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“In 2010, a Seattle-based survey co-produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Urban Indian Health Institute found that nearly every Native woman had been raped or coerced into sex at least once in their lives. You may be wondering why a survey that’s eight years out of date is only just beginning to make headlines. The answer, it turns out, is nearly as shocking as the survey’s results.
Abigail Echo-Hawk began her new job as director of the Urban Indian Health Institute in 2016 in the same way many other people begin new gigs — by poking around her new office, according to a Seattle Times exclusive. That’s how she found a copy of the 2010 survey, which questioned 148 women who identified as American Indian and/or Alaska Native about their experience with sexual violence, buried among other files in the very bottom drawer of a filing cabinet tucked into the corner of her office. Despite the fact that the survey revealed important findings about both the rate of sexual violence against Native women and its impact, the Urban Indian Health Institute hid it for years.
Echo-Hawk told the Seattle Times that leaders at the institute had initially opted not to publish the survey’s results because they feared they would promote negative characterizations of the Native community. But Echo-Hawk felt it was important to make the survey findings public and so, for two years, she worked with the CDC on interpreting and releasing the data in a report called Our Bodies, Our Stories: Sexual Violence Among Native Women In Seattle, WA.”
– Bustle, Almost Every Native American Woman Reported Rape Or Coercion In A Survey That Was Hidden For Years.
“It’s difficult to know precisely how these statistics compare to the broader population. But the CDC’s 2015 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey reported that about one in five women in the U.S. — a little more than 21 percent — had experienced an attempted or completed rape at some point in their lives.
At Wednesday night’s meeting, which was exclusively for members of the Native community, no one was particularly shocked by the survey results. This type of violence has long been an issue of concern, though one rarely discussed out in the open.
The reason the survey results were hidden for so long is because leaders at the Urban Indian Health Institute, a division of the Seattle Indian Health Board, had decided to not release them, believing the information would only lead to negative characterizations of the Native community, according to Echo-Hawk.
“We’re always taught as Native people … you don’t hang your dirty laundry out, because people attack the victims,” said Susan Balbas, co-founder and executive director of the Seattle-based Na’ah Illahee Fund, which promotes the leadership of indigenous women and girls. She attended Wednesday’s meeting.”
– Seattle Times, Nearly every Native American woman in Seattle survey said she was raped or coerced into sex.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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