The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

death.
A headline in the Navajo Times in the fall of 1979 reported
that rape was the number one crime on the Navajo reservation.
In a professional mental health journal of the Indian Health
Services, Phyllis Old Dog Cross reported that incest and rape
are common among Indian women seeking services and that their
incidence is increasing. “It is believed that at least 80 percent of
the Native Women seen at the regional psychiatric service center
(5 state area) have experienced some sort of sexual assault.” 2
Among the forms of abuse being suffered by Native American
women, Old Dog Cross cites a recent phenomenon, something
called “training.” This form of gang rape is “a punitive act of a
group of males who band together and get even or take revenge
on a selected woman.” 3
These and other cases of violence against women are
powerful evidence that the status of women within the tribes has
suffered grievous decline since contact, and the decline has
increased in intensity in recent years. The amount of violence
against women, alcoholism, and violence, abuse, and neglect by
women against their children and their aged relatives have all
increased. These social ills were virtually unheard of among
most tribes fifty years ago, popular American opinion to the
contrary. As Old Dog Cross remarks:
Rapid, unstable and irrational change was required of the
Indian people if they were to survive. Incredible loss of all
that had meaning was the norm. Inhuman treatment, murder,
death, and punishment was a typical experience for all the
tribal groups and some didn’t survive.
The dominant society devoted its efforts to the attempt to
change the Indian into a white-Indian. No inhuman pressure
to effect this change was overlooked. These pressures
included starvation, incarceration and enforced education.