Editor's note: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
The prisoner hierarchy is simple, good dudes at the top and bad dudes at the bottom.
A “good dude” is a prisoner who has not committed a sex offense to be in prison.
The absurdity of the term is not lost on any of us since a good dude can be someone who murdered his grandmother for not cutting the crust off his sandwich. Obviously, not a moral person. I am a good dude. A bad dude is someone who has been convicted of a sex crime. This is the most salient dichotomy in determining a prisoner's social status. I've spent years asking other prisoners why this is so. I do not disagree with the result, but I'm curious about the philosophy and intention behind it. My perspective and conclusions are derived from my understanding of colonial genocide, matriarchal social structures, Indigenous identities and my personal experience. I have not heard anyone from other races represented in prison provide an explanation beyond that dudes are “pieces of shit.” Maybe that is enough and no more thought should be put into it. But I get the sense that most of the guys just want someone else to look down upon while they are here. And that does not reflect my thinking.
Ga lo Vann is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Eastern Oklahoma and a prisoner at Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem. Read more of his columns.
The Oregon Department of Corrections is mandated to keep and care for those who have been sentenced to incarceration, guaranteeing them selected services such as religious expression. This is, of course, a practice through a white, Christian-informed lens. That means any prisoners are entitled to enroll in and visit any religious practice they fancy. This Anglo entitlement framework desecrates the spiritual traditions and protocols of Indigenous people because notions of reciprocity, sincerity and commitment are absent.
Even free Indigenous spiritual participants do not claim a “birthright” to practice or presumed membership to any community without first being invited and then accepted by the people who are there first. Not all traditionally reared children go to sweat lodge, not every Lakota man sundances.
In the case of sex offenders coming to our Indigenous religious services in prison, I've been met with the inquiry that if I ‘truly believed in these ways,’ wouldn’t I think the medicine is strong enough to heal rapists and child molesters? No, I do not.
Indian country’s most traditional communities do not believe this either. Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Fort Peck, all have banished selected problem sex offenders from their ancestral lands. The Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa have an operating law defining crimes that result in the practice.
The law states:
“Sec. 13-8202 Grounds for banishment; Automatic Banishment
Any person shall be automatically banished, and the tribal council shall issue a banishment decree upon conviction for knowingly or intentionally killing, or attempting to kill a member of the tribe, employee of the tribe or any person on the settlement. A person may be banished by the tribe for:
(b) Upon conviction of raping or attempting to rape a member of the tribe, employee of the tribe or any person on the settlement;
(c) Upon conviction of having sexual contact with or attempting to have sexual contact with a member of the tribe or person on the settlement who is less than 16 years old.”
I've observed banishment practices in the case of a self-professed Lakota medicine man named Nathan Chasing Horse who has fake ceremonies, and uses false status to coerce women and girls into sex. The jurisdictional confusion between law enforcement agencies and distress they've created in Indigenous communities have left Nathan untouched. Banishment orders are largely symbolic, a mark of gravest shame. In extended family communities, every person is loved, they have a role and their contributions are not easily refused. Therefore, banishment is an extreme measure. For your community to cut ties and make you a man without a people is to say you're irredeemable and you're a danger to the people.
Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn teaches, “men who caused stress in communities or risked the survival of the tribe by dishonoring women were held accountable by the people. They could not carry the sacred pipe, nor could they hold positions of status.”
Indigenous spiritual practices require vulnerability and intimacy (emotional connection) among adherents. The sacred nature of life and the spirit are highest in our practices. The words many tribes developed to describe rape can roughly be translated as “spiritual murder” or “soul murder.” This is because this spiritual wound will last a lifetime, open and festering. Many of my Indigenous criminal justice-involved brothers were first victims of sexual assault and the imposition of sex offenders creates hostile spaces for them and closes them emotionally, spiritually and physically. They're triggered and harmed by the presence of perpetrators who have assaulted others in vulnerable intimate spaces just as their own aggressors did. Any attempt to separate sex offenders from Indigenous spiritual services, as is tradition, is criminalized by the Oregon Department of Corrections. White, Christian chaplains and security staff issue disciplinary reports placing inmates in the Disciplinary Segregation Units (“the hole”) for practicing traditional Indigenous spiritual protocols.
While unconditional forgiveness and tolerance for rape and child molestation may exist in their culture, it does not in ours. This is only one instance of how the lack of representation for communities of color and spiritual plurality in ODOC policies and staffing results in the desecration, disrespect and degeneration of non-Anglo Christian spiritual practices while behind bars.
Colonial violence
Indigenous societies are difficult to talk about without overgeneralizing.
