Wise Woman of the Week: Harriet Tubman

Don't piss her off.

Harriet Tubman is one of those historical heavies that are rendered very lightweight. In elementary school, we’re given the basics:

Harriet Tubman was black.

Harriet Tubman was a slave.

Harriett Tubman freed a bunch of slaves.

Harriet Tubman freed a bunch of slaves via Underground Railroad, which was (psst!) not a real railroad.

Harriet Tubman died.

The end.

While this bullet by bullet version of her brain-meltingly awesome life is easy to read, it is not easy to accept, especially when you find out giving a middle  finger the size of Godzilla to slack-jawed slave owners was just one of the many badass feats this woman pulled off, and then some.

Born into slavery on a Maryland plantation, Harriet spent her first twenty-five years living under the watchful gaze of a number of different jackass overseers and housemistresses.  While this five-foot tall woman may not have been the most physically imposing specimen this side of the She-Hulk exploding with ‘roid rage, hard work made her tough as hell – she toned her body and her muscles working grueling manual labor twelve hours a day, seven days a week.  Out in the unforgiving Maryland sun, she beat the hell out of trees with an axe, hacked up firewood, plowed an endless assortment fields, and drove unwieldy ox-carts.  Before long, her physical strength matched her unshakable willpower.

Despite facing a lifetime of cruel bondage, Harriet Tubman never took fucking shit from anybody ever.  Her stubbornness and refusal to back down generally resulted in her suffering endless beatings and physical abuse, including one time when she was smashed in the head with a lead weight for defending a fellow slave (a wound that left her suffering dizzy spells and light-headedness for the rest of her life), but she simply refused to have her spirit broken by a bunch of jackass rednecks on a power trip.  Finally, one cloudy night in 1849, Harriet Tubman had enough of it.  She made a break for freedom.  Fleeing into the darkness, Tubman traveled for several days through the unfamiliar Maryland wilderness, and didn’t look back until she reached the friendly, we-promise-we-won’t-enslave-you confines of Philadelphia.

As awesome as it was to no longer live in slavery, there was still one problem – Harriet left behind her mother, father, and nine siblings. While most people would have just shrugged and said, “fuck it dudes, you’re on your own,” Harriet Tubman did the unbelievable – she fucking went BACK to the plantation, tracked down her family, and led THEM to freedom.  That’s just how she rolled, bitches.

Once Harried saw that she was capable of leading a large band of fugitive slaves safely to freedom (seriously, ten kids! Her family was almost as prolific as those crazy nutjobs in Utah who named all their kids with the letter J!) Harriet decided that she couldn’t enjoy her freedom while her people remained in bondage.  Using the code name “Moses”, she returned to Maryland TWENTY more times, each time delivering her people from the chains of slavery to the promised land (which in this case was Niagara Falls, Canada, a 350-mile walk from the Maryland border) where they didn’t have to worry about shit like getting whipped for insubordination or not having enough food to eat.  Tubman rescued over 300 slaves over the course of 20 years, and was one of the greatest and most fearless heroines of antebellum America.

The Underground Railroad was some serious shit.  Deep behind unfriendly lines for days and weeks at a time, Tubman and her crew slept in swamps, hid during the day, and moved under the cover of darkness.  Travelling with women and children, young and old, and being pursued relentlessly by police, soldiers, attack dogs, bounty hunters, and slave-catchers barely caused her to flinch.  She urged her people on, led them to freedom, and threatened to fucking face-shoot anybody who suggested giving up or turning back (seriously – if one member was caught or returned, it jeopardized the entire Railroad, and she would rather have capped someone in the face than seen that shit go down).  Although she was illiterate and uneducated, Harriet Tubman was by no means stupid – she cleverly hid from her would-be captors, outsmarted the entire population of Maryland nearly two dozen times, and told everybody else to get bent harder than Uri Geller’s silverware collection.  She made her escapes on Saturdays, which bought her a one-day head start because wanted posters could not legally be posted on Sundays – and twenty-four hours was all she needed to leave her enemies in her dust.  Despite the fact that there was a $40,000 reward for the “black ghost” (a figure that today equates to a cool $4 mil), she was never caught, never defeated, and never lost a single person she escorted to freedom.

