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Feminist Nations? A Study of Native American Women in Southwestern Tribal Politics
Abstract
Tremendous variation exists in the politics and governance of the over 550 federally recognized American Indian tribes. For example, women are barred from participating in tribal politics in most Pueblo Nations, yet in other Southwestern tribes, they are political leaders. Using data from personal interviews with officials from 21 Indian Nations in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah, I examine the role that they, as women, play in tribal politics; why they participate; the positions they hold; the constraints they face; their political goals, policy priorities, and strategies; and the institutional and social conditions that enable women to serve in their tribe’s political leadership. The findings reveal substantial diversity among the Southwestern Indian Nations studied, yet considerable similarities exist among the leaders’ paths to leadership, policy priorities, and political goals in tribal government.
... For women's/compassion issues to effect the party gender gap among American Indians, there would need to be a gender gap in their support for women's/compassion issues. The little research that has been done on American Indian women's support for these issues has focused on political leaders, and generally it finds that American Indian women care about women's/compassion issues (Prindeville 2000;Prindeville and Gomez 1999;but see McCoy 1992). Although McCoy (1992) finds that women leaders' policy priorities do not center on women's issues and are similar to men's priorities, other researchers have found otherwise. ...
... Or, while they are concerned about reproductive services, they are less concerned about abortion and more concerned about fetal health and adoption of Aboriginals. There is also evidence that women leaders believe that women bring different perspectives to governing that advance women's interests (Prindeville 2004;Prindeville and Gomez 1999). Many of these studies do not compare women leaders with men leaders, so they do not indicate whether women are more or less interested in these issues than men. ...
While there is much research examining gender gaps in political attitudes, there is less examining how gender gaps differ within social groups. This article helps fill that void by examining gender gaps among American Indians. Using two surveys, the initial findings suggest that among American Indians, women have a stronger American Indian identity, are more likely to support women's/compassion issues, and are more likely to be Democrats. It further finds that the gender gap in party is more likely the result of the gender gap in compassion issues than in American Indian identity. Additional analysis finds that among American Indians who prioritize their American Indian identity, the partisan gender gap is reversed, with men being significantly more likely to be Democrats. Although this study finds some similarities between the gaps among American Indians and whites, it also finds some unique gaps among American Indians. This suggests the need to look at the intersectionality of gender and social groups to fully understand the gender gaps.
... Our claim is not novel. We build on the work of pioneering scholars who explored the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender among political elites to argue for the full inclusion of women of color in the study of American politics (e.g., Prestage 1991;Prindeville 2004;Takash 1993). Scholarship that builds upon these foundational texts continues to advance the necessity of an intersectional focus on women of color elites to uncover nuanced differences in how these women experience politics and political institutions in ways that are unique from their gendered and ethno-racial counterparts (e.g., Harris 2018;Hawkesworth 2003;Smooth 2006). ...
This essay serves as the introduction to the special issue that focuses squarely on the political leadership of women of color in the United States. In recent years, it is becoming increasingly common for women of color to seek and attain elected office. As these actors become more prominent in politics, then it will become increasingly difficult for scholars of American politics to ignore them. We argue that if the discipline wants to remain relevant, and if it wants to produce the best work possible, then it is imperative that scholars of all backgrounds familiarize themselves with research that centers women of color. In the spirit of intersectionality research, we see our clarion call not as coercion, but as an invitation.
... At the time of her writing, New Zealand policy toward Māori was called "Closing the Gaps" and focused on "'helping' Māori peoples gain access to the kind of socioeconomic status their non-Māori counterparts enjoy." 4. A similar point to ours is made by Robert Williams in his "singularity thesis" applied to American Indians (see Williams 2005, xxxv-xxxvi, 170-71). 5. The work of scholars such as Prindeville (2004) suggests that privileging positional politics over distributional politics allows for Indigenous nation-driven cultural change and forestalls the "sanitization" of Indigenous cultures through the imposition of human rights regimes (see Gana 1995 While it has taken time, most have done so. Nonetheless, these policies lack true government-to-government substance of the type we argue for here. ...
Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.
... If it is already difficult to justify "sanitizing indigenous cultures" (paraphrasing Gana 1995, 140-41) with the fell swoop of national or international human rights laws because of the potentially destabilizing effect of those actions, feminists should find it even more difficult to do so when a number of Native nations are already on self-directed paths of cultural change that point toward an outcome more in line with the mainstream. We offer the "problematic" Pueblos themselves as an example; Prindeville (2004) has found a mounting, internally driven, wholly indigenous pressure for improving the status of women in those societies. Third, we fall back on our own belief in the trumping value of sovereignty, that as sovereigns, Native nations have the right to establish policy, law, and methods of dispute resolution without interference from outside nations such as the United States or Canada. ...
