CLEVELAND, Ohio — As a lifelong Northeast Ohioan, I’m thrilled that my favorite season, autumn, is finally upon us. From horror movies to haunted houses to welcoming the trick-or-treaters, I look forward to Halloween all year long.
But as an Indigenous Clevelander, an Anishinaabe woman, it’s also a tricky time of year. At Halloween, I experience anxiety, worrying if a person in my circle of friends, family and acquaintances will don a racist costume. I wonder if I’ll see familiar faces “playing Indian” or wearing a “sexy Indian princess” costume in my social media feeds.
At a time when the rate of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) remains a crisis across the continent, it’s harmful to have Halloween costumes dehumanizing Native women as sexual or primitive objects, rather than as the sacred beings they are in Indigenous communities.
For those unfamiliar with the MMIW crisis, here are sobering facts from the National Institute of Justice:
More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime
56.1% of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime
In the year leading up to the study, 39.8% of American Indian and Alaska Native women had experienced violence, including 14.4% who had experienced sexual violence
Overall, more than 1.5 million American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime
Additionally, Amnesty International notes that about one in three American Indian and Alaska Native women (29.5%) have experienced rape in their lifetime, meaning they are more than twice as likely to be raped than non-Hispanic white women in the USA.
In 2021, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna) — the first Native person to serve in a presidential cabinet — created the Missing and Murdered Unit to address this crisis.
“Violence against Indigenous peoples is a crisis that has been underfunded for decades,” she said in a news release, announcing the new unit. “Far too often, murders and missing persons cases in Indian Country go unsolved and unaddressed, leaving families and communities devastated. The new MMU unit will provide the resources and leadership to prioritize these cases and coordinate resources to hold people accountable, keep our communities safe, and provide closure for families.”
It has taken a long time to get the U.S. to address this issue. Since the founding of this country, Native women have endured high rates of violence. And sadly, that violence – a long-lingering ill, resulting from colonization — remains prevalent today.
One of the incidents that will forever stand out to me that illustrates the real horror of this crisis is the 2017 murder of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind (Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe) in North Dakota. The shockingly brutal case involved a then-pregnant 22-year-old LaFontaine-Greywind, whose baby was savagely cut from her body, as she was left to die, bleeding in a bathtub. Her body was ultimately found wrapped in plastic, floating in a river.
“She was taking her first breath, as her mother was taking her last,” said the prosecutor in the case, referring to LaFontaine-Greywind’s daughter, who survived the forced delivery. LaFontaine-Greywind’s daughter was found with her killer, and later reunited with her family. The killer was brought to justice. But this, quite tragically, is often not the case, across the continent, when Indigenous women are murdered.
When we look to Canada, the numbers are just as alarming among First Nations women. According to a 2021 report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 1,017 women and girls identified as Indigenous were murdered between 1980 and 2012 — a homicide rate roughly 4.5 times higher than that of all other women in Canada. As Amnesty International notes, considering the RCMP does not always correctly identify Indigenous women as Indigenous, those numbers are likely greater.
Right now in WinnipegIndigenous peoples are calling for law enforcement to search a landfill that they have conceded likely contains the bodies of murdered and callously discarded Indigenous women believed, to have been victims of a serial killer targeting Indigenous women. But police, even aware of the location of the bodies, have continually refused to search the landfill.
I strongly believe that both of these atrocities, and countless other violent crimes against Native women, are attributed to society’s indifference to the value of Indigenous women’s lives. It is directly linked to how we, Native women, are portrayed in media like Disney’s sexualized Pocahontas, and depicted in dehumanizing imagery, like racist mascots. The under-coverage of this issue by the media also plays a large part in allowing it to become a crisis. The criminal justice system, which does not treat violence against Indigenous women with the same urgency as it does violence against white women, are also complicit, sending the message to perpetrators that they will not serve equal justice.
Native women are a testament to the resilience of our people and are the backbones of our communities. Tolerating or embracing the depictions of us that reduce us to stereotypes isn’t just wrong, it affects society’s conscious and unconscious biases that lead to higher rates of violence.
So, if after reading this, you see others wearing sexy Indian maiden costumes this Halloween, remember it represents more than you think. And, hopefully, if you’re a true ally, you’ll educate others about why this seemingly harmless act contributes to the larger problem about the dehumanization of Indigenous women and the MMIW crisis.
A Clevelander from the Slavic Village neighborhood, Nancy Kelsey started her career in journalism before working in communications. Her biggest loves are her husband, family, dogs, volunteering, traveling, writing, learning about other cultures and sharing her own. You can reach her at [email protected].
Nancy Kelsey columnist for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. January 14, 2022
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