Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (30 page)

The American system continued these policies. In 1850, the California legislature passed a law called the Government and Protection of the Indians Act, which can be described as legalized slavery. This act provided for the indenture of loitering, intoxicated, and orphaned Indians, and the forced regulation of their employment. It also defined a special class of crimes and punishment for these Indians. The law, enacted on April 22, 1850, established within its twenty various sections the mechanism whereby Indians of all ages could be indentured to any white citizen.
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A white man could pay the fine and costs of any Indian convicted of an offense punishable before a justice of the peace. Then, the Indian person was required to work for the white man until the fine was paid off.

The act also gave local justices of the peace jurisdiction over all Indians within their districts and allowed the Indians to be punished with up to twenty-five lashes for stealing. According to Sidney L. Harring, “[t]he same Act also made provision for
indenturing
Indian children as servants and curtailed tribal land rights.”
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Under the apprenticeship provisions of the laws of 1850 and I860, the abduction and sale of Indians, especially young women and children, was a regular business in California.
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These provisions in the state law resulted in the institution of a slave mart in Los Angeles where captives were auctioned off to the highest bidder for “private service.”
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Although the slave mart has since disappeared, UNICOR, the California prison industry authority, continues to sell captive labor to the highest bidder.

The Little Girl That Became a Prisoner

The journey began for me at the age of five, when my mother put me into the backseat of our car and drove us away from our home and my father. She was driving away from a marriage consumed by alcoholism and domestic violence. Mom thought we would be safe somewhere else. Little did she know that she was driving me towards a life of sexual abuse and violence at the hands of people that were supposed to love the little girl with big, dark Indian eyes.

The abuse started as soon as we relocated, when the next-door neighbor’s son started putting his hands down my panties. I remember telling my grandmother what was going on. She responded, “Don’t you tell anyone about this or it will cause problems.” I did tell and she was right—it did cause problems. It opened the door for my new stepfather and my grandmother’s husband to start grooming me for sexual abuse when I was seven years old. Both men introduced me to adult comic books. My grandfather also started giving me alcohol. My stepfather would bathe me and put me to bed. Over time, he began to fondle me. One night, he was caught outside my bedroom window watching me undress for bed. I remember seeing him through the window, his face all distorted. It was not until recently that I realized that he was “jacking-off” while watching me. His abuse did not stop with me; he also fought violently with my mother.

By the age of ten, I was well on my way to becoming an alcoholic. Also at this time, my mother began to abuse me. Her words still ring in my head: “You are just a dirty Indian like your dad. You are a no good half-breed, and you will grow up to be a drunken Indian, just like your dad.”

Half Breed
a word that has made me
a stranger in my own land.

She would frequently throw hot coffee in my face, or take her long nails and dig them into my flesh, trying to draw blood.

From the ages of eleven through thirteen, the verbal and sexual abuse elevated. I was not allowed to go back to live with my dad, even though I cried and begged my mother to allow me. Sometimes I was able to spend summers with him, but never the entire summer, just a few weeks at a time. It was always hard on me when I had to return to my mother’s house.

All my women role models were white
They did not know how to deal with this Indian child
Who grew so dark in the summer
During the school year they would cut and perm that Injun hair
putting me in pretty dresses and
then telling me in soft hushed voices,
Your dad is just a dirty drunk Indian and you will be just like him.

I never told my dad what was going on at home because things at my dad’s house were not much better. He was still drinking and abusing his new wife.

It was during this time that I started to abuse drugs and alcohol on my own. My home life was pure hell and that extended to school. When I was twelve, I was raped by four boys who went to school with me. My best girlfriend watched as these boys tore off my jeans and menstrual napkin, and proceeded to rape me one after the other. Later, I remember sitting in the bathtub in the cold water crying. No one was there for me, so I cleaned myself up and went to bed. After that happened, I started running away from home and skipping school. I ended up in juvenile hall three times before I left home for good. I thought if I ran away, that all the abuse would stop. However, I ultimately ran to another life that was just as violent, if not more so.

From the ages of fourteen through nineteen, I lived with a man who became my first husband. He was thirteen years older than I was. He was verbally, sexually, and physically abusive to me during our years together. I stayed with him because I had no place to go. I could not return home. I finally gathered the courage to run away from him, but what I ran to was even worse. Alcohol, drugs, bars, backseats of cars, rapes, and beatings consumed my days and nights. I spent a lot of time in the hospital, once for a broken arm, another time for a gunshot wound, and a third time to have an
IUD
surgically removed because I was raped with a cane. There were too many different men, too many empty bottles, and too many suicide attempts.

In my past I laid upon a strange bed in a hotel
Praying that I would not wake up in the morning.
At these times it was done as a ritual
Long hot showers, purifying my body,
Combing my long dark hair, wrapping it into neat braids,
Singing my own death song.
Other times I would be sitting on the side of an empty bed,
Around me would be empty whisky bottles
And a shiny new razor blade in my hand.

At the age of twenty-two, I was sentenced to five years in the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco. By then, imprisonment was just a new phase in the cycle of abuse.