Four case studies of American Indian nations' treatment of matrimonial real property disputes under formal tribal law, customary law, state law, and some mixtures are presented. Derivative lessons suggest that First Nations, supported by the Government of Canada, ought to develop their own rules and adjudication mechanisms to address these disputes.
... The researcher enters the participants' space~s!-a Congressional office~Dodson 2006!, a slaughterhouse~Pachirat 2007!, the union hall~Warren 2005!, a cocktail lounge in Las Vegas~Bayard de Volo 2003! or corporate headquarters~Morrill 1995!-rather than staying in a familiar setting. The researcher asks to enter the world of the research participant-a home~Soss 2000! or the local coffee shop or neighborhood corner storẽ Prindeville 2004;Walsh 2004! to talk, the reservation~McCool 2002! or community center~Yanow 1996! to hang out, the shop floor~Shehata 2003! to work. The sheer variety of potential settings and their relative unfamiliarity to the field researcher just starting out-in contrast to the medical researcher's intimate knowledge of a very bounded workplace-mean that the research process must and should be conducted quite differently. ...
Political science as a discipline has largely ignored research regulatory policies associated with institutional review boards (IRBs). Many political scientists—especially those in the senior ranks—are either oblivious to the existence of IRBs or actively decide to sidestep them by not submitting their proposals for review. Based on research conducted since 2004, we hold that APSA members at all ranks of the profession, along with political scientists worldwide, need to be concerned, not to say alarmed, about IRB policy. Why this sense of urgency, and why now?
... The proximity to a major urban center may provide more opportunities and mechanisms for one to disconnect from their Native culture, whereas the relative isolation of the Northern Plains tribes may facilitate the maintenance of Native cultural ways. Second, the Northern Plains tribes are formally characterized as patriarchal, as contrasted with the Southwest tribe's matriarchal structure (LaFromboise, Heyle, & Ozer, 1990;Prindeville, 2004). For the Northern Plains tribes, it is generally the exception rather than the rule for Lakota Sioux to marry within the tribe; today, most Lakota Sioux marriages are cross-cultural. ...
With a sample of American Indian adults, we estimated the prevalence of adult caregiving, assessed the demographic and cultural profile of caregivers, and examined the association between cultural factors and being a caregiver. This is the first such study conducted with American Indians.
Data came from a cross-sectional study of 5,207 American Indian adults residing on 2 closely related Lakota Sioux reservations in the Northern Plains and one American Indian community in the Southwest. Cultural factors included measures of cultural identity and traditional healing practices.
Seventeen percent of our sample reported being caregivers. In both the Northern Plains and Southwest, caregiving was positively correlated with younger age, being a woman, larger household size, attending and participating in Native events, and endorsement of traditional healing practices. In both regions, attendance and participation in Native events and engagement in traditional healing practices were associated with increased odds of caregiving after adjusting for covariates. Only in the Northern Plains did we find that speaking some Native language at home was associated with increased odds of being a caregiver. Examination of interaction terms indicated some sex differences in the association between cultural factors and caregiving in the Northern Plains but not in the Southwest.
Our findings indicate that greater cultural identity and engagement in traditional healing practices are related to caregiving in American Indian populations. Caregiving research, intervention efforts, and caregiving programs and services in Native communities should pay special attention to the dynamics of culture and caregiving.
During a phenomenological narrative study regarding the perspectives of leadership among women who are both Native and Deaf, a portion of the data collection focused on visual art as a means of interpreting what leadership meant to the participants. Participants produced visual imagery to impart their ways of knowing as women who negotiated their paths between two distinct cultures. Themes of identification with indigenous art forms, spirituality, and evolving self-identities were shared, with the participants leading the development of their artistic renderings. The participant-created visual arts highlight the significance of non-verbal modes of inquiry within Indigenous and Deaf populations.Keywords: Indigenous; Native American; Deaf; Women; Art Inquiry; Identity
What did Native American women and men voters think about Donald Trump on the eve of the 2018 election? This question has important implications for understanding the gendered political attitudes of peoples adversely targeted by Trump’s politics. To examine this issue, we analyze a path-breaking, nationally representative sample of six hundred Native American voters. We find that Native Americans’ attitudes about sexual harassment are central to their attitudes about politics and policy in the Trump era. This relationship suggests that Native American voters are an informed electorate influenced by the president’s words and actions. Our work demonstrates multiple ways that gender influenced Native American politics during an election where gender and racial identities were central. In so doing, our work illuminates how race, institutions, and vulnerability affect the political attitudes of Native American voters, one of the least studied groups in American politics.
