Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (31 page)

In California, 195,000 children have a parent in state prison and another 97,000 children have parents in county jail. Many women feel guilty and shameful about having to leave their children. Reunification is a desired goal, but women prisoners need various resources and assistance to accomplish this. Children separated from their mothers by incarceration also exhibit emotional and health problems, such as nightmares, bedwetting, withdrawal, and fear of darkness.
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The negative consequences of having a mother in jail could assist in funneling these children into the criminal justice system, failing to break to the cycle of oppression.

The courts should be obligated to ensure that Native mothers who are criminally charged are made aware of their tribal nation’s rights under the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Every measure should be taken by criminal justice workers both in and out of the prisons to assist the incarcerated Indian mothers in maintaining as much contact with their children as possible during incarceration to diminish the effect of losing their parent.

What We Face Inside

Incarcerated women suffer different traumas than men in prison. The needs and the problems that women face in prison are much different than those of men, and our emotional reactions are quite different. In order to understand the emotional difficulties that affect many women prisoners, one needs to consider their backgrounds and the obstacles they face as mothers in prison. Women prisoners suffer from harsh discipline and sexual harassment. Women also have unique medical and mental needs, which are difficult to address in the harsh environment of prisons. Access to reliable health or mental health care is a major concern for all female prisoners. Women are afraid that incompetent medical attention, more than the illness itself, will lead to death.
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My last roommate at CRC was a soft-spoken, middle-aged Mexican woman from Los Angeles. Like many other women, Rita was doing time because she was addicted to drugs. The last few months before her release she had terrible stomach pains. Rita begged for a doctor to take a serious look at her pains. Prison staff refused to listen to her, accusing her of trying to get free drugs. Many nights I would sit up with her as she cried because the pain was unbearable. It got to a point where Rita was unable to eat because she would throw it back up. We tried to get her some extra milk when we could. Rita’s parole date came, and she was able to go back home. We got word a few weeks after her release that Rita was taken to the hospital, where she died on the operating table. The cancer had spread like wildfire; there was nothing they could do.

Medication is used as a way to control women in prison. Studies in the United States indicate that incarcerated women are more heavily medicated than incarcerated men.
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Most psychiatry in prison has everything to do with control and management and nothing to do with holistic, effective treatment.

I was medicated the entire time I was in county jail. Before I was sentenced, the doctor prescribed me Elavil twice daily and Mellaril three times daily. These medications made me sleep most of the day and night. I would wake only to go to “chow-hall” and to take a shower. These meds were given to me throughout my nine-month incarceration. By the time I left for state prison, the pills had affected my speech. The thoughts were there but I had a difficult time getting the words out. My mouth and skin were dry and I was weak from constant sleep. Upon arriving at the prison I was given Thorazine for two weeks; it made me a walking zombie. The other Indian women there told me that many of them were also medicated. After being sentenced to five years at the California Rehabilitation Center and returning to jail I was given a med packet with a small pill inside. “What is this for?” I asked the guard as she locked my cell door. “It came from the doctor this morning when he found out that you were being sentenced. Take it Stormy—it’s just to calm down,” she told me. The next thing I remember was my cellmate shaking me as I sat on the floor, watching my cigarette burn a hole into my nightgown. “What did they give you Storm?” “I am not sure what it was,” I said to her with slurred speech, “all I know is that it was small.”“Must have been Thorazine,” was her reply, “the doctor gives that to all of us women, especially the Sisters that get sentenced to prison.”

Inadequate medical care is one of the most pressing problems facing women prisoners. Women in custody have an increased incidence of chronic health problems, including asthma, gynecological disease, nutrition problems, and convulsive seizure disorders, often due to their exposure to violence. Moreover, care is provided with an eye toward reducing costs and is often based upon the military model, which assumes a healthy male. Consequently, medical care for women in California prisons is woefully inadequate. In addition, increasing numbers of women arrive at prison malnourished, with sexually transmitted diseases and untreated gynecological problems. Many scholars and activists have argued that the poor medical care in prisons is a violation of the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Sexual Abuse

Many women in prison were victimized by sexual violence and abuse before incarceration. It is estimated that 43 percent to 57 percent of women in state and federal prisons have been physically abused at some time in their lives.
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Any experience of sexual abuse in prison compounds their suffering. Privacy violations are an unpleasant fact of prison life. Historically, incarcerated women in the United States have experienced sexual advances, coercion, and harassment by the staff.
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Guards observe female inmates at all times, while taking showers, dressing, and going to the bathroom. Women are searched continuously, from pat downs after meals to complete strip and body searches after family visits. Many women are victims of sexual abuse by staff (both male and female). The abuse includes sexually offensive language and inappropriate touching of their breasts and genitals when conducting searches.

Conclusion

The one thing that prisons do well is punish prisoners. Prisons strip people of their dignity, their health, and whatever self-esteem and self-respect they once had. Prisons also punish the children and families of prisoners. Prisons do not stop crimes.

