Excerpts from "Not An Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples" by Andrea Smith (2003)

“Ann Stoler argues that racism, far from being a reaction to crisis in which racial others are scapegoats for social ills, is a permanent part of the social fabric. Racism is not an effect but a tactic in the internal fission of society into binary oppression, a means of creating ‘biologized’ internal enemies, against whom society must defend itself” ( 1997, 59) Kate Shanley notes that Native peoples are a permanent “present absence” in the U.S. colonial imagination, an “absence” that reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified. …today colonizers justify the theft of Native lands on the grounds that Native peoples did not or do not properly control or subdue nature. John Eidsmoe, among the Christian right contends that Christians never stole the land. He argues that since Native people did not privatize the land, and since their communities had not been “established by God”, then Europeans had a right to seize the land from them. (Eidsmoe 1992, 133, 140). Within the context of colonization of Native nations, sexual violence does not affect Indian men and women in the same way. However, when a Native woman suffers abuse, this abuse is not just an attack on her identity as a woman, but her identity as a Native.”

-Andrea Smith- Hypatia vol.18, no 2 (Spring 2003).