Over the last 40 years, Indigenous communities in Canada have negotiated self-government agreements that allow them to express politically their unique identities, traditions and beliefs within the confines of the federal system. In this paper, we examine the motivations and range of candidates that have run for political office at the regional level in Nunatsiavut, an Inuit self-governing community in northern Labrador created through the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement in 2005. In particular, we examine whether existing political behavior theories are applicable to Indigenous candidates running for office in these kinds of regions. To do so, we qualitatively analyze data from Nunatsiavut elections held between 2006 and 2017, including 11 elite interviews with candidates that ran for the office of Ordinary Member in 2014 and 10 interviews with candidates from other years. Our findings suggest that gender, and to a lesser extent, family dynamics, as well as, public attitudes towards candidates and negative attacks, may be barriers to running for office.
Environmental justice concerns are raised when environmental risks and hazards are inequitably distributed across society. Native American populations have long been at the center of environmental justice disputes, however relatively little quantitative research has examined how Native Americans view the risks related to the siting of a potentially hazardous facility. Combining 35 statewide surveys collected from 1990 to 2001, the following study explores the risk perceptions of Native American populations in New Mexico regarding the storage of nuclear waste. We find that Native Americans tend to have higher perceptions of risk regarding the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) facility than white respondents. We also explore variation within self-identified Native American respondents and find that older males tended to perceive less risk associated with WIPP and Native American respondents in counties with Navajo reservations tended to perceive more risk. These findings help in understanding how Native Americans perceive risk as it relates to environmental and energy issues.
Within the last twenty years, legalized gambling on Indigenous reservations has become a major source of economic development for many of the First Nations and is now calculated to be a multibillion dollar industry.1 Indigenous-owned casinos earned $26 billion in 2007, with an average 5 percent growth rate. This is compared to earnings of $12.85 billion in gaming revenue for Nevada casinos (500 Nations). What is less well known is that almost overnight a concomitant level of political power has taken shape as the people of Indian Country seek to preserve their recent economic gains. Both developmental and political successes have added a new dimension to the conflict over sovereignty between U.s. states and tribal governments.
Swedish domestic worker Emina Johnson witnessed the great Peshtigo fire in 1871; Cherokee nurse Isabella Wolfe served the Lac du Flambeau reservation for decades; the author's own grandmother, Matilda Schopp, was one of numerous immigrants who eked out a living on the Wisconsin cutover. Calling This Place Home tells the stories of these and many other Native and settler women during Wisconsin's frontier era. Noted historian Joan M. Jensen spent more than a decade delving into the lives of a remarkable range of women who lived during the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. These individuals shared many struggles as economies evolved from logging to dairying to tourism. Facing many challenges, they cared for their sick, educated their children, maintained their cultural identity, and preserved their own means of worship. Entwining the experiences of Native and settler communities, Jensen uses photographs and documents to examine and illustrate the recovered stories of representative but often overlooked women. These stories of individuals together form a substantial history of Wisconsin's well-known industries, its caregiver networks and schooling practices, and matters of faith and politics. This comprehensive volume brings a deeper understanding of the state's history through the stories of individual women and the broader developments that shaped their lives. © 2006 by Minnesota Historical Society Press. All rights reserved.
Over the past several decades, the number of women elected to higher office in the United States has grown substantially. However, when the electoral gains of women are considered on a state-by-state basis, there are observable variations in the rate by state at which women are elected to state legislative office. Scholars have noted an additional variation in women office holders: that women of color serve at higher rates than white women.
This paper attempts to demonstrate that a grounded theory textual analysis yields results that are equally important as more traditional forms of inquiry, such as archival research. The research employed a grounded theory approach in a CAQDAS(1) textual analysis of the published minutes of three communist party meetings, held in Hungary, Serbia and the Soviet Union in 1988. The purpose of the analysis was to reveal nuance in delegates' speeches at a time when, officially, monolithic unity' in the party required members to express wholehearted support for their leaderships' policies, and yet at the same time these regimes were in the process of liberalizing, and party members had begun expressing their own preferences. But, the few speakers at these meetings who advocated far-reaching changes often chose to allude to taboo subjects in a coded way, while their hardline, conservative superiors sprinkled their speeches with terms that are traditionally associated with liberal democracies. Interpretive coding of text enabled recording of a more fine-grained reading of these minutes, while the application of grounded theory provided a tabula rasa which generated a model that was common to all three cases.
