Honoring Jamie Lee Crooked Arrow on Trans Day of Visibility
Yesterday was Transgender Day of Visibility. As someone who is not trans—I am a queer cis woman—I only want to add my voice to uplift those of trans folks—particularly trans women and femmes of color—whose voices are often only lifted when they are gone. Nine trans women have been murdered this year so far—at least nine. This is only the reported number of trans women killed this year as, in many cases, the homicide victims are misgendered or their lives unknown. Late last year, our community lost a trans woman—a black trans woman—to suicide, which when trans lives are pushed to the margins, is still part of the structural violence against trans women. Of the women killed this year, the majority have been women of color—particularly black and Native.
It is the life of Jamie Lee Crooked Arrow that I want to highlight here. The second trans women of color to be killed in 2017, Crooked Arrow was a Two Spirit trans woman who was an Oglala Lakota woman originally from Pine Ridge[i]. I remember when I read of her death that my heart broke. I did not know her, but she was a Native Two Spirit woman and so my heart fell into pieces mourning for her.
The lives of Native folks are made to be invisible. They are erased from memory such that, to dominant white society, Indigenous folks are but a relic of history, which makes white folks feel capable of bastardizing their name and image in culturally appropriative sports mascots, clothing and accessories, and for-profit New Age-style spiritual practices. As Sherman Alexie, a Spokane writer, noted in his poem The Great American Indian Novel, “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.[ii]” This erasure of Indigenous people is vital to the perpetuation of the myth of the American dream and American Exceptionalism; were the United States and those who support it to confront the realities of historical and present-day genocide of people of color—particularly black and Indigenous people—it would uproot all concepts of some glorious free, democratic past; of any egalitarian underpinnings of the founding fathers; and of the very foundation of the accumulated wealth and concentrated power in this country, which was earned on the backs of the genocide of Native people and theft of their lands and the enslavement and criminalization of black folks. It would also underscore that the issues of racism today are not merely in the hearts and minds of racist folks (which they are), but also in the very institutions that continue to shroud these old myths that America is the beacon of freedom and democracy when, in reality, the U.S. has always and continues to wield colonial and imperialist power against black and brown folks—and poor black and brown women and femmes in particular. Kelly Hayes, a Native organizer, activist, and writer based in Chicago, talks about the how and why of the invisibility of Native folks’ experience from media and the dominant U.S. narrative in the video of her speech from the Women’s March (1/21/17) in Chicago, IL:
“One of the greatest things that we are up against as Native people is that we are unseen. Native people are more likely than any other group in the United States to be killed by law enforcement...Who here can name a Native person that was killed by law enforcement? Go ahead, yell it out…And I'm not coming down on those of you who [can’t name someone]. This isn't about you being a bad person who doesn't care about the right things. You are not meant to see us die. We were meant to suffer in silence and disappear because American mythology, the myth of American exceptionalism doesn't exist when you have to factor in all the terrible things that have been done to my people, that are being done to my people. Black exploitation on the other hand is performed in public, for a reason. Because whether it's a postcard of a lynching, or a YouTube video, or a person left hanging in a tree there is a lesson. It is an attempt at social control. It's about keeping people in their place because this country could not function without the financial exploitation of Black people, and never could have. To change that we have to upend everything.[iii]”
This effort to make Native folks invisible is not dissimilar to the ways our society attempts to make trans women invisible through misgendering, rendering to the margins, or through more overt acts of violence (that also then do not even receive as much attention as violence against cis women and particularly cis white women or other cis white folks)[iv]. That is perhaps why I was dealt a blow when I heard of Crooked Arrow’s death.
In Pine Ridge, where she is originally from, suicide rates are some of the highest in North America, unemployment and alcoholism hover around 80-90%, and domestic violence and sexual assault against Native women and Two Spirit people is especially high (in a 2016 U.S. Department of Justice study, nearly 60% of Native women reported experiencing sexual violence and nearly 85% have experienced some kind of violence in their lifetime). The average household income in Pine Ridge hovers around $5,000 a year, average life expectancy is about 50, and many live with multiple families per household—the houses not equipped with running water, electricity, or indoor facilities. These issues exist only because of widespread, systemic white supremacist colonization that has rendered jobs, housing, and the means to obtain a livelihood less valuable and less easily attainable for Native folks. We do not hear of this, though, do we? This is erased in our pursuit of American myth and mythology. This is where Jamie Lee Crooked Arrow is from. This is where her Two Spirit identity may have started, in the resilience of life the Lakota way—the Indigenous way—not the way of white folks. Because despite these statistics, the beauty, joy, and resilient strength of Indigenous people is why Native people are still here, fighting colonization, climate change, sexual violence, and the gender binary (among many other things)[v].
This is what Native people have said and known all along.
Two Spirit identities have been and are alive and thriving in Native communities[vi]. They have been under attack as a result of widespread white colonization and the need to force gender binaries for a profitable division of labor and a concentration of power, but these gender identities are important to recognize to begin to make visible the structural (and tangible) violence committed against Native communities and to reverse the invisibalization of Native communities and identities.
So as we honor trans women and other trans folks and gender diverse people on Transgender Day of Visibility, let us ground that in recognizing how colonization and white supremacy have played a hand in erasing trans identities—and particularly Two Spirit identities—and in celebrating that Jamie Lee Crooked Arrow lived this identity, was loved and was loving, was living her identity as a resilient Two Spirit Oglala Lakota woman, and honor her life by showing up better for communities that have been erased.
[i] Many articles discuss Crooked Arrow’s death including this one from Mic.com: https://mic.com/articles/164689/two-spirit-woman-jamie-lee-wounded-arrow-is-2017-s-second-transgender-murder-victim#.okC07FnDc
[ii] For Sherman Alexie’s full poem, please visit https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/52775.
[iii] For the audio and full transcript of Kelly Hayes’s video, please view the article from Truth-Out regarding Hayes’s speech and platform here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/39191-why-i-threw-out-my-speech-for-the-women-s-march
[iv] As “cis” may be a new term for those unfamiliar or without access, here is a link to its definition on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender and here is a reference to help understand how to better learn terms that are critical to the LGBTQIA community without burdening folks with those identities to be at the forefront of the education: http://www.transstudent.org/definitions
[v] Prior to colonization, many Native nations had diverse genders and gender roles and identities. Despite colonization, these practices have continued to thrive and have provided resilience and strength to Two Spirit individuals. Although this article uses an incorrect term (“transgendered”), Indian Country Today Media Network discusses this gender diversity: https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/two-spirits-one-heart-five-genders/. More on Two Spirit identities here: https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/the-two-spirit-people-of-indigenous-north-americans/ and here: http://www.westender.com/news-issues/two-spirits-one-struggle-the-front-lines-of-being-first-nations-and-gay-1.1269015#sthash.QnK7yUau.aZIYnUjS.gbpl
[vi] Two Spirit is a term to reference people in Indigenous communities and should not be used by non-Natives: http://www.conspireforchange.org/?p=2283
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