. This must change. Society must widely acknowledge the settler-colonial history of brutality and genocide, and the continued sexual abuse and violence against Native American women. The respect, fortitude, resilience, and nurturing of Native women needs to be recognized and honored. It is time for truth-telling.