The Seminoles and Miccosukee tribes are matriarchal societies tracing their lineage
through their mothers. But while women are revered within these tribes and others,
American Indian and Alaskan Native women face particularly high rates of domestic
violence. According to the National Indigenous Women's Research Center, four out of five will
experience violence in their lifetime. This is part of the focus of a new course at the
University of Miami's Native and Global Indigenous Studies program, or NAGIS. The course explores
Indigenous feminism and highlights the negative role colonization continues to play within tribal
communities. Joining me now to share more about this program and the violence against Native women
is Caroline LaPorte, an immediate descendant of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians,
an associate judge for her tribe. Caroline is also a lecturer for the Native American and Indigenous
Global Studies program at UM and director of Safe Housing for the National Indigenous Women's
Resource Center. Caroline, it is so wonderful to have you today. Thanks for joining me.
No, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.
So we know you went to UM Law, but as a student there, you've said you noticed you were really
the only Native American in your program. So talk about what that was like for you.
Yeah, I think, you know, I wanna say, I think it's really challenging for most universities,
or at least this is a challenge most universities could learn from, right? And we need to find ways
to address it. And we also think we need to think about why it's an issue in general but for me,
you know, as a native student, I just wanted native community. You know, law school is
challenging. Law school is challenging enough and I think that, you know, if I had had a little
bit of more peer interaction, right? I might have felt more grounded throughout that whole process.
It can be really isolating not to have that, but it can also result in indigeneity if it's
even represented on campus to be misrepresented or appropriated in harmful ways. So I think as
a native student, just generally, this kind of speaks to any university. You have to struggle
through having to explain some of that. And that's difficult and also adds to a sense of loneliness.
So it's really all about educating people in the most part, don't you think?
I think it is, and I think it's about drawing people in, right, rather than kind of excluding
people out. I think that there is, you know, when you say that you need more representation to sort
of feel seen, right? I think there sometimes is this tendency to feel like that's a critique,
and it's really not. It's just sort of a, it's more of just a request, right? But I think that
it would've helped a little bit. I think the other thing that it results in is that you end up right,
without indigenous representation on campus, you end up without class options.
Talking about indigeneity, you represent you, you end up without club options,
without access to native faculty. Any sort of basic considerations around your cultural
identity and those gaps sort of feed off of one another in different ways.
Yeah, we know you've become an educator in that space. So talk about UMs Native
and Global Indigenous Studies program or NAGIS, how did this all come about?
Yeah, it really came about to just address some of those gaps that I identified,
right? And I think as a student, I sort of had a unique perspective, or as an alumni, I had a
unique perspective on it. But weirdly, I had the opportunity to guest lecture at the law school
right before the pandemic hit, which I know was sort of a weird and isolating time for all of us.
And Tracy Divine Guzman, who's a professor, was actually at the lecture. So we went to
lunch afterwards, we started talking about the need for representation and
representation sort of being the lowest bar. And then she and another colleague
by the name of Will Pestle submitted a U-Link grant application that's part of
their racial equity work that the university is doing, and the university awarded it.
What do you want students to learn? What's the goal here? What do you want
them to walk away from this course knowing better that they didn't before going in?
You know, I think one of the big things is just thinking about the ways in which we
learn differently, right? So I really want them to understand that humor,
land, kinship connection, right? That those are all valid forms of learning.
I also, I mean, it's sort of a core part of my syllabus requirement, but they really need to
consider who they are in relation to the material. So I want them to be able to connect with
what we're talking about. I want them to leave really thinking about their own responsibility,
about their own values. And yes, obviously, I mean, it is a class that infuses history and
law. So they do have to understand US history as it has impacted Indigenous people and think
about law in a different way. But really the goal is to have them challenge some
deeply and pervasively held perceptions. And I want them to leave my class with empathy.
[Pam] Yeah.
You know, I think a lot of these issues we talk about don't just impact indigenous people,
they just happen to impact them disparately and exponentially and so if we can sort
of talk about our shared experiences in that way, then it leaves people feeling,
I don't know, more included in what they're learning about. Right?
Yeah, no, absolutely. And can, do you have any examples of things that students have
revealed to you through this course that they've actually come to learn
maybe about themselves or their connection to Indigenous people or to other minority groups?
I think the big thing actually has been students thinking about where they grew up.
And not that that's like, that's sort of a basic sort of intro thing that we do in our,
in my class, is thinking about where people are from and whose land that they're on,
right? And sort of their connection to that space, because those spaces are important to my students,
the places where they grew up, you know, they hold significance for them. And I think if I
can get them to think about things that have happened there historically, then there's that
sort of an interesting entry point for people to gain. But I also just think, you know,
in general, people just have a lot of similar shared experiences, especially in regards to,
I mean, for example, like violence, which it's not always the easiest thing to talk about,
but I think to build trust in that way has been important for the class too.
Yeah, so let's talk about that. In your work, focusing on violence against Native
women and women, by the way, are revered in most tribal cultures. I just went to
the Miccosukee Village a few weeks ago and learned that when I did my interview
with Curtis Osceola Jr. that really women are the center of the family,
but research shows that four out of five American Indian and Alaskan Native women will experience
violence in their lifetime. So if they're so revered and are the center of the family,
why is this happening? And why do you think these rates are higher for Indigenous women?