When Tubman wasn’t risking her life trying to save people from bondage or biting live Piranha in half, she spoke out publicly against slavery, worked at a hotel, and helped John Brown plan and finance his attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.  When the Civil War blew up like whoa, she fucking signed on as a scout with the Union Army, serving as a reconnaissance officer for Colonel James Montgomery.  As a scout and spy, Tubman helped slaves escape the South, provided them with medical attention, and encouraged them to seek vengeance on their former masters by enlisting in the Federal army.  She also participated in a number of military engagements, including the Raid on Combahee Ferry in 1863, when she personally helped liberate 800 slaves in a single battle.  Amazingly, she wasn’t even paid for her work, preferring to earn her money brewing badass root beer for the soldiers.  Man, I fucking love root beer.

In the 1890s Tubman had fucking brain surgery, without anesthesia  She allegedly bit down on a bullet for the pain.  Is that tough enough for you?

After the war she received a military pension, built a house in upstate New York, and opened up a rest/retirement home for elderly black men and women.  Even into her later years she stood up for her rights, fighting for women’s suffrage alongside no-bullshit chicks like Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.  Harriet Tubman died in 1913 at the age of 93, and was buried with full military honors.

Peace and Coexistence: The Goals of the International Women Commission

IDF soldier stops Palestinian child at checkpoint

For those who have utter faith in American mass media, it is more than likely that they believe the Palestinian populace lives only for three things.

1) Killing Israeli civilians.

2) Blowing themselves up to kill Israeli civilians.

3) Falafel.

However, what they don’t realize is that most Palestinians (read: 99%) enjoy none of the above with the exception of falafels.  Palestinians strive to be teachers, doctors, scientists, writers, and artists, to name a few choicey occupations, and while the pervading myth of ’72 virgins and rivers of milk and honey’ might pervade throughout Western culture, the idea of a fulfilling and fruitful life in a chosen occupation is seen as preferable in the face of blowing yourself up out of desperation.

Those most affected by the conflict are women and children. Educational centers suffer bombings and extreme vandalism, and even with emphasis on after-school programs, keeping Palestinian children both educated and happy has proved near impossible, especially so for girls. Palestinian girls suffer more than boys because of the desire to keep girls close to home and away from the staggering amounts of violence that stems from rebellions against the occupation.

The International Women’s Commission (IWC) brings together Palestinian, Israeli and international women dedicated to an end of the Israeli occupation and a just peace based on international law [including relevant UN resolutions], human rights and equality.  The IWC aims to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through immediate final status negotiations leading to a viable sovereign Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel on the June 4, 1967 borders. The IWC works for an ongoing and comprehensive reconciliation in order to realize a mutually secure and sustainable peace and co-existence.

The IWC is a coalition of Palestinian, Israeli and international women who recognize the urgent need to achieve a meaningful peace between Israelis and Palestinians and feel a shared commitment to accomplish this goal. Participation in the IWC is grounded in mutual respect for diversity and the rights and dignity of all parties.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and other international conventions and instruments call upon state parties to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels for the prevention, management and resolution of conflict.  In accord with this resolution, the absence of Palestinian and Israeli women from the decision-making processes and official negotiations must be rectified. Women from all ethnic and national communities must be full partners in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only on the basis of principle, as re-affirmed by  Resolution 1325, but also on the basis of the significant contributions made by Palestinian and Israeli women over the years in developing alternative models of political dialogue and engaging in peace-making efforts.

The goals of the IWC

• ensure the meaningful participation of diverse women, including those from civil society, in any Israeli-Palestinian peace process, including negotiations and supportive initiatives;

• guarantee gender equality and that women’s perspectives and experiences be incorporated in any future resolution of the conflict;

• work for an end to the occupation and genuine negotiations towards a just and sustainable peace;

• promote a process of political dialogue that rectifies ongoing asymmetries and addresses all elements of reconciliation;

The immediate objectives of the IWC are to:

• set forth principles and suggest concrete, substantive and procedural measures within reasonable timeframes to facilitate constructive engagement and political progress between Palestine and Israel based upon the principles of fairness, justice, and equality;

• insert a gendered perspective, voice, and experience into the peace process;

• ensure that the rights and issues of women affected by the Palestine-Israel conflict are raised and effectively addressed including issues dealing with women’s economic, social and cultural rights, and human security;

• push for transparency, accountability, and respect for rules and principles to be maintained throughout the peace process;

• provide an early warning of obstacles that undermine the two-state solution (Jerusalem, the wall, settlements) and activate interim preventive measures;

• contribute to the mobilization of civil society in support for a peace built within a legal, humanitarian and human rights framework.

