An Era of Violence Against Native Women: Uncovering Colonial Violence in the U.S. Violence Against Women Act

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Speaking on the 2021 Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), U.S. President Joe Biden referred to the rate of sexual assault as 'a pandemic within a pandemic for countless [Native] women at risk for abuse,' concluding, 'this is an urgent crisis' (2021). The VAWA-first enacted in 1994-represents an era of legislation that presents the 'crisis' of violence against Native American women as a 'problem' to 'solve' using U.S. federal law.After 27 years, the violence continues unabated, as nearly 85 percent of Native women report experiencing sexual violence in their lifetime. While the VAWA includes 'solutions' that enhanced criminal jurisdiction and funding for tribes, little attention has been paid to the 'problem' the VAWA 'addresses'. My project challenges the assumption that the 'problem' is obvious. Eschewing discussions of intent or 'effectiveness', I show the ways the VAWA creates, constitutes, and shapes the very violence it claims to solve. By deploying Indigenous feminist and decolonising frameworks, I intervene in evaluative policy research to explore how the very real violence Native women face is (re)produced by federal policy discourse. As the Biden administration prioritises the VAWA, it is essential to critically appraise its role in (re)creating violence against Indigenous women.By interrogating the problematizations-or ways in which issues are represented as problems-offered in the VAWA, I answer the overarching question: What is the problem represented to be in the Violence Against Women Act regarding Native women?Using Bacchi's (2009) 'What's the Problem Represented to Be?' (WPR) discursive policy analysis tool, I address the problematizations in the text, the underlying logics, the silences and contestations, and the lived and discursive effects. I also consider:1. How do the problematizations within the VAWA rely on the taken-for-granted 'truth status' of colonial discourses?2. How have these problematizations changed or stabilised over the era of the VAWA?3. What forms of governmentality and biopolitics are invoked by the VAWA?4. How are these problematizations reproduced or contested by Native advocates of the VAWA?My research offers three contributions toward historical legal studies and settler colonial studies by incorporating an intersectional, decolonising approach. First, I break from traditional evaluative policy analysis to uncover underlying coloniallogics. Existing research on the VAWA is largely 'effectiveness-driven', using legal frameworks to explain the history and loopholes of the legislation (Crepelle, 2020; Reed, 2018), while Native scholars have also situated the VAWA within Indigenous legal systems (Agtuca, 2014; Allison, 2019; Deer, 2015). Although existing discursive analyses discuss the VAWA in relation to non-Native women (Meisel, 2016), my research uniquely combines discursive analysis with historical and gendered approaches to denaturalise the ingrained colonial truths in the law, creating space to imagine alternative paths to safety for Indigenous women. Second, my analysis introduces the WPR methodology to decolonising and policy and legal studies in the U.S. This research builds on my 2020 thesis from the LSE, No 'Safety for Indian Women': Problematizing Logics of Colonialism in the 2013 Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which focused on just one iteration of the VAWA. This approach offers both fields a new interpretative framework to understand colonial violence in U.S. law.Finally, by positioning the VAWA as a meaningful era in Federal Indian Law, I uncover colonialism as a violent, ongoing project specifically targeting Native women. While some have evaluated the VAWA as a period of broad anti-violence policy (Gover & Moore, 2021), none have considered the decades-long legislation as a complex, but cohesive approach to governing Native peoples.