Marie Sanchez
Women stood at the center of Native activism throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And yet the mainstream Native rights movements often did not speak to the particular concerns of women. That changed during the 1970s with the founding of organizations such as the Women of All Red Nations (WARN). Established in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1974 by an eclectic group of women, many of whom had experience in the American Indian Movement, WARN aspired to create “a national organization in which women can organize to struggle.” One of their early campaigns targeted the Indian Health Service’s practice of sterilizing Native women without their consent or through coercion. Marie Sanchez (Northern Cheyenne) anticipated this issue in her address at the Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, Switzerland, in September 1977. Consider how Sanchez, who became a tribal judge on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, related the issue of women’s rights and sterilization abuse to sovereignty, genocide, and global indigeneity.21
I come with greetings from the women of the Western Hemisphere. I come here to pose questions to this conference and hopefully to receive positive actions in some of the questions that I present. The Indian women of the Western Hemisphere are the target of the genocide that is still ongoing, that is still the policy of the United States of America. We are undergoing a modern form called sterilization, which has been going on for hundreds of years, to totally exterminate the Red man. Our brothers were the ones who had to undergo murders and other inhumane acts. And you heard this morning from our brothers, the Warriors and protectors of our nations. The Native American woman is the carrier of our nation. Therefore, I again state, we are the target for a total, final extermination of us as people. The question I would like to put forth to this conference, to the delegates of other countries here present is that why have you not recognized us as sovereign people before? Why did we have to travel this distance to come to you? Had you not thought that the U.S. government in its deliberate and systematic attempt to suppress us, had you not thought that was the reason that they did not want to recognize us as sovereign people? The positive thing that I feel will come out of this conference is if you are going to include us as part of that international family. It is for you to give us that recognition.
Only with that can we continue to live as completely sovereign people. There are other concerns of the Native American women. They do not just stop at the concern of being sterilized. They go beyond that because of our relationship to Mother Earth. The raping, plundering, because of the greed of the United States of America for our natural resources, it is still yet a form of sterilization. Because we depend on Mother Earth for life. And you also, because you are part of the family in this world, should also be very concerned, because the current enemy is your enemy too. And that enemy dictates the policy to your governments also. And I want to warn you not to be so dependent on the country and the government that we are under. We have demonstrated to you how many hundreds of years we have survived, but only because we are still united we can still be together in struggle. And we wish to continue to exist.
I have a message of Panama. “The Indian women of Panama greet our inseparable companions in the struggle, in the Indian movement that are present here today to question and to achieve positive acts for our nations. Our groups are the most exploited and most segregated of all the peoples from the time of invasion and conquest of our land. We, the Indigenous women of Panama have already committed ourselves when it deals with the unity of our people because we have contributed, although in a passive form, to the progress and development in the areas of strengthening our cultural, spiritual and traditional values, hereditary wealth of our ancestors. We are conscious of our historic position and we are sure we will not defraud our future brothers and sisters because we are here constructing little by little the basis together with you all. Let us be brave men and women so that once again for the history of the world the richness of our indigenous society shines.
“Delegates, this is a very great mission and it requires the participation of all its members, because we want and desire the full vindication of all our rights because here, in one form or another, we are united by blood, by a history weighed down by the constant murders and humiliations towards us and because all the Indian nations are raising our voices before the protectors of the state, who at great height pretend to maintain us under a situation of segregation as though they did not recognize the objectives which they want to attain, our own extermination.
“We would like to make it known to the public here that for the women, her defense, her rights and equality are concepts in practice and real life we do not know. The rights of better social conditions, on par with culture, with our education, because the great majority of us are domestic servants and we are not permitted to go to school even at night-time. We are cheap labor. In the houses where we serve they oblige us to renounce our traditional dress, our dances, our language, for a miserable wage. They oblige us and condition us to think and to feel as whites. They teach us and oblige us to look down on the Indian that forms part of our history, who is our brother and our father.
“We are objects of investigation on the part of the so-called scientists, the anthropologists and we are against this because nobody wants to be studied. This is our reality. There has never been a pronouncement made about the exploitation of the indigenous women. We are the objects of jokes and humiliations as if being an Indian woman was a painful shame for the country. We constitute a problem in the social, economic, political and cultural aspects due to the exploitation and alienation to which we are subjected. We are abandoned to our own fate. Our representative on behalf of the government could say it is certain that the indigenous woman of Panama does not carry a tremendous weight upon her shoulders and that the indigenous women present at this conference should say if this is not the sad truth.
“All these situations form part of the politics of integration into a civilized life into which they wish to induce us, and we oppose that. For that reason we wish to make a call to all the Indian brothers present here to struggle together, all united under one flag, under one religion, the religion of the Indian nation. And in that struggle we should all participate together, the men and women together in this struggle, because both strengths are necessary to guarantee the support of our own various ethnic groups. We have many problems and must fight according to the possibilities to achieve our rights in favor of the enrichment of our culture and of our peoples because we have always been and are now women who fight with a sense of our own values.
“On a national level we would like to terminate the politics of paternalism, integration and discrimination which also affects us and enormously and that which they try to impose upon us in our land, in our work and in whatever place, wherever we are. Indigenous brothers, we have confidence in you and we have confidence always that our voices will be heard, all united under one Indian religion only without different borders. We will fight for that one day when the richness of our culture and the greatness of our indigenous people will shine again in all its splendor. This is a challenge to all of us and we will fight to overcome.”
So you see our concerns from both the North and the South Americas are the same and that is survival. To keep our nations going and united Native American nations, of course, would like to be a part of the United Nations.