scholarly journals Gertrude Bonnin on Sexual Morality

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Lewandowski

This paper examines attitudes to sexual morality held by the Yankton Dakota author and activist Gertrude Bonnin (1876–1938), better known by her penname Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird in Lakota). Bonnin’s concerns encompass several themes: the victimization of Indian women, disintegration of Native courtship rituals, sexual threats posed by peyote use, and the predatory nature of Euro-American men. This critique as a whole — in which a ‘white invasion,’ in her words, leads to a corruption of Native sexuality — sometimes produces inconsistencies, particularly regarding Bonnin’s statements on the alleged sexual perils of peyote. Her investigations into the Oklahoma guardianship scandals of the 1920s, however, strongly buttress recent research by Sarah Deer (2015), whose study, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, highlights the tragic aspects of Native-white sexual relations under United States settler-colonialism.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Judith B. Cohen

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's, An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States, confronts the reality of settler-colonialism and genocide as foundational to the United States. It reconstructs and reframes the consensual narrative from the Native Indian perspective while exposing indoctrinated myths and stereotypes. This masterful and riveting journey provides truth and paths towards the future progress for all peoples. It is a must read and belongs in every classroom, home, library, and canon of genocide studies.


Author(s):  
Corey Rayburn Yung

The American criminal justice system regarding sex is not just logically incoherent, it is also often morally bankrupt because it remains unexamined and poorly understood. This Article contends that there are actually common roots underlying the seemingly oppositional forces of social panic and denial, which explain why the United States has an endemic sexual violence problem. Both panic and denial reinforce the implicit, and sometimes explicit, desire to avoid substantive engagement with socially contentious issues related to sex. The use of residency restrictions and civil commitment fit the modern social goal of putting sex offenders out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Yet, those same desires also explain America’s unwillingness to believe victims of sexual violence and police failure to properly investigate criminal complaints. In this way, sex panic dovetails with sex denial—in both instances, American culture only permits a limited discussion and understanding of sex and sexual violence. The result is that our nation fails to take sex crime complaints seriously while overreacting to the few convictions that emerge from the hostile criminal justice system.


Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.


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