However, in Native communities, women regularly held positions of status and influence in spiritual, political and economic spheres that European women and their descendants were historically excluded from. Indigenous women often held seats on councils or chose and removed the men who would sit on these councils. A Native woman could leave an abusive husband without ostracism or negative moral judgment from the community, inheritances went to wives and their matrilineal kin, a boy belonged to his mother's clan — not his father's, he would be taught manhood by his maternal uncles. Female leadership meant more equal representation between the sexes because women naturally sought male input to protect balance. It would be foolish to assume there was no sexual violence in pre-colonial Indigenous communities, but many colonial documents in journals note how rare instances of rape and sexual abuse were among Native people, or against their guests and prisoners. In cases where sexual assault did occur in matriarchal societies, women were given more influence in the outcome.
A historic Mvskoke rape law reads, “And be it further enacted if any person or persons should undertake to force a woman and did it by force. It shall be left to woman what punishment she should satisfied with to whip or pay what she say it be law.”
Indigenous women are the most raped women in America. Unlike women of every other race in this country. Native women's perpetrators are often members of another race. In her book, “The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual assault in Native America,” Muscogee Professor Sarah Deer says, “As a baseline, the vast majority of rapes in the United States are intraracial, meaning that victims are usually attacked by persons of their own race. The only exception to this rule is American Indian and Alaska Native women who report that the majority of assailants are non-Native. The original 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics report concluded about nine in 10 American Indian victims of rape or sexual assault had white or Black assailants. Another report indicated over 70% of the assailants were white.” These women are the mothers of this continent and the foundation of our Indigenous communities. In America's matriarchal Indigenous societies, the assault of women, their position and erasure of their experiences constitute an unending cultural genocide spanning 530 years.
Throughout the centuries of interracial slavery in America, enslaved Native women garnered high bids based upon beauty, youth and virginal status. The first relationship between white Europeans and our ancestors were characterized by sex trafficking, coercion and rape.
Maori lecturer Philip Borrell has offered, “Coloniality reflects recurring patterns of power that have become established over time as a result of colonization. Such patterns define culture, labor, inter-subjective relations, knowledge … Coloniality can be seen as a contemporary, lived continuation of colonization, or more directly, it can be argued that coloniality survives colonialism.”
READ MORE: Columns by Ga Lo Vann
The American tradition of committing sexual violence against Native women is coloniality manifested in today's rape statistics and the instances of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG).
America's predation upon Native women is both notably prolific and uniquely brutal. The MMIWG movements in Canada and the United States rest upon a foundation of cases largely linked to sexual violence. A 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey conducted by the CDC measured 49% of Native women suffered a history of sexual violence. Another survey that same year found 94% of women who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native living in Seattle reported they had been raped or coerced into sex at least once in their lives. Historical distrust earned by the federal government and its agencies, especially in data collection, can reasonably be suspected to lead to underreporting from Indigenous populations. In her book, Deer cites Ronet Bachman, who analyzes National Crime Victimization Survey data. One of Bachman's reports studied 13 years worth of these national surveys, finding 90% of Native women's aggressors, beat them while being raped compared to 71% of white women's aggressors. Additionally, it was measured that in the commission of rape, 25% of Native woman's aggressors, use a weapon such as gun or knife to threaten them compared to 9% of white women.
Rape and sexual assault should be intolerable under any circumstances, regardless of identity. Rape is the defining act of colonization and a Native American identity all but guarantees it.
The advent of the #metoo, #churchtoo, MMIW and Revolucion Diamantina movements in the Americas have reinvigorated international discussions about patriarchal societies, settler colonialism and sexual violence.
In November 2021, the BBC reported that emergency calls regarding violence against women in Mexico rose 30%. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This rise in gendered violence mirrors American and global statistics. Hidden and punished far from the public sphere, we, Indigenous prisoners are thinking about reckoning with complex intersectionalities of carceral environments, masculinities, accountability and healing. Women and other victims should have a say in the sentencing of sex offenders. The prison social terrain and carceral experience provide direction and meaning for the rest of us. The supervision of white chaplains from Abrahamic traditions over Indigenous prisoners is coloniality that must be stopped. The authority of white chaplains over our spiritual traditions is absurd given the church’s direct administration of genocide and boarding school abuses. These people as overseers are akin to the forced admittance of sex offenders into our Indigenous spiritual spaces.
The ODOC's well-funded religious services positions staffed almost exclusively by Christian chaplains should better reflect the communities they serve. The current model depends on unpaid community volunteers to provide the sparse level of non-Christian religious services available. Staff homogeneity maintains colonialities rooted in historical violence.
