Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community

New Legislation Threatens American-Indian Women’s Reproductive Health
By Michelle Chen, In These Times
Posted on July 21, 2008, Printed on July 21, 2008
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 92227/
When it comes to their health, American Indian women face extraordinary barriers — from high disease risks to increased incidents of sexual violence. They now face another obstacle, rooted in the political battleground of abortion.

The Senate’s recent passage of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act was a breakthrough for advocacy groups that have long pushed for the bill’s provisions — new programs, improved facilities and funding for the Indian Health Services (IHS) system, which serves about 1.9 million people nationwide.

But the victory is dampened by a poison pill provision slipped in by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that explicitly restricts abortions under IHS programs. The amendment was approved along with the bill in February. As In These Times went to press, it was unclear whether the House would vote on companion legislation carrying a similar amendment.

Speaking at a Right to Life rally in January, Vitter boasted that his amendment put “clear, strong, pro-life language in that Indian health-care bill.”

In fact, the amendment mostly replicates an older, more general ban on abortion funding under federal health programs, known as the Hyde Amendment. IHS is already subject to those restrictions, which allow federal financing for abortion only in cases of rape, incest or endangerment of the pregnant woman’s life.

Still, Vitter’s initiative entrenches Hyde’s strictures more firmly by directly changing IHS’s long-term governing statute. Enacted in the late 1970s, Hyde is subject to annual revision when renewed through the appropriations process. It mainly applies to Medicaid, but anti-abortion groups have lobbied to expand its reach in other areas, such as the military and federal prison health systems.

Opponents say Vitter has tethered crucial health programs to an anti-abortion agenda and brazenly targeted Native women’s reproductive rights.

“It’s a race-based amendment, because it’s trying to reduce our right to access abortion more than any other race of women in this country,” says Charon Asetoyer of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC), a research and advocacy organization.

Critics point to slight differences in the wording of the Vitter amendment that could tighten existing restrictions — for instance, the limitation of the incest exception to women under 18.

Although some states offer separate funding for abortions deemed medically necessary for overall health, Hyde has generally succeeded in raising barriers to abortion for poor women. By making abortion prohibitively costly, the funding restrictions have historically led many women to have abortions later, at greater medical risk, or not at all, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive- health policy group.

The consequences of abortion funding restrictions are uniquely dire in Native communities, where women are disproportionately poor, more likely to be sexually assaulted, and acutely limited in their options for dealing with unplanned pregnancy.

“Native women are so much more vulnerable on so many levels,” says Sarah Deer, a Minnesota-based victim advocacy legal specialist with the Tribal Law & Policy Institute, “from health problems, to being victims of violence, to housing. We’re the ones suffering the most on a lot of different issues.”

According to research by NAWHERC, IHS facilities performed only a handful of abortions over a two-decade period. But the Center has also found that IHS staff routinely failed to properly enforce the Hyde Amendment’s protections for assault survivors. Meanwhile, state health records indicate that Native women in North and South Dakota and Alaska are over-represented among abortion cases compared to their overall state populations, suggesting that many are resorting to private abortion providers.

This isn’t the first time the abortion issue has ensnared Indian Country. In South Dakota, which has an especially high Native population, Asetoyer and other activists campaigned successfully in 2006 against a proposal for a statewide ban on abortions. A similar initiative is up for a referendum vote this November.

But since the Vitter amendment would not dramatically change current abortion policies at IHS, the bigger concern is that it will sink the Native health bill altogether, killing prospects for a much needed funding infusion.That would still be a victory for Vitter, who voted against the bill even with his amendment.

To Kitty Marx, legislative director of the National Indian Health Board, an advocacy group representing Native communities, the health of nearly 2 million American Indians and Alaskan Natives is being subsumed in a political proxy battle.

“[This] is an Indian health-care bill — written by Indians for Indians,” she says. “If Congress wants to have a national debate on abortion, then have it on a national bill.”

Asetoyer says Vitter’s initiative creates a cruel dilemma for activists focused on the intersection between reproductive rights and Native health issues. She continues to support the bill despite the amendment: “We just may have to eat this one, because we cannot use this to stop the bill from going through. Otherwise, we’d end up with no health care at all.”

