Photography Julian Lucas 2014
Text Pamela Nagler
Photography Julian Lucas
“In the United States, violence against indigenous women has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence. Alaska Native women continue to suffer the highest rate of forcible sexual assault and have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States. Though available data is limited, the number of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and the lack of a diligent and adequate federal response is extremely alarming to indigenous women, tribal governments, and communities. On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average.”
Indian Law Resource Center
The Conquests did not introduce rape to the regions, but they did introduce rape on a scale not seen before. The Spanish Conquest of California, as it was elsewhere in the Americas, was a masculine conquest and sexual assault having very much to do with it. Rape, sexual assault, was systemic to the Conquest.
The European invaders in the Americas believed that not just the lands, but the people, were there for the taking. It was not just about taking possession of the land, but about taking possession of indigenous bodies as well. Explorers, conquistadors, soldiers, sailors and Padres alike believed that the Americas and the Amerindians simply waited in ‘darkness’ and ‘ignorance’ for them to claim possession. In order to do so, the conquistador arrived with shiploads of weapons and strategies to gain the supremacy that they thought they deserved. Rape - sexual assault - was just one of these strategies.
Rarely did the conquistadors bring their own women. Women were there to be ‘acquired’ along the way, and this kind of thinking permeated everything the conquerors did. They routinely evaluated the lands they encountered as barren or fertile, placing value on the territories as to their usefulness for themselves. They routinely enslaved the peoples they encountered to serve their needs, and they subjugated women by sexually assaulting them.
In the early days in Alta California, it was customary for the explorers and invaders to describe the inhabitants as “quiet” and “tractable” - a projection of what they hoped for. When things did not go well, they instead described them as ‘hostile savages’ (though sometimes, they called them this even when things were going well). Integral to their evaluation of indigenous peoples was whether or not they could be subjugated, and how easily.
On their explorations, sea captains and land explorers routinely kidnapped or “took” natives to serve as servants or translators - and they also routinely raped the women. Later, when the soldiers arrived to invade, occupy and colonize the Californias, they not only conscripted anyone they could to labor for them, but they raped the women or “took” them as concubines. It was part of the formula. Contemporary historian Virginia M. Bouvier describes that, in California, the indigenous people faced an “explosive sexuality” from their Spanish invaders.
It is common to think of rape as a single horrible, ‘intimate’ action between an aggressor and his single victim, but rape in California had a scale of its own. It was multiplied hundreds of times by the soldiery. It was not just a single terrible act of aggression against one woman, but the symbolic castration of the men connected with the women. The physical ramifications of the assaults went beyond a single violent act. The rapes restricted mobility and the inhabitants of a rancheria’s ability to procure food. These assaults set up a cycle of fear and hatred, with retaliations resulting in casualties. The indigenous men who struggled to defend the women often wound up dead. In the end, rape became an act against the entire community, leading to the subjugation of everyone.
Rape was both physical violence and psychological warfare, and it enabled the conquerors to gain territory and loyal subjects for the Crown.
In Las Californias, in both Baja and Alta California, these predatory soldiers were responsible for the spread of syphilis, ‘mal galico,’ throughout the indigenous communities. Disease became just one more way that the revolution was won against them. Syphilis, if it did not kill outright, weakened them, made the people more susceptible to other diseases, living as they were in the unsanitary conditions they endured in the missions, enduring the maltreatment of the Spaniards which included the systematic use of torture and incarceration.
Spanish soldiers, trained for war, trained to kill Indians, trained in the belief of their racial and cultural superiority, raped. They considered both sexual violence and exploitation as the ‘spoils of war’ - something deserved as a consequence for their service as soldiers. At times, they raped because they were bored. They raped for sport. They raped because they could. Their duties as soldiers did not occupy all of their time. Rape became a crime of opportunity. The conquering males, isolated, without their wives, mothers, sisters, cousins, took advantage of their circumstances. Sexual conquest was part of the language of the Conquest and It was fed by a literature and philosophy that promoted race and gender supremacy while romanticizing the vanquishing and the ‘taking.’ The conquistadors - the military and the missionaries - took advantage of the fact that In the Spanish patriarchal casta system in the Americas, indigenous women ranked on the lowest rung on the race, gender, socio-economic ladder.
And while the Spanish Crown, the Spanish government did not officially sanction rape, the officials expected it, anticipated it, and whatever they said about it, they lacked the will or the means to stop it. Tacitly, they recognized that it furthered their goals of reduccion - of dislocating people from their ancestral lands and placing them in mission compounds modeled on Spanish townships as a means to turning them into loyal, tax-paying citizens for the Crown.
The Franciscan Fathers in California certainly railed against the multitude of sexual abuses. They considered each rape an act against God, but there was also some self-interest in their protestations. They recognized that the rapes were detrimental to their effort to convert California. In the end, however, no matter how much they railed against it, the Fathers had little effect in either stopping or curtailing the widespread, systemic abuse, and they remained complicit because they relied on the military to sustain the mission institutions that they valued so much.
The California military governors only half-heartedly placed any sanctions whatsoever on their own troops. Punishments were few and arbitrary, haphazard, and, in the end, ineffective in curbing the violence. It was a soldiers’ job was to terrorize and control, and the military and government officials simply recognized the efficacy of sexual violence - rape carved out space for them to take possession of the territories and coerce the people into Spanish compliance.
Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there.
LINKS
“Ending Violence Against Native Women”