In my own life
In high school, I began to grow into my alcohol addiction, blacking out and engaging in risky behaviors. I had a platonic friend. Her name was M. She and I had flirted in the past, but we never took it further, preferring to go on adventures and sustain a trusting vulnerability that we were not willing to lose to romantic intimacy. She was my trusted confidant and I loved her completely. As I lost Ga lo and became alcohol, I abandoned my principles and priorities. There was a night when our friend group was partying and drinking and M went into a bedroom where our friend Michael was sitting in a chair. She laid down on the bed and closed her eyes to go to sleep. In the loneliness and isolation I created in my alcoholism, I decided she wanted me and I would kiss her to reawaken her affection for me. Saturated in male privilege and a sense of patriarchal entitlement, I bent over and kissed her while her eyes were closed. She opened them realizing what I was doing and immediately said, “No Ga lo stop.” And I did, rising to walk out the room. Too late. The shame I deserve to feel and do feel from this rivals the shame I feel from the life I extinguished in the drunken crash I caused that brought me to prison.
"I want accountability and fire. I want to answer for the gendered violence I've committed knowingly and unknowingly. The best I can come up with on my own is to be changed by my crimes forever. To carry the message by living it and speaking with other men and boys about it."
In that time with M, the mid 2000s, as I recounted what I'd done to others, seeking feedback and accountability, something — I was given the battery of “boys will be boys” platitudes. I did not have the words for it, but I knew that I trespassed some sacred boundary. What I did was on the spectrum of sexual assault and I'm fully responsible for it. I think about the fact that M’s experience was minimized. She would bring it up later several times, laughing it off, and I apologized, assuring her I knew I was wrong, and nothing further would have happened without her consent. I think she wanted to be mad at me and probably was, but an entire history and culture signaled that she needed to be affable in talking about it or she would not be supported. For 15 years, I've wondered if I stripped her sense of safety among trusted friends for awhile or forever. I think about her single mother’s fears about raising a daughter in a world that sexualizes her before respecting her humanity. I think about my mother as a victim of sexual violence and my betrayal of her life and sacrifices made for me — a lifetime of trying to raise a good, kind, gentle, respectful man from a boy. I think about the fact that as an Indigenous man who intentionally sought relationships with Indigenous women, my partners were already victims of sexual assault before we met. I think of my ex's daughters, two young girls I would die to protect, and how furious I feel at the prospect someone would steal a kiss from either of them without verbal consent.
The helplessness and then anger I feel at the world our girls live in, in which a boy may live his whole life without a man instructing him, “the absence of a yes means no,” “you do not hit or rape a woman ever,” “you do not touch a woman without her consent.” I know intrinsically that there are instances of gender oppression I have perpetrated that I could not see at the time.
When did I speak over a woman in meetings or present ideas that received institutional support that a woman had previously presented? When did I fail to support the women around me in the ways that they supported me always? How many times have I stood at a microphone and spoken with self righteous confidence at an event women worked to hold, but did not get a chance to speak at themselves.
I am privileged to be a man of color with white skin because of my blood quantum (a white concept) and because I choose to be. In considering my Indigenous identity, I have betrayed the lives, experiences, traditions and teachings of the old ones who carry me in my life, while I carry them in my blood. I don't want sympathy and reassuring comfort that I'm a “good man.” I want accountability and fire. I want to answer for the gendered violence I've committed knowingly and unknowingly. The best I can come up with on my own is to be changed by my crimes forever. To carry the message by living it and speaking with other men and boys about it. If I'm lucky beyond what I deserve, I will have the opportunity outside of prison one day to listen to M, to hear her words and apologize again sincerely, with more knowledge of the meaning of what I have done and to answer any questions she asks as completely as I can, detached from any presumed forgiveness or reconciliation. It is my responsibility to carry this forever.
Indigenous communities must wean themselves from the paternalism upheld by engaging the criminal justice system which in 2014, the CDC found is more likely to kill Native Americans than any other race in the nation. Oregon is the 5th deadliest state for Indigenous people in officer involved shootings. Our people are the most victimized by interracial crimes and have the highest rate of crime victimization in general, while crimes against Indigenous people go unanswered and unspoken of in record numbers. If 90% of the men who raped Native women are not from our communities, than 10% are. As an Indigenous man, it is my responsibility to show other Indigenous men that I will not tolerate sexual violence in my community or in myself. Gender violence preceded racial violence and they are inextricably linked. American racism will continue to rule our society and institutions until we rematriate the land and the people first.
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