Sovereign Women, Sovereign Nations: Framing Violence Against Native American Women
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2013
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) proclaims its mission to be “restoring safety to Native women by upholding the sovereignty of Indian and Alaska Native tribes” (niwrc.org). The NIWRC is an organization aimed at decreasing violence against Native American women, and its main strategy, like many similar organizations is to strengthen tribal governments’ ability to respond to this violence. Numerous organizations like the NIWRC have been created in the United States in the last several years to address the problem of violence against Native American women, since studies show Native American women are much more likely to be victims of violence than other women. In my thesis, I examine the significance of many organizations’ choice of a sovereignty framework for describing violence against Native American women. I argue that this framework has strategic advantages, because it resonates with many Native Americans who might not support the movement to eliminate violence against Native American women if it were framed using the human rights framework, a more commonly used framework in the movement to eliminate violence against women internationally. However, the sovereignty framework has limitations as well. It constrains the way violence against Native American women is perceived because it depicts violence against Native American women as mainly as an issue of tribal sovereignty and does not examine other causes of violence against women, such as patriarchy, which also contribute to the problem. I argue that an intersectional politics framework is a good alternative for framing violence against Native American women because it incorporates elements of the sovereignty framework but also allow for an examination of other factors contributing to the violence, and therefore offers a more comprehensive approach to the elimination of violence against Native American women. Social movement framing can shift public perceptions of an issue. If the sovereignty framework continues to dominate the movement to eliminate violence against Native American women, the general public may see violence against Native American women as caused only by tribal courts’ lack of jurisdiction over these crimes, when in fact many issues, including patriarchal oppression, contribute to violence against women.