Just as alcoholism has touched the life of every Native person, so has the U.S. criminal justice system—in particular, the prison system. As Luana Ross points out, most Native people have been incarcerated or they have a relative who is currently in prison.
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In my family, it was my great-grandfather, then me, then my brother, and then my baby sister. The high rate of imprisonment can only be described as genocidal. Foreign laws that were forced upon us have devastated the Native world and the number of jailed Natives is a chilling reminder of this fact. Native people are being locked up at alarming numbers in their own ancestral homeland. Our struggle has been threefold: for our ancestral land, our religious rights, and, simply, our right to live.

For Native women the struggle has also been about the right to freedom from sexual assault, which often leads us to prison. As Andrea Smith demonstrates, colonists depicted Native women as impure and, therefore, inherently “rapable.” Colonization is inextricable from the sexual violation of Native women: “As long as Native people continue to live on the lands rich in energy resources that government or corporate interests want, the sexual colonization of Native people will continue. Native bodies will continue to be depicted as expendable and inherently violable as long as they continue to stand in the way of the theft of Native lands.”
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For the Native women of North America, sexual assault and imprisonment are two interlocking, violent colonial mechanisms. The criminalization and imprisonment of Native women can be interpreted as yet another attempt to control indigenous lands and as part of the ongoing effort to deny Native sovereignty.

The criminal justice system can be seen as an institution of formal social control used by the dominant society to enforce its own cultural values, social order, and economic system on Native people. This is evident, based on the fact that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately incarcerated. The laws and policies that govern the criminal justice system today are rooted in the laws and policies that were created to massacre and exterminate people native to this land. The philosophies that allowed people to use slaves to build this country and to use immigrant labor for the purpose of industrialization are the same as the philosophies used today to justify using sweatshop and prison labor for the capitalist system.

Our women and girls under correctional control are among the country’s most impoverished and vulnerable population, yet they have very few advocates. Services must be designed to be accessible, culturally appropriate, respectful, and useful. We need to remember that these women are grandmothers, mothers, sisters, aunties, and daughters; they are us and we are them.

What was my crime, why five years in prison?
Less than $2,000 of welfare fraud
What was my crime?
Being a survivor of molestation and rape
What was my crime?
Being addicted to alcohol and drugs
What was my crime?
Being a survivor of domestic violence
What was my crime?
Being an America Indian woman.

Notes

1
  Luana Ross,
Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 5.

2
  Lawrence A. Greenfeld and Steven K. Smith,
American Indians and Crime
(Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, February 1999).

3
  Carol C. Lujan, “Women Warriors: American Indian Women, Crime and Alcohol,”
Women and Crime
7 (1995): 91.

4
  Angela Davis and Cassandra Shaylor, “Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex: California and Beyond,”
Meridians
2 (2001): I.

5
  F. Frank Latta,
Handbook of Yokuts Indians
(Bakersfield, CA: Bear State Books, 1949), p. v.

6
  Rupert Costo and H. Jeannette Costo,
Natives of the Golden State: The California Indians
(San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1987), p. 3.

7
  The Advisory Council on California Indian Policy,
The Special Circumstances of California. Indians
(1997).

8
  Costo and Costo,
Natives of the Golden State,
p. 17.

9
  Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio, 1789.

10
  Little Rock Reed,
The American Indian in the White Man’s Prisons: A Story of Genocide
(Taos, NM: Uncompromising Books, 1993), p. 2.

11
  Reed,
American Indian,
p. 25.

12
  Reed,
American Indian,
p. 25.

13
  Ross,
Inventing the Savage,
p. 89.

14
  Reed,
American Indian,
p. 31.

15
  Jack Norton,
Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our World Cried
(San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press, 1997), p. 44.

16
  Sidney L. Harring,
Crow Dog’s Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 45.

17
  Norton,
Genocide
, p. 44.

18
  Norton,
Genocide,
p. 207.

19
  See Mary E. Gilfus,
Women’s Experiences of Abuse as a Risk Factor for Incarceration
(National Electronic Network on Violence Against Women, December 2002), available at
www.vawnet.org
.

20
  William G. Archambeault, “The Web of Steel and the Heart of the Eagle: The Contextual Interface of American Corrections and Native Americans,”
Prison Journal
83 (2003): 51.

21
  Gilfus,
Women’s Experiences,
p. 2.

22
  Merry Morash and Pamela Schram,
The Prison Experience: Special Issues of Women in Prison
(Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2002).

23
  Gilfus,
Women’s Experiences,
p. 7.

24
  Ross,
Inventing the Savage,
p. 6.

25
  Ross,
Inventing the Savage,
p. 78.

26
  Reed,
American Indian,
p. vii.

27
  Ross,
Inventing the Savage,
p. 115.

28
  Kathryn Watterson,
Women in Prison: Inside the Concrete Womb
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), p. 99.

29
  See Christopher J. Mumola,
Incarcerated Parents and Their Children
(Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, USDOJ, 2000).

30
  Morash and Schram,
Prison Experience,
p. 78.

31
  Watterson,
Women in Prison,
p. 25.

32
  Watterson,
Women in Prison,
p. 118.

33
  Gilfus,
Women’s Experiences,
p. 2.

34
  Morash and Schram,
Prison Experience,
p. 120.

35
  Ross,
Inventing the Savage,
p. 1.