What Valentine’s Day Has to do with Indigenous Women’s Wellness in America
Instead of dating and relationships, try (extreme) intimate partner violence
This Valentine’s Day, rather than focusing on relationships and dating, Indigenous women and advocates will instead turn their attention to the chilling pattern of intimate partner violence. Known as IPV, it represents one of the most alarming and leading health threats facing Indigenous women and teenage girls.
Across Indian Country, memorial walks, vigils and day-long events are being led by Indigenous women faced with the highest sex assault rate in the country and the second highest murder rate — crimes most often committed by offenders of which the victim knew.
This revelation of extreme gender violence, confirmed in July by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , is one of several health disparities central to perhaps one of the biggest shortcomings of all — a lack of mental health care.
The good news is that data reporting about the wellness of Native women is slowly improving. (Often Natives are left out of the data equation — an ironic disparity in and of itself). With this progress, it is a hopeful sign that essential healing can expand.
Homicide
According to the Indian Health Service, a quarter of Native peoples will die before they reach the age of 45. And for Native women and girls, their fatalities aren’t symptomatic of any medical or genetic issue. Rather, lives are lost to a disproportionate rate of violence.
Murder is the most severe health outcome facing Indigenous women. The demographic represents roughly half a percent of the U.S. population. Yet, according to the CDC, they are met with the second-highest homicide rate in the country next to black women.
Between 2003 and 2014, 240 American Indian and Alaska Native females were murdered. And of those killed, 36 percent were young — between the ages of 18 and 29.
The statistics released last year confirmed what tribal advocates, in favor or the Violence Against Women Act, had been telling Congress for years: that a near majority of victims — 46 percent — were murdered by someone they trusted or loved; a romantic partner that they knew.
Accidents
While homicide reflects the most grave health disparity among Indigenous women and girls in America, accidents rank as the overall third-leading cause of death. (Cancer and heart disease are the top-two fatalities for Native females, although they rank significantly lower than the national average). Accidents are what the National Vital Statistics Report call “unintentional injuries” — deaths related to car crashes, hypothermia or freak falls, for instance.
But there is need for scrutiny behind what has long been deemed accidental.
For instance, when Aerial Saxon, a tribal citizen of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, was found beaten unconscious and later died, Mendocino County Sheriff’s detectives stalled their suspicious death investigation after a toxicology report detected methamphetamine in Saxon’s system. The tribal newspaper, the Two Rivers Tribune, reported that despite the apparent bruises and injuries to her head, a pathologist determined she died of natural causes. Saxon’s family believes that she was murdered and they blame her boyfriend for her death.
Carmen O’Leary of the Native Women’s Society of the Great Plains said Indigenous women are often seen as second-class victims. “This notion that people who use drugs and alcohol are less deserving, it’s just a recipe for many victims and few investigations,” said O’Leary.
Re-examining how unintentional injuries are reported among Native women could also alter the number of poisonings associated with this group, particularly whenever fatal alcohol consumption and drug overdoses are involved. In Alaska, for example, Native women there are statistically dying of toxic alcohol intake at rates nearly 2.5 times that of white women nationwide. But it’s unclear if other factors may have led to these deaths.
To be sure, alcoholism is believed to contribute to the second-leading cause of death among Native women, aged 35–54 — chronic liver disease and cirrhosis — the highest rate among any other group of female Americans.
Mental Health
Since the 1990s, mental health experts have theorized that substance abuse and fatal addiction are less about pleasure-seeking but rather a response to untreated suffering. Known as self-medicating, Indigenous youth advocates at WeRNative are sharing this knowledge as a way to curb substance abuse tendency among Native teens faced with extreme violence, steep social inequality, and the highest suicide rate in America.
“I’m sorry you had to find out that I hated my life so much it drove me to killing myself.”
Native girls between the ages of 10 to 14 are most prone to self-inflicted fatality — almost four times the rate of white females in the same age category. In a study focused on reasons why people kill themselves based on the suicide notes they leave behind, one 13-year-old Native American girl referenced alienation from her own family. “I’m sorry you had to find out that I hated my life so much it drove me to killing myself,” she wrote.
No one knows for sure about the status of mental health access in Indian Country. A 2011 report conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services was incomplete. But from the information gathered, it listed as its top recommendations to tribal clinics and hospitals to seek partnerships for care with non-Native providers — reinforcements away from the reservation.
Mental health is not a priority for Indian Country, but it should be.
Framed another way, 25 percent of Native youth exposed to violence, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, are more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at a rate higher than U.S. soldiers returning home from Afghanistan. These adverse childhood experiences, otherwise known as ACE’s, are what families in Indian Country have managed for generations — unresolved historic traumas that have been passed on, unhealed.
STD burden and Infant Mortality
To further read into the statistics, if the rate of sexually transmitted diseases and infant mortality are any indicator, it shows that Native women just aren’t receiving adequate health care, period.
STD’s among Native women are high — on average, two to three times the national average for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis. But STD’s don’t instantly evolve into diseases. They start as bacterial infections first — STI’s — and ones that are generally easy to treat, if you have access to care.
But perhaps the starkest truth lies with the fact that while every other racial group in the country saw infant mortality rates drop, for Native women they remained dire — nearly twice the national average. In 2014, American Indian and Alaska Native mothers were 2.5 times less likely to receive late or no prenatal care compared to white mothers.
The health and wellness of Native women is not like all other women.
More studies are needed to further examine these realities, and ones that public health advocates say are authentic of the Indigenous experience.
“The solution is not to look at those terrible numbers but to look at situations through a decolonizing lens,” said Stephanie Carroll Rainie, an Athna Athabascan Native and co-founder of the U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network at the University of Arizona.
Rainie said focusing on survivorship — what supported Indigenous Peoples in their time of resilience from traumatic events — is the Indigenous-minded direction that hones healing.
“What supported people in their time of resilience; in their own community?”
