Citizenship status, racism, gender and violence: Aboriginal women in Canada, international sex trade – finding the links and associations

Lawrence W.

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Citizenship status, racism, gender and violence: Aboriginal women in Canada, international sex trade – finding the links and associations

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Abstract

In the forward to Andrea Smith's (2005) book Conquest. Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Winona LaDuke, writing about Native Women's experience in Minnesota, writes that Native women in the state, which borders Manitoba, have a ten-times higher chance of dying a violent death than a white woman in the same region. She also notes that "the National Guard will not spend hours of manpower scouring for your missing body." (LaDuke: xvii) She compares this to the expensive $150,000 search for a blond woman, who went missing at the Minnesota/North Dakota border, attesting the lack of similar resources under any circumstances expended in search of a missing Native woman. This is not only true of Minnesota, North Dakota or any other part of the U.S., but also the truth of experience of Native women across Canada. This paper will try to explain and evaluate, and place in a personal social-work context, why this would be true. As well it will compare the experience of Native women and violence, to the violence faced by immigrant women who work in the sex trade in Canada, or the role of Canada as a state of boundaries and policies of exclusion, within a climate of globalization and heightened spread of an international underground of sex trafficking that accompanies globalization

Introduction
The discussion on rights and violence against women
The way that citizenship laws are framed in Canada
That Native women experiencing higher levels of violence
Neo-colonialism or trans-national capital globalization
Forms of domination
Article by Denise Brennan on Dominican sex workers
The sense of the problematic nature of violence
The systems of justice in our society
The violence inherent in prostitution
The links between violence and oppression
References

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[...] (Jiwani: However, this is not even framed or noted as such, unless it is deconstructed and interrogated, due to its ‘natural' air which equates with privilege (Razack, 1998) The way that citizenship laws are framed in Canada, as Jiwani (1999) notes, leads to exclusion of vulnerable and young women from being able to migrate to Canada. This becomes one of the ways that the liberal democratic state, inadvertently, aid the traffickers in girls and women in the international sex trade. [...]

[...] As a society this could include as Green suggests native women who end up seeming political inconsequential not only to the Canadian state which frames the laws of citizenship but also the band councils with the urgent need for self-determination, again, not taking into account the equality of women in the unfortunate interlinking of citizenship, status, patriarchy and for those at the margins, gender and race and poverty. (Green: 718) The need, as Fellows and Razack contend lies in the deep analysis that “class exploitation could not be accomplished without gender and racial hierarchies; imperialism could not function without class exploitation, sexism, heterosexism, and so (Fellows and Razack: 335) Their radical critique stems from their fear that if one oppression is left to stand, then they all remain; none are eradicated unless all are eradicated together, whether in theory or in praxis. [...]

[...] At the outset, it can be confusing to see the connection between aboriginal people's struggles (and the violence pervasive against Aboriginal women historically, and in the contemporary Canadian context) to the international trafficking in young women, which is being exacerbated and intensified as a result of globalization. However, one key historical linkage is with European imperialism and conquest in the era of colonialism and the claiming of the vast geographical territories of North America as European in the 17th century, and its impact on Aboriginal tribal societies; and the current global restructuring, the power of transnational capital and information flow, and the traffic in women for and into the consumer culture of the West. [...]

[...] Hence many women can be “complicitous in the oppression of other women (Fellows and Razack: 337) Within feminism(s) in context of debates that take place at conferences, which is an example Fellows and Razack give, the problem of who speaks, who listens, who leads, who follows, can lead to “incidents of high conflict” such as one they describe the denial by a group of women at a conference that prostitution is violence against women by excluding a woman's concerns about this (who worked as a prostitute and was at the conference) in a move to discuss something else the ‘superior' oppression of race and its ‘violence'. [...]

[...] Citizenship in the sovereign state is a privilege not a right for all; and this privilege is stratified and hierarchical, be it patriarchal Kenya suffering under the chaos of post- colonial identity crisis, or Canada, multicultural liberal democracy, swaying beneath the weight of contradictions and paradoxes that can be traced back to colonial history and mistreatment of Native peoples from the very onset. These problems are all framed into constitutions which relish the division between people as a way to maintain the codification of gender, race, class divides. [...]

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