Chapter 8 - Sexual Violence and Indigenous Women

Summary

This chapter examines how a U.S. soldier’s sexual harassment prompted the enrollment of Kā tý Brown, also known as Catharine Brown, at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation in 1817. Viewed through Indigenous feminists’ theorizations of the role of sexual violence in settler colonialism, archival materials enable new understandings of the significance of the life and writings of Brown, one of the earliest Native American women to publish self-authored writings. Brown’s strategic and agential removal of herself from her harasser’s proximity became a foundational act in her development as a Cherokee leader over the next several years as she put her literacy to service in the cause of sovereignty. More broadly, the essay interrogates how a lack of scholarly attention to Indigenous women’s experiences of sexual violence has affected scholarly conclusions about Cherokee-white relations in the pre-Removal period and demonstrates how Indigenous feminist theorizations of colonial sexual violence must be put in dialogue with the documentary record in archives.