To achieve these aims, the IWC will:

• advocate IWC principles among policy and decision-makers at the national and international levels;

• seek the active participation of women in all formal and informal peace-related processes;

• review and make recommendations on all relevant multilateral, bilateral, and intra-governmental structures;

• make suggestions for facilitating constructive political dialogue and ways of reframing divisive issues and rectifying ongoing asymmetries;

• assess all existing and future peace proposals and make recommendations to ensure full incorporation of a gender perspective, as well as human rights, international law and human security;

• incorporate into their recommendations the experiences and expertise of international women, specialists, peace activists and organizations engaged in conflict resolution around the world;

• mobilize local and international support for a just and sustainable Israeli-Palestinian peace through public and media outreach, networking, dialogue and political efforts and actions;

• constantly evaluate and adapt its own structure and mechanisms to changing needs, circumstances, and new opportunities.

Courage Under Fire: One Iraqi Mother’s Bravery

Iraqi mother comforting her weeping infant son. The child had shrapnel embedded in the base of his skull.

It had been a slow morning at the hospital, until they arrived. One by one, bloodied and crying, carried in the arms of men and women with wounds themselves — a child, her mother, two more of her children, a man, another child, an uncle and others. Medics of the 28th Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone grabbed them from the Iraqis who had carried them in and ran them the rest of the way to the emergency room, laying them gingerly on the pale blue sheets of the Army gurneys.

In fits and starts, the story came out: this family had been gathering for a clan funeral in the Dora neighborhood a few miles away. A US convoy was traveling through; as it left, mortars rained down on the neighborhood. One landed nearby and sprayed them all with shrapnel. Most of these wounds were superficial but still terrifying.

The mother of three was bleeding from her left temple, but was far more worried about the traumatic scene in front of her: three of her children screaming and cut, surrounded by medics. She flitted from one gurney to the next, holding hands, giving comfort, kissing foreheads. A doctor tried to stop her and get her to accept treatment, she batted his hands away and went back to the next child’s bedside.

Two of the children were stabilized; the oldest, a girl of ten, was soon positively Churchillian in her stoicism, replacing her tears with wide-eyed wonder and only letting out a yelp when confronted with the needle for the IV. But the youngest, a boy of only a year old, would not stop crying. Eventually the mother crawled on the gurney with him and he calmed some.

“Where’s the interpreter?” a doctor called out. An Iraqi who works at the hospital stepped up and gently tugged the mother off of the gurney and into a bedside conference.

“Okay,” the doctor began, “tell her we have the X-rays and there’s a piece of shrapnel in the base of the boy’s head. It seems to have lodged in the lower brain.”

The translator winced, then translated. The mother clenched her fists and swayed.

“No, wait, wait,” the doctor continued. “It’s very small and not very far in. He probably wouldn’t be able to have carried on the way he has if there was any damage. We’re going to do some more tests but I think he’ll be okay.”

The translator nodded approvingly and turned to the mother.

“Zehn, zehn,” he told her in Arabic, simplifying the prognosis.

It’s good, it’s good.

The Unreported, Uninvestigated and Unprosecuted Abuse of Native American Women

Leslie Ironroad was 20 years old when she moved from one side of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas to the other — the town of McLaughlin, S.D., home to one gas station, one diner and her friend, Rhea Archambault. She roomed in Archambault’s spare bedroom.

“I make star quilts, so she was helping me make patterns,” Archambault said recently, sitting at her dining room table. “She was just a nice little girl.”

One night four years ago, Ironroad left the house to go to a party a few miles away. Early the next morning, she called