Since the development of modern survey methods, political scientists have identified gender-based differences in the political behavior of men and women. Early research found women to be less politically engaged than men and to be more likely to vote for right-wing parties (Lipset 1963). Beginning in the 1980s, however, these differences in political participation dissipated, and the gender-based pattern in vote choice was reversed (DeVaus and McAllister 1989; Inglehart and Norris 2000). These gender differences in political behavior, and the many others that could be added here, are commonly referred to as gender gaps. © 2013 The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association.
Research design is fundamental to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. In many social science disciplines, however, scholars working in an interpretive-qualitative tradition get little guidance on this aspect of research from the positivist-centered training they receive. This book is an authoritative examination of the concepts and processes underlying the design of an interpretive research project. Such an approach to design starts with the recognition that researchers are inevitably embedded in the intersubjective social processes of the worlds they study. In focusing on researchers' theoretical, ontological, epistemological, and methods choices in designing research projects, Schwartz-Shea and Yanow set the stage for other volumes in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. They also engage some very practical issues, such as ethics reviews and the structure of research proposals. This concise guide explores where research questions come from, criteria for evaluating research designs, how interpretive researchers engage with world-making, context, systematicity and flexibility, reflexivity and positionality, and such contemporary issues as data archiving and the researcher's body in the field.
This paper presents the results of a qualitative, exploratory study of Native American women who served as organizational leaders in human service, educational and health-related agencies. Data were collected through interviews with 13 women. Findings include effects of gender and culture on leadership; motivations to act in a leadership position; challenges to successful leadership; and personal and organizational support to the leadership role.
Among the most well-established consequences of the election of minorities to public office is an increase in the degree to which minority interests are substantively represented. Recent work argued that minorities also benefit from the presence of female legislators; however, it remains unclear whether minorities can expect to benefit from the presence of all women or solely women of color. Susan Dovi has argued that descriptive representatives are more likely to be effective if they possess strong mutual relationships with disposed subgroups of historically disadvantaged groups. In this piece, we argued that one implication of Dovi's argument is that women of color will be more effective descriptive representatives than their male counterparts. We examined this hypothesis by focusing on the effect of Latino/a school board members on education policies in Texas school districts. The results suggested that while the presence of Latinos on school boards is associated with increased district financial and institutional support for bilingual education, the presence of Latina board members results in much more substantial levels of support. We found no evidence for the notion that the substantive representation of Latino/as is facilitated by the presence of non-Latina women on the board.
This article examines the political identity, demographics, and experience of 16 Latina and Native American women activists in environmental justice organizations in New Mexico. Based on qualitative interview data, a model of indigenous women's grassroots activism is developed. Additionally, alternative conceptualizations of feminism and environmentalism are presented from the perspective of indigenous women leaders. The findings are discussed and compared with similar studies in the literature of ethnic/ race and gender politics. We conclude that there are important similarities between women active in grassroots community organizing. Differences in their ideologies and motivation for participating in politics, however, warrant the development of new conceptions of political activism, feminism, and environmentalism.
American Indian women are playing an increasingly important role as policymakers in state, local, and tribal politics. Despite their activity and impact, however, few studies examine their political agendas or public policy preferences. One exception is Mela-nie McCoy's 1992 study of female tribal leaders published in Wo m e n & Politics. Like McCoy, we explore the research questions: What are the public policy agendas of American Indian women leaders? What do they wish to accomplish? What motivates them? Does their gender and/or ethnic identity have an influence on their political participation? Whereas McCoy's sample consists of female tribal officials from across the United States, we interviewed Indian women in elected or appointed positions in state, local, and tribal government in New Mexico. In her study, McCoy concluded that “the disadvantaged condition of [Indians appears to] have more influence on [leaders'] political behavior than either gender or ethnicity” (1992, 57). However, we find that both gender and ethnic identity are significant influences for Indian women holding public office in New Mexico. Furthermore, the difference in our findings is due to the cultural and structural restrictions placed on women by the more traditional tribes in New Mexico.
In the Southwestern United States, Hispanas and American Indian women are increasingly adopting policymaking roles in state, local, and tribal politics. This study examines the influence of gender and ethnic identity on the policy agendas of 30 women who hold public office in New Mexico. Although the findings reveal a distinct pattern of advocacy for a feminist agenda, the majority of these indigenous leaders do not identify themselves or their goals as feminist. This research indicates that women’s policy concerns transcend ethnic/race boundaries. Furthermore, to understand Hispanas’ and Indian women’s politics, and to effectively apply feminist theory to praxis, new models incorporating their practical application of feminism are needed.