Violence and Indigenous Communities by Susan Sleeper-Smith;Jeff Ostler;Joshua L. Reid;

Author:Susan Sleeper-Smith;Jeff Ostler;Joshua L. Reid;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northwestern University Press

A Red Girl’s Reasoning and Disrupting Settler Narratives

A Red Girl’s Reasoning resists settler discourses that deflect the blame for violence against Indigenous women away from settler men and onto Indigenous peoples themselves. In Canada, settler hegemony perpetuates violence against Indigenous women and girls and their communities by reifying harmful stereotypes in at least two ways. First, hegemonic colonial institutions imply that the violence against Indigenous women occurs most often within the Indigenous community itself. While Indigenous feminists have called for “Indigenous society and particularly Indigenous men” to cease practices that denigrate Indigenous women, settler society has problematically failed to acknowledge that colonialism is to blame for domestic violence by Indigenous men.35 For example, a 2015 news article cited Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) claims that Indigenous women are usually murdered or harmed by men within their own communities. Several First Nations chiefs were deeply offended by the insinuation that Indigenous peoples are responsible for this problem.36 Domestic violence in Indigenous communities is an outcome of colonial gender politics and would not occur except for the imposition of hegemonic and Eurocentric masculinity on Indigenous men during contact and beyond.37 Hence, Tailfeathers’s choice to direct her film at “white boys” becomes a strategic act of resistance done to shift responsibility for violence onto the settler state, which privileges and protects colonial masculinity.

Similarly, Tailfeathers questions a second mainstream social narrative, one that situates the cause of violence against Indigenous women with the women themselves. It is gender studies scholar Scott L. Morgensen’s view that “colonial masculinity sustains both colonial and heteropatriarchal power by presenting its victims as the cause and proper recipients of its own violations.”38 This happens when colonial institutions generate “stock narratives” in which Indigenous women who are murdered or missing are routinely portrayed within a “set of assumptions about a shared life narrative (troubled childhood, ‘broken’ family, abuse, children’s services, adolescent rebelliousness, . . . drug experimentation, prostitution, addiction, mental illness, criminality, and so forth).”39 The 2015 RCMP report utilizes this rhetoric and thus reifies this harmful ideology. Despite the report’s stated intent not to ascribe blame to victims, it emphasizes a link between violence and victims’ use of “alcohol or other intoxicants.”40 In A Red Girl’s Reasoning, Nelly encounters this mindset in the judicial system. She explains to Delia that her attempts to file charges against Brian for his crime were dismissed by prosecutors who claimed that “[her] blood showed traces of this and that, and [her] lifestyle was high risk.”41 Narratives about murdered or missing Aboriginal women absolve settlers of blame by reassuring the general public that women in Nelly’s situation are at fault, and hence do not have “grievable lives.”42 Brian, however, embodies a cultural ideal that many settlers readily accept: he is young, white, conventionally attractive, and by the appearance of his clothes, affluent. Certainly Brian has internalized a view of his own self-importance, apparent in that he does not even remember Delia as one of his victims, until she reminds him. This narrative twist exposes

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.