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WHEN I WORKED as a rape crisis counselor, every Native client I saw said to me at one point, "I wish I wasn't Indian." My training in the mainstream antiviolence movement did not prepare me to address what I was seeing-that sexual violence in Native communities was inextricably linked to processes of genocide and colonization. Through my involvement in organizations such as Women of All Red Nations (WARN, Chicago), Incite! Women of Color against Violence (www.incite-national.org), and various other projects, I have come to see the importance of developing organizing theories and practices that focus on the intersections of state and colonial violence and gender violence. In my ongoing research projects on Native American critical race feminisms, I focus on documenting and analyzing the theories produced by Native women activists that intervene both in sovereignty and feminist struggles.1 These analyses serve to complicate the generally simplistic manner in which Native women's activism is often articulated within scholarly and activist circles.
NATIVE WOMEN AND FEMINISM
One of the most prominent writings on Native American women and feminism is Annette faimes's (Guerrero) early 1990s article, "American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in North America." Here, she argues that Native women activists, except those who are "assimilated," do not consider themselves feminists. Feminism, according to Jaimes, is an imperial project that assumes the givenness of U.S. colonial stranglehold on indigenous nations. Thus, to support sovereignty Native women activists reject feminist politics:
Those who have most openly identified themselves [as feminists] have tended to be among the more assimilated of Indian women activists, generally accepting of the colonialist ideology that indigenous nations are now legitimate sub-parts of the U.S. geopolitical corpus rather than separate nations, that Indian people are now a minority with the overall population rather than the citizenry of their own distinct nations. Such Indian women activists are therefore usually more devoted to "civil rights" than to liberation per se. ... Native American women who are more genuinely sovereigntist in their outlook have proven themselves far more dubious about the potentials offered by feminist politics and alliances.2
According to Jaimes, the message from Native women is the same, as typified by these quotes from one of the founders of WARN, Lorelei DeCora Means:
We...