Andrea Smith - Conquest

Praise for Conquest

Winner of the 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award

Andrea Smith offers a powerful analysis of sexual violence that reaches far beyond the dominant theoretical understandings, brilliantly weaving together feminist explanations of violence against Native women, the historical data regarding colonialism and genocide, and a strong critique of the current responses to the gender violence against women of color. As a passionate activist and a respected scholar, Smith brings her experience working on the ground to this important project, rendering Conquest one of the most significant contributions to the literature in Native Studies, feminist theory, and social movement theory in recent years.

Beth E. Richie, author of Compelled to Crime:
The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women

Whether it is our reliance on the criminal justice system to protect women from violence or the legitimacy of the United States as a colonial nation-state, Andrea Smiths incisive and courageous analysis cuts through many of our accepted truths and reveals a new way of knowing rooted in Native womens histories of struggle. More than a call for action, this book provides sophisticated strategies and practical examples of organizing that simultaneously take on state and interpersonal violence. Conquest is a must-read not only for those concerned with violence against women and Native sovereignty, but also for antiracist, reproductive rights, environmental justice, antiprison, immigrant rights, and antiwar activists.

Julia Sudbury, editor of Global Lockdown:
Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex

Give thanks for the very great honor of listening to Andrea Smith. This book will burn a hole right through your mind with its accurate analysis and the concise compilation of information that makes it the first of its kind. Conquest is not only instructive, it is healing. I want every Indian I know to read it.

Chrystos, artist, poet, and activist

Conquest is the book Aboriginal women have been waiting for. It is the nonfiction work we all wish we had the time and inclination to research and write, the book we all wish had been within easy reach during the long years of our education. Andrea Smith has not only meticulously researched the place of rape and violence against Indigenous women in the colonial process, but she is the first to fully articulate the connections between violence against the earth, violence against women, and North Americas terrible inclination toward war. Every single adult human being on this continent needs to read this book. If we did, we would all find the strength to face our history and alter its course.

Lee Maracle, author of I Am Woman:
A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

Andrea Smith has no fear. She challenges conventional activist thinking about global and local, sexism and racism, genocide and imperialism. But whats more, in every chapter she tries to answer the key question: What is to be done? Conquest is unsettling, ambitious, brilliant, disturbing: read it, debate it, use it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, The Graduate Center,
City University of New York

Conquest radically rethinks the historical scope and dimensionality of sexual violence, a historical vector of bodily domination that is too often reduced to universalizinghence racistnarratives of gendered oppression and resistance. Offering a breathtaking genealogy of white supremacist genocide and colonization in North America, this book provides a theoretical model that speaks urgently to a broad continuum of political and intellectual traditions. In this incisive and stunningly comprehensive work, we learn how the proliferation of sexual violence as a normalized feature of modern Euro-American patriarchies is inseparable from violence against Indigenous women, and women of color. In Conquest, Andrea Smith has presented us with an epochal challenge, one that should productively disrupt and perhaps transform our visions of liberation and radical freedom.

Dylan Rodrguez,
University of California, Riverside

In Conquest, Andrea Smith reveals the deep connections between violence against Native women and state policies of environmental racism, sterilization, and other medical experimentation. Her expos of how colonial ideology appropriates Native spirituality for the purposes of sexual exploitation is simply stunning. A must-read for everyone concerned about Native people and our Native world.

Haunani-Kay Trask, author of
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and
Sovereignty in Hawaii

Conquest is not for those who flinch from an honest examination of white supremacist history, or who shy away from todays controversies in the reproductive health and anti-violence movements. This book is a tough, thoughtful, and passionate analysis of the colonization of America and the resistance of Indigenous women. Andrea Smith is one of this countrys premiere intellectuals and a good old-fashioned organizera rare combination that illuminates her praxis and gift to social justice movement building in the twenty-first century.

Loretta Ross,
coauthor of Undivided Rights:
Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice
and cofounder of Sister Song Women of Color
Reproductive Health Collective

This book is dedicated to Sunjay Smith,
who has shown me what it really means
to struggle against the odds,
and to Tsali Smith, future revolutionary leader.

Andrea Smith

Copyright 2005 Andrea Smith

Originally published by South End Press, 2005

Republished by Duke University Press, 2015

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Andrea, 1966

Conquest : sexual violence and American Indian genocide / Andrea Smith.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8223-6038-4 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-8223-7481-7 (ebook)

1. Indian womenCrimes againstNorth America.

2. Indian womenColonizationNorth America.

3. Indian womenNorth AmericaSocial conditions.

4. Indians, Treatment ofNorth AmericaHistory.

5. ViolenceNorth America. 6. North AmericaRace relations.

7. North AmericaPolitics and government. I. Title

E98.W8S62 2015

305.48'897dc22

2015004774

Cover photograph by Rene Burri, courtesy of Magnum Photos

1. Chapter 1
   Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide
2. Chapter 2
   Boarding School Abuses and the Case for Reparations
3. Chapter 3
   Rape of the Land
4. Chapter 4
   Better Dead than Pregnant: The Colonization of Native Womens Reproductive Health
5. Chapter 5
   Natural Laboratories: Medical Experimentation in Native Communities
6. Chapter 6
   Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence
7. Chapter 7
   Anticolonial Responses to Gender Violence
8. Chapter 8
   U.S. Empire and the War Against Native Sovereignty

M any thanks to the South End Press, the greatest publishers on planet Earth, for supporting this work. The professional, personal and political support South End gave me to finish this project was astounding. Not many publishers will not only help you with editing, but help you with babysitting (thanks Asha Tall and Jill Petty!) In particular, I must profusely thank Jill Petty for devoting countless hours to the manuscript. Her political commitment as well as her kindness, generosity and patience was very inspiring to me. Theresa Noll and Nina Sarnelle also assisted with the research and fact checking for this book. Donna Kiefer and Erich Strom were helpful in proofreading the manuscript. And Alyssa Hassan did a great job with the production and layout of the book. South End Press plays such an invaluable role in supporting progressive social movements in the U.S., and I am so grateful for the work they do.