Women at Risk

The majority of women defendants in the criminal justice system have extensive histories of childhood and adult abuse that may result in homelessness, substance abuse, and economic marginality that forces them to survive by illegal means. The systems that place victims under correctional control include the criminalization of women’s survival strategies.
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Moreover, many incarcerated women were exposed to violence that began early in their lives. American Indian women are the victims of crime at a rate that is nearly 50 percent higher than that reported by black males.
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Women are also affected by their socioeconomic status, as low-income women of color have the greatest abuse risk. This leaves them vulnerable to being criminally entrapped and forced by abusive policies into the corrections systems. Violence perpetrated against women and girls can put them at risk for incarceration by forcing abused girls and women into the criminal justice system where they are not seen as victims, but as offenders in the eyes of the state.
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The female population in the prison system is dominated by drug offenders. The actual offenses vary—from possession or minor involvement to more large-scale drug sales and distribution. The offenses also include prostitution performed for drug money or holding small amounts of drugs for their male partners. The “war on drugs” is sometimes called the “war on women” because it has brought proportionately more women than men into the prison settings.
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Racial discrimination in the criminal justice system has a devastating effect on women of color. According to Mary E. Gilfus, “[w]omen of color are more likely than white women to be arrested and charged with more serious offenses, to be prosecuted, to be convicted and to serve prison time.”
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Ross notes that “[t]he violence experienced by women prior to incarceration continues inside the prison in a variety of forms including sexual intimidation, the overuse of mind-altering drugs, lengthy stays in lockup, and the denial of cultural activities for Native Americans.”
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We lose our dignity as soon as we enter the criminal justice center. It starts with a strip search—vaginal searches are particularly humiliating, but also painful. We are told to shower with a de-lousing soap, given state-issued clothes that are either too big or too small, and then we are given a prison number. The reality of the nightmare begins to set in the first time we hear the sound of the door closing and the turn of the key.

Out of Sight/Out of Mind

In the warmth of my fantasy
I awake to the cold gray walls
Of my reality.

These words thundered in my mind as the judge read my sentence: “Ms. Ogden, you are sentenced to five years, which will be served at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco.”

My reality is becoming more common for women in the United States, especially for American Indian women. Our Native women face overwhelming odds at every stage of the criminal justice system.
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Yet, when I was trying to gather information on the number of American Indian women in prison, I found that it was almost impossible to find any accurate numbers. To quote the late American Indian activist Little Rock Reed, “the American Indian segment of the population of people is the forgotten segment; the segment that is so small in other racial and ethnic groups warehoused in America’s prison that it is insignificant.”
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The few articles that are available on this topic are either generic, lump both men and women together, or they focus solely on Indian men.

Native American women are lost in the system because race classification systems in most prisons only allow for identities of White, Black, Hispanic, or “Other.” Ross explains that “[p]risoners are ritualistically dehumanized, regulated, and reduced to numbers.”
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Located outside the door to my cell was a small, white, 3 × 5 card that listed my last name, my state number, and my racial classification—“Other.” Every morning as I left for my job assignment, I would cross out “Other” and write “American Indian,” but each afternoon when I returned for noon count, there would be a new card with “Other” written on it. This went on for a few days when finally the correctional officer approached me, and said, “Next time, Ogden, it will be a write up and a loss of good time.” The next morning, before work, I found a permanent laundry marker, tore the card off the wall, and wrote “American Indian” on the wall.

All women in prison are fighting to maintain a sense of self within a system that isolates, degrades, and punishes. But, as American Indians, we must also fight for our identity on the very lands of our ancestors..

Women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population. Today, there are over 140,000 women incarcerated in prisons and jails (nearly triple the number since 1985), and nearly one million under criminal justice control. California now has the distinction of having the most women prisoners in the nation, as well as the world’s largest prison. There are over 11,000 women in prison in California. The two largest women’s prisons in the world are located outside of Chowchilla, California, and imprison almost 8,000 women. The combined population at Valley State Prison and the Central California Women’s Facility is higher than the city of Chowchilla where they are located. The majority of women are in prison for economic and nonviolent crimes, namely, drug offenses. As the number of women behind bars grows, the detrimental effects are felt by a whole generation of children, since a high percent of the women are mothers.

We Are Losing Our Children

It is impossible to explain to your three year old, over the phone, that you love her and that you will be home soon. Afterwards, you go back to your cell and cry yourself to sleep because “soon” is five or more years. The children, also known as the “hidden victims of incarceration” also suffer due to their mothers’ absence.
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The growth of the prison system has dramatically affected the lives of millions of children. Although children whose parents are incarcerated do not automatically enter the foster care system, there is an increasing number of children who are entering it. In 1999, U.S. prisons held the parents of over 1.5 million children, an increase of over 500,000 since 1991.
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The incarceration of women uniquely influences families and communities because women are often the primary caregivers of children. Additionally, black, Latino, and Native children are at a greater risk for losing a parent to incarceration. When a woman goes to prison and there is no one able to care for her child, she runs the risk of losing her legal parental rights. Thousands of children end up as wards of the state and are shuffled through the foster care system while their mothers are incarcerated. Still more are adopted out, never to see their incarcerated mother again.