NATIVE WOMEN AND AMERICAN FEMINISM

The exciting message of the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement which spread from California across the country carried with it the startling awareness that women did not have an equal place in the movement. It had been presumed, wrongly, that women students and faculty would share every level of responsibility in the free speech and anti-war organizing efforts. But early on, it became clear that the male leaders would not share the stage with women. As one student put it, “we were welcome to make the coffee and pass out the handbills, but the front of the stage was for the men.” This souring led almost instantly to the beginning of the women’s movement.
At the same time the American Indian Movement and other groups were organizing to push the causes of Native sovereignty and government accountability. The 19-month occupation of Alcatraz island in San Francisco Bay spread the word of Native sovereignty from California throughout the rest of the country. Prior to Alcatraz, several urban Indian centers had been established to provide services to Native people who had been relocated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs from their homelands to big city ghettoes. These centers became launching pads for the larger organizing efforts.
The emerging women’s movement and the Native justice movements of the late sixties took different paths, and there are several reasons why they did. Some say those paths may never converge.
During the Berkeley Free Speech days, attempts were made to form alliances between the university students and the emergent Black Panther organization. It was thought that civil rights, free speech and black power all had much in common and that support of one should include support for all. However, the cultural gap between the mostly white students and the black power group was never bridged, and after a time each continued on separate courses. Among the Native movements, white participation was viewed with suspicion and separation was the preferred posture, and even though an occasional meeting was held and declarations of cross-support were issued, in the main the groups remained apart.
As time passed, the strengthening women’s movement came to be seen as a culturally white organizing effort and a distance developed between it and other groups. In the excitement of organizing and pressing claims on behalf of feminism, inclusivity was not paid much attention to until it was quite clear that there were many missing faces. By then, after the organizing work had been done, it seemed like window dressing to try to bring in women of color, particularly since the leadership roles had been well-established, and they were occupied by almost all whites.
Meanwhile, the Native groups had gender problems of their own. The structure of these groups was loosely organized around tribal models, with “councils” of the leadership, charismatic spokesmen (nearly 100% male), and large numbers of “warriors” or support workers. In this configuration, women found themselves in the support roles of cooks, security, clerical help, messengers, and medical personnel. Nevertheless the glue holding all of this together was culture. A strongly defined sense of history and the challenge of righting wrongs done to Native people united everyone in the group to press forward together as a single body. There was no room in this organizing model for women to press separate claims of feminism. In fact, feminism was seen as a white concept that had to be rejected as the cultural model was embraced. Participation in the Native movements by large numbers of professional women never occurred, in some part due to the male dominance of the leadership and the lack of opportunity for educated women to play much more than minor supporting roles in the development of the groups.
Eventually, Native women as well as other women of color did join the women’s movement, although never in the numbers that should have been there, nor in any significant representation in the leadership. By that point, fifteen years after Berkeley, the icons of the women’s movement were well known, and none of them included women of color. In an evolution very much like all of the other movements, a few women became preeminent and closely identified with the very essence of feminism, thus mirroring in most aspects what spokeswomen said they rejected in male-dominated organizations. They replaced white American culture with its subculture in a white female dominated organization that had few avenues that would allow women of color to feel comfortable or succeed. Yet, inclusiveness became a watchword. Great effort was made to recruit women of color, Native women among them. But it was not until the battered women’s groups became a subgroup of the larger women’s movement that greater numbers of Native women joined. Here, women had a common experience—the domestic violence that cut across all cultures. To a lesser extent, the reproductive rights groups also had success in recruiting women of color for participation. The greater women’s movement had to find areas where the common experience cut across cultures and where the issue had a fundamental link to the relationship between men and women. This was to become no more evident than in the competition for jobs.
Whereas the great thinker of the African American civil rights movement, W.E.B. DuBois said that women’s suffrage and the equality of slaves were so similar as to be linked, feminism in the late twentieth century pressed hard for economic parity but did little to support men of color. This attitude was not lost on women of color who sensed a similar betrayal was in store for them if they became too closely aligned to feminism.
Now, some thirty years after Berkeley, it cannot be said that any of the movements have evolved into permanent institutions. Perhaps it was not the natural path for these large social groups to take. A great number of social changes have occurred which acknowledge the prejudice practiced against women and attempt to remedy the inequity by means of rules similar to civil rights rules. However most of these remedies put women in a category like those of identified people of color, the so-called “racial minorities.” Stuck in this clutch of protected groups, women are permanently in a minority status, even though they are neither a minority nor a cultural group per se. It is the latest dilemma that the women’s movement must face—whether to maintain the protective cover of a special class or solve the problem of being defined in such a way that women are set apart from men more or less permanently. To some, it is a matter of timing—a certain level of economic parity must be reached. To others, it is a matter of history—men must never be trusted or they will always take the upper hand.
In this mix, Native women, like some of the other cultural groups, are doing fairly well. There is a strong leadership group, professional women’s ranks are growing, and pay, while not at parity, is closer than that of women overall. By sitting out the women’s movement’s organizing phase, Native women seem to have reaped many of the benefits while not compromising a strong cultural affiliation. It is hard to tell. The Native movement also brought about changes in U.S. governmental practice, thus opening up many opportunities for men and women. The outcome is Native women seem to have suffered less as a result of their exclusion from the women’s movement than feminism suffered from a lack of participation by women of color. Feminism finds itself in dire straits, struggling to define itself in the new twenty—first century context of competition and individualism. A reexamination of the cultural chasm might help the women’s movement to build a bridge to other groups that have long eluded the feminist embrace.