Native American scholar Sarah Deer's new book is a timely and valuable contribution which offers a wide-ranging and insightful consideration of the crisis of sexual violence against Native women. The author opens by challenging the description of this problem as an “epidemic,” arguing that the term depoliticizes the issue by conjuring images of a mysterious, spontaneous problem of unknown origin. Deer wastes no time in convincing us that, in reality, the rape of Native women is founded upon a history of state-sponsored violence and is sustained by the very structures and institutions that purport to prohibit and prevent this crime. From the outset, it is clear that, fundamentally, this book is about the inextricable intertwining of the violence of colonization and the violence of rape.
Deer establishes her priorities clearly in chapter one by noting the methodological limitations of conventional data-gathering on the rape of Native women. She questions the reliance on statistics to “know” the issue, and asserts that the voices and documented histories of survivors provide more real, useful, and compelling data. Indeed, throughout the book, Deer is determined to assign proper value to the experiential wisdom of women who have survived both violent colonization and violent rape, arguing that these situated knowledges provide insight into the profound and unmeasurable destruction of the harm, help to challenge the stereotypes of inferiority inscribed upon the Native population, and map a possible way out of the crisis.
Chapters two through five provide a detailed historical, legal, and political overview of responses to rape from precolonialism through to the current day. Although the discussion is at times descriptive and meandering, there is no obvious prescription for covering a terrain of such vastness and complexity. Deer's narrative is consistently engaging and fascinating and is peppered with evocative and often disturbing excerpts from original historical documentation such as the diaries of colonizers. A particularly interesting point made in chapter two—and threaded throughout the entire volume—is the incompatibility of Native and colonial law in their conceptualization of women, sex, gender, identity, and rights. As Deer explains, it was patriarchal colonial law that conceived of rape as a property crime, whereby the sexual violation of a girl or woman was only recognized because it devalued a man's assets. Gendered power and worth in Native systems, on the other hand, was and is far more complex.
Chapter four provides a particularly interesting analysis of government apologies to Native people, noting their omissions and silences and how they ultimately fall short through their failure to acknowledge the pervasiveness and continuing legacy of harms. Chapter five highlights the persistence of chattel slavery into the present, in the form of the euphemistically-framed “sex trafficking.” The sixth chapter is an interesting inclusion: centered around the tragic personal story of Dana Deegan, Deer highlights the need for an indigenous feminist approach to understanding the experiences of women survivors of violence. Reminiscent of bold feminist writings which deftly weave anecdote and poetry into incisive theoretical analysis, this chapter reinforces the sense that Deer is a feminist pioneer, prepared to bend disciplinary convention in order to produce literature that is compelling and challenging on both an affective and intellectual level. Symbolically, this chapter provides a momentary pause and a timely reminder of the personal realities that underpin the need for this book. Then, Deer launches into the final four chapters, which critically consider recent legal reforms that have further contributed to outrageous levels of rape. In the concluding sections, Deer proposes a range of survivor-centric approaches and self-determination-based remedies that may begin to “decolonize” America and address the “vacuum of justice” (p. xiii) that exists for so many Native women.
Throughout her book, Deer demonstrates an impressive command of a range of complex content. She writes with passion and pain of the many generations of women burdened with unspeakable trauma, yet never loses sight of the broader dimensions of the problem. Grand themes like law, society, power, politics, colonialism, structure, institution, oppression, race, sex, identity, spirituality, and belief systems are artfully woven throughout the cohesive and compelling narrative. Deer's writing is engaging and refreshing, making reading this book—despite its challenging content—a pleasure. Unlike much academic literature, it is light on discipline-specific jargon, thus continuing in the tradition of feminist political writers who show a determination to produce work is that accessible to a wide readership. Accordingly, this publication will be of great use to scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields. It is an excellent example of innovative interdisciplinary work and is highly recommended for those working in law, criminology, politics, history, public affairs, indigenous, postcolonial, sex and gender studies, and in the areas of peace, conflict, justice, and transitional justice.
