Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights by Dian Million

Author:Dian Million [Million, Dian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-04-19T19:06:53+00:00

six

What Will Our Nation Be?

Speaking for the sake of the land and the people means speaking for the inextricable relationship and interconnection between them.

—simon ortiz1

In the United States, Pat Bellanger, an Ojibwe from Minnesota, stated her community’s interest: “To us, it is impossible to separate the fate of our children from the fate of our families—they are the same. We needed to come together as families. The women define the family and the family is the base of our culture and our culture, our families are under attack at every level, in every way.”2 Indigenous women imbued this concept of relations writ large with the sense of integral and reciprocal responsibility that their sense of “family” entailed, a sense that put them at odds with the rising white second-wave feminist movement’s radical critique of women’s subjugation in family. White feminists initially argued for abortion rights, and only later for “the right to choose” educated by the very different positions of Women of All Red Nations (WARN) and other women of color.3

Indigenous women located “the fate of their children” at the center of their activism, because their struggle for their right to bear and raise their children was central to any future they had as peoples or nations. These positions were actually different sides of a similar issue. Radical western feminists argued for rights over their own bodies, which they saw usurped in national laws that forbid their decision to bear life or not. Obviously, for Indigenous women, it was the actual elimination of a decision, violating their bodies by sterilizing them without their informed consent. Then, even if they managed to have children, the state often took them, as it had for generations, either to schools or, at the time WARN wrote, to foster 123

124 • Therapeutic Nations homes and adoption in white families. Either way the white male state sought control over women’s reproductive powers.

In this chapter I track what healing means in two contexts, the one that I established in the last chapter as a language for the healing of nations steeped in community/personal development, and here in the language of women who argued for a radically different notion of nation. I do this because both of these discourses are a vision for community, for the heart and meaning of nation, not necessarily the nations called into being by a human-rights will to self-determination, but as the indigenous nations they already understood themselves to be. Women, the “heart of nations,” as opposed to women as the abject heart of the dissolution of nations, come into focus in this chapter. I then shift to exploring how healing, community, and government is a conversation that Indigenous women have had and continue to have about what makes life generative, an expanded sense of potential for a people central to any vision of Indigenous nation.

As Our Bodies, Our Nations?

US national interests in population control in Third World countries tied to ideas of development supported Indian women’s coercive sterilization in Indian Health Service

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.