Indigenous Feminism and Breaking the Colonial Mindset
By Mattie Branson-Meyer
One of my favorite works that we’ve read for this semester was “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy” by Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. This piece stretched my eyes wide open to the extent that colonialism shaped our country from its founding through today and how it has molded our ideals and patterns of thought and action. Of course, I knew that colonialism was the basis for the foundation of the United States and colonists from numerous other countries had been interfering with the lives of the Indigenous peoples who already lived there for centuries before and after 1776. And I also knew about the horrible conditions that many Native Americans face even today on the reservations where they were forced to move. But when I thought about Indigenous feminism, I thought mostly about the fact that Indigenous women are often ignored within society and within feminism itself, and how an egregious number of Indigenous women have gone missing or have been murdered in this country (and around the world) and have received very little attention or help. But this is a colonial way of thinking. We as a country have not moved past our colonial roots at all, and even our elementary and secondary education is filled with this colonial mindset.
But what exactly is that mindset? We are taught, to some extent, about the horrors that past Americans forced upon Native Americans–– about the epidemics, the atrocities, the massacres, the forced relocation and assimilation–– and how the after-effects of these experiences still cause harm today. And we are taught that because Native Americans suffered such great abuse at our hands, that they are no longer able to fight for themselves, and that they need a privileged, white man’s help to lift them out of suffering. As Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill explain explicitly, this is a prime example of a colonial mindset: that Native Americans are helpless and ignorant, and need the guidance of a superior people to help them end their pain. Although this mindset may be one that is modernized for an era when we theoretically know that asserting our dominance over another group of people is wrong, it still echoes back to the original age of colonialism and conquest because the Europeans had essentially the same ideology. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill call on their colonial-minded audience to recognize that we no longer get to have control over the lives of Indigenous peoples–– even if we caused them harm, even if we’re trying to make it better–– because all we inevitably do is take more and more agency, power, and authority away from them.
Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill also link the colonial mindset to feminism. They point out that settler colonialism is inherently gendered, and more than that, Indigenous women have been both excluded from feminist conversations and the most common victims of violence and other elements of the heteropatriarchy. Today’s feminism in the United States is working within this colonial context, and the three authors emphasize the need for Indigenous feminism to dismantle both the colonial structure and the heteropatriarchy. I find their methods for asserting this need to be absolutely brilliant. Within their work, they lay out the problems and exclusionary aspects of today’s colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and feminism. Then they lay out a beautiful, though complex (but all the more impressive for its detail) process for attaining Indigenous feminism, including necessary steps and challenges to overcome. Rereading their work made me almost giddy at the thought of achieving this radical change. They call for an overhaul of ideologies, of the way we are taught to see the world, and of institutions as well. Though this seems like an impossible task, they are so detailed in their work that one cannot help but be uplifted and inspired to change–– and I mean really change, deep down in the core of your core–– and fight for this future of Indigenous feminism.
Works Cited:
Arvin, Maile, et al. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections Between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations, vol. 25, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 8–34, doi:10.1353/ff.2013.0006.