To cite, use: Lynne, Jackie 1998 "Colonialism and the Sexual Exploitation of Canada's First Nations women," paper presented at the American Psychological Association 106th Annual Convention, San Francisco, California, August 17, 1998.
Copyright © 1998 Jackie Lynne. All Rights Reserved.

Street prostitution in the lives of Canadian First Nations women is a fundamental form of sexual oppression whose exploitative roots are located within earlier colonial relations. Historical patriarchal, capitalist relations subjugated First Nations women collectively. This collective sexual oppression, based on gender, created our inferiority as a class of people to both First Nations men and non-First Nations men. The sexual domination of First Nations women has remained unabated to present-day due to patriarchy's stronghold. Thus, it has had, and continues to have profound, and prolonged injurious consequences in First Nations women's lives. This article describes some aspects of the historical rootedness of the sexual exploitation of First Nations women.

First Nations women who have been prostituted are graphic examples of how deeply patriarchy wounds. When sexual oppression is intersected by racism, and capitalism, the wounding worsens--this compounded wounding for First Nations women has occurred for over 500 hundred years.

Several powerful aspects of colonization imposed upon First Nations women which changed our lives were capitalism (mercantalism)., the church, the state, and the military. All these forces systematically created women's subservience to men. For example, European colonizers intended to accumulate capital through the production and circulation of commodities. Fur was the main attraction to Canada, and First Nations women were especially essential to the fur traders. The Europeans used the presence and influence of First Nations women to penetrate new territories and secure new markets. Thus, First Nations women were integral to the creation of commodity production. However, their position in that new society was one of slave. For example, in 1714, a Hudson's Bay Company officer, as part of an expansionist strategy, "obtained" a Chipewyan woman whom he referred to as "slave woman". He "obtained" kept her with him for two years so that she might learn they system of commodity exchange and the value of British goods and private property. She was then sent into the interior to recruit Chipewyan people to come to York Factory and begin trade. Her confinement to the fort was a form of hostage-taking where she was forced to accept the Western values of capital and private property.

As First Nations society became transformed through a policy of capitalism, First Nations women were also sexually commodified (Absolon, Herbert & MacDonald, 1996). Women were purchased through a system of exchange. For example, women were bought by alcohol, and other European goods. In Kathleen Barry's Female Sexual Slavery (1984), she stated:

the traffic in women, like the traffic in drugs or black market babies, depends upon a market ... the demand for sexual service is most significant where men congregate in large groups separated from home and family (p. 70).

In the first century of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), European women were not allowed to travel or to live in Canada known as Rupert's Land at that time. Neither were mixed family formations allowed in or around the fur trade posts (Bourgeault, 1989). This further encouraged relations of domination as European males used First Nations women for sex. Sexual exploitation became so prevalent around Bayside, an officer at York Factory reveals in his 1769 journal: "the worst Brothel House in London is not so common a (stew) as the men's House in this Factory was before I put a stop to it" (Bourgeault, 1989).

Not all men visited brothels. Some took First Nations women as their "country wives", lived with them and had children. While on the surface, this seems a respectable practice, all too often these women and their children were abandoned by the white men at a later date. The phenomenon of the "country wife" was a form of sexual exploitation which was used by the officer class, and was a more subtle form of sexual exploitation. In these relationships, First Nations women were concubines--secondary wives without legal sanctions. These relationships, particularly when First Nations women became dependent on white men, created serious differences between First Nations women, and their culture. "Country wives" and their children were not deemed legitimate property of men by English common law. Therefore; these families were abandoned.

The state-regulated residential school system (an assimilation strategy designed by the state/carried out by the church) has had grave consequences for First Nations culture in general, and women in particular. The residential school system was designed to eradicate Native culture in the process of cultural genocide (Haig-Brown, 1988). The school system was modelled after the United States' industrial schools established for First Nations people known as "aggressive civilization" (Davin, 1879, as, cited in Haig-Brown, 1988, p. 30). The superiority of European culture was the underlying belief inherent in this type of assimilationist policy.

As a tool of assimilation, the residential school system failed, but it was successful in causing irrevocable damage to First Nations culture. Its damaging impact has had serious consequences. Children were held taken from their families and communities and held as captives within these schools. Parental care and guidance were lost and replaced by institutionalized child care characterized by authoritarianism, often to the point of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse "bordering on (and often passing into) the realm of torture, such treatment often being rationalized as discipline by those inflicting it" (Chrisjohn, 1991, p. 169). The legacy of residential schools on the children who attended, their parents, and the subsequent generations, can be described as internalized collective trauma. This type of trauma is the result of separation from family, cultural denigration, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse (Absolon, Herbert & MacDonald, 1996).

Sexual abuse of First Nations children is at crisis proportions. This form of violence is a legacy of colonialism. As previously mentioned, residential schools held First Nations children captives. These children were terrorized sexually with no avenues of escape. When they were allowed to visit their families during holidays, these children often felt increasing loneliness and despair due to a widening sense of cultural estrangement, and abandonment.

Today, there are northern communities in which the entire female population has been sexually assaulted by males who are living in community with them. These men are their brothers, cousins, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers. Some of these abusers hold powerful positions on band councils--most of them are held unaccountable for their assaults against their female relatives. Often women feel powerless to effect change, and are threatened with further violence if they attempt to stop the abuse.

In summary, the afore-mentioned historical impact of the market, the military, the church, and the state have created the sexual oppression of First Nations women as a class condition. (Street) prostitution depends upon this class of devalued women.