Yeah, I think they're high for a lot of different reasons,
right? It's something that we've been exploring in my class. But one of the
things that I try to get my students to at least acknowledge in the beginning is that
the experience of violence for Native women has two main root causes. And you actually mentioned
them when you were introducing, right? They're genocide and colonization. And like you said,
most tribes were matriarchal, not necessarily all of them, but most were.
So when settlers came to this land, women and children were directly and strategically targeted
for violence and separation. And that was sort of a continued act of political violence against
the sovereigns that were here, right? Like long before the other sovereigns that sort of appeared.
And then these acts of violence then spread of course into law and policy. One of the main
reasons for violence in our community is actually jurisdiction. So it's a legal issue. So you know,
you cited that four out of five Native women experience violence within their lifetimes. That
is true. I myself actually am a survivor of sexual assault and stalking. But 97% of those women from
that same study, which was a Department of Justice study, will say that it was a non-native that
actually perpetrated the violence against them. And that goes back to that Supreme Court case that
I was referencing, which is called Oliphant. And in that case, the Supreme Court held that tribes
had been stripped of their inherent authority to prosecute non-natives for crimes that they commit
on the reservation. It was somewhat addressed by the most recent re-authorizations of the
Violence Against Women Act, but not entirely. And I think the perception that this gives to people
that would be abusers is that they can come to Indian country and they can act with impunity.
[Pam] Yeah.
And I think that's, you know, that's a huge issue, right? There's also like
little to no law enforcement, there's general invisibility, there's a lack of prosecution,
there's not a lot of services for individuals who need support. And
then we have sort of these ongoing other political issues like around the extractive
industries that I think really add to the experiences of violence people have.
So are you saying that a lot of the violence,
the majority of the violence against women is being done by non-native men?
It is being done by non-native men, particularly within regard to sexual assault.
And I know that that is definitely a difficult statistic to hear,
but this was a Department of Justice study that was released in May of 2016,
if anybody's interested. It's actually called the Rose Study, and you can find that online.
We know too, you're the director of Safe Housing for the National Indigenous Women's Resource
Center. So we know how crucial providing safe housing and other resources is for
survivors of domestic violence. But there are many layers, as you've been mentioning,
barriers unique to the indigenous communities. So talk about some of these issues such as the
ties to ancestral land, because some of these spaces and places are not on
ancestral land. So these women are being taken away from their land, if you will, correct?
That is true. I think one of the biggest issues, and we just sort of see this in
the work in general, is that housing is not available. And that's really not like a,
you know, that's definitely something that's historically been an issue in Indian country
for a myriad of issues relating to things like the Dawes Act or the Homestead Act.
But housing is an issue everywhere. Housing is an issue in all of our communities. We partner
with the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and so we have access to their referral database. And
one of the things we know from that database is that there are over 2,000 domestic violence
shelters just kind of across the United States for people to access. But for tribes and for Native
survivors who want to maybe access a domestic violence shelter that's culturally rooted,
there are less than 50 tribal domestic violence shelters. That's not really meeting the need,
right? When you consider the level of violence that's experienced. Plus, as you mentioned, there
are 574 federally recognized tribes. Another thing that I think impacts most everyone's community
is the way we condition access to housing. We have sort of come to view it as an individual.
An individual right, right or something that you might have access to based on your own sense of
personal responsibility. When in reality housing is is a basic human right. And so I think a lot of
what we're doing at the center at least, is having these conversations to shift people's mindsets
around what housing access actually needs to look like, and what about our own mindsets maybe need
to be adjusted a little bit to ensure that people have access to things that are their basic needs.
Yeah, so what are some of the resources then for
Native women looking for a way out of a violent situation? What can they do?
Yeah, so the first thing that they should do really is reach out to the Strong Hearts
Native help lines. It is a peer-to-peer hotline that is confidential and 24 hours
that will connect a caller to an advocate who is also Native for a warm referral. So, you know,
getting you to either like a transportation voucher that a survivor might need,
a hotel voucher connecting you to a program that can assist you with shelter access,
for example. Or maybe with finding any sort of alternate support you might need, like even even
therapeutic support. Other important resources, you know, NIWRC.org, where I currently work.
I would definitely say like Sovereign Bodies Institute, which does missing and murdered
Indigenous women's data work and then your tribal coalitions. So regionally there are
tribal coalitions that will focus on these issues similar to mainstream or state coalitions.
Yeah and we'll list all of those. We'll have those resources on our website for
everybody so that they can easily access them. Yeah, of course. And before we let you go,
what is it that you want people most to know about being an Indigenous woman, about Native people?
What is it that people should walk away with, especially in Native American Heritage Month?
I think that people should walk away with an understanding that our worldviews and
our value systems are just as valid, right? And that if anything they offer an additional
lens for people to look at what they're experiencing or how they're experiencing it.
That it's just, you know, that it is something that is vibrant, that it is,
we are people that are still here and that we are a resilient group of people.
Well, it has been wonderful and very enlightening to speak with you. Thank you again so much for
joining us and continued best of luck with all the work you're doing at the University
of Miami and with everything else related to domestic violence, we really appreciate you.
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.