Michelle Chen’s work has appeared in Extra!, Legal Affairs, City Limits and Alternet, along with her self-published zine, cain.

TO: American Indian Community Members

FROM: Metro’ Urban Indian Directors

DATE: Thursday, July 24 – 10AM

RE: Open Community meeting at Indian Center Auditorium to discuss two pressing matters…

1. Oh Day Aki Charter School (formerly Heart of the Earth): Its status and future.
2. American Indian Education Office: Current status and direction.

Minneapolis Public School Representatives in attendance:

1. Mr. Dan Loewenson – Assistant to the Superintendent
2. Ms. Bernadiea Johnson – Deputy Superintendent

Please consider attending this important meeting.

William (Bill) Carter
American Indian Community Advocate
City of Minneapolis
Direct: (612) 673-3028
Fax: (612) 673-2599
Strength and answers (to you.)

CHECK OUT THIS NATIONAL CONFERENCE OPPORTUNITY HOSTED BY MILLE LACS ON JULY
29 - 31 AT GRAND CASINO HINCKLEY.
http://www.wewin04.org/PDF/WEWIN%20Conference%20Registration%202008.pdf

FOR ALL YOU GOLFERS, THE CONFERENCE STARTS OUT WITH A 3 PERSON SCRAMBLE ON
JULY 29TH AT GRAND NATIONAL GOLF COURSE IN HINCKLEY.  FOR MORE INFORMATION
ON HOW TO REGISTER, GO TO www.wewin04.org AND CLICK ON 2008 GOLF TOURNAMENT.

JULY 24 FARMERS’ MARKET at WOLVES Den
Dream of Wild Health will be selling fresh, organic produce at the
Wolves Den, 1201 E. Franklin Avenue, Mpls, on Thursday, July 24, from 10
am to noon. This week Native teens from the Twin Cities will be selling
at low cost freshly picked beans, carrots, mint, spinach, kale, onion
bunches, lettuce mix, sage, cilantro, parsley, basil, cabbage, broccoli,
and zucchini (summer squash). These teens are part of the Garden
Warriors program, a four-week garden apprenticeship that teaches teens
about healthy food, organic gardening, diabetes prevention, and job skills.

/Dream of Wild Health is a 10-acre Native owned and run farm in Hugo,
MN. For more information, visit www.petawakantipi.org./

Greetings Ladies and gentlemen.  If this message doesn’t pertain to you
directly my apologies.  Please would you do me the honor of sharing it
with those who work with Native youth, young adults, college students
and or communities that have facilitation needs!  Chi-Miigwetch (many
Thanks)

  As the long summer comes to a close.  Many communities, schools,
colleges and higher education facilities will be searching for new and
exciting, motivational speakers, health & wellness programs to utilize
in the fall and the new coming year.

By presenting effective programming now it helps to get ahead of the
game in a new year that WILL be filled with health and wellness
accompanied by a positive inspirational message.

With that said..Please consider our amazing highly renown entertainer
and National health and wellness facilitator, 2006 Native GRAMMY
recipient, music instructor, youth mentor, and all around Youth
Motivator.. Star Nayea..
for all your 2008/2009 program needs..

ANTOINETTE CONCHA -
Tumbleweed Productions
Representing 2006 Native GRAMMY & NAMA ARTIST Star Nayea
www.cdbaby.com/cd/starnayea
www.myspace.com/starnayea2
www.starnayea.com
(505) 820 -6626
(505) 699-7167

peaceislandv6.pdf

Patzin:  Wombs and Land
By Patrisia Gonzales
Column of the Americas (c) July 16, 2008;
Patzin, “respect-worthy medicine” in Nahuatl,  is a monthly feature on Indigenous medicineMiriam Aviles-Reyes was pulled over by Tucson police while driving
brown, pregnant and without papers in December 2007.  In this era
where the border has been extended into city streets,  the uterus of
Indigenous women cannot escape militarization. Tucson police quickly
called in the border patrol; Miriam went into labor. Instead of her
husband by her side at the hospital, an immigration office kept watch,
insisting that she hurry up and push.  As her baby descended through
the birth canal, she recalled, the officer persisted in his threats to
deport her.

Nez Perce-Chicana scholar Ines Hernandez-Avila has addressed how the
reproducing bodies of Indigenous women are subject to state control
because they threaten many nation states and occupying forces with
their ability to reproduce and sustain distinct peoples.  With a 4 to
1 birth rate among young Latinas, Indigenous-rooted women pose various
threats to those who fear the browning of this country. Their bodies
and the acts of their bodies are challenges to notions of homeland.

What threat could Miriam have posed for the immigration official to
violate the most sacred moments of life?  It is doubtful she would
have attempted escape with a baby crowning.  The officer potentially
risked that child’s life from the duress that Miriam experienced.
Indigenous midwives say that when a pregnant woman experiences fright,
or trauma, what is referred to as susto, it causes susto in both
mother and child. Luckily, her son was born without major
complications, but only with time will the family know what birth
trauma was inflicted upon this small one’s life.  For many

Indigenous
peoples, the body is a land base and a sacred site and how we come
into this world is certainly a right to life and intricately linked to
self determination.Miriam, the mother of three U.S. citizens , originates from an old
Nahua village on the road to Xochicalco, a Mesoamerican university in
900 A.D.  To be Mexican, even if her Indigeneity was not recognized,
is still to be treated like an Indian during various attempts at
Indian removal in this country. For many like Miriam, their brown skin
and Indian faces do not allow for their Indianess to be physically
invisible. Instead, official  narratives surrounding labels such as
“Mexican” and  ”immigrant” deny their aboriginal histories and claims
and silence their original relationships to this continent. While in
labor, Miriam did sign papers agreeing to leave this country.

 Around the same time, a grandmother in South Texas took on

Michael
Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security in yet another
defense by Apache peoples to protect their land base and traditional
territories. Dr. Eloise Tamez and her daughter Margo are engaged in a
historic struggle for refusing to allow the border wall to traverse
the Tamez private property (part of a 1786 Spanish land grant)  and
impede their ancestral Native trails. Professor Tamez has been
described as a Mexican American grandmother, and yet she and her
family assert their Indigeneity as Nde’ (Lipan and Jumano Apache) and
Basque descendants.  El Calaboz Rancheria in the Lower Rio Grande
Valley, wrote Margo in a report to the United Nations, is located in
traditional homelands which were recognized by other Indigenous
peoples as “the place where the Lipan pray.”  The government has  sued
Tamez and she has countersued, while numerous elders have been
harassed by “armed personnel of the government,” according to Margo.
Calaboz, she writes, refers to an earthen dug-out prison: “… the
psychological warfare that the Spanish used against our ancestors to
contain them in little prison holes within the ground when they
resisted oppression and stood firm on dissidence against all power to
destroy a people.”The Tamez women are related to Esequiel Hernandez, the student who was
shot by U.S. Marines while herding his goats along the border in
Redford, Texas , in 1997. He was the first civilian killed by U.S.
military or National Guard since Kent State. A recent documentary
portrays how the marines, though charged with murder by the Texas
Rangers, were never prosecuted after a grand jury declined to indict
them. According to the Tucson-based Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, the
four- man unit, part of Joint Task Force Six, was the first known
joint domestic operation between the Departments of Justice and
Defense, and a precursor to the Department of Homeland Security.
Esequiel was Jumano Apache and doing what his ancestors have always
done, walk their traditional lands. As a local historian noted in The
Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez, they have walked those lands for 12,000
years. But Esequiel wasn’t “crossing the border.”  Its militarization
has extended from the womb of one Indigenous mother to another.   A
2008 report by that human rights coalition documented 128 bodies
recovered in the Arizona-Sonora border, including a miscarried fetus.
That which was life in a woman’s womb, child, tissue, blood, has
become these militarized lands.
(c) 2008 Column of the Americas

Gonzales can be reached at:
Column of the Americas - PO BOX 85476 - Tucson, AZ 85754
or Patzin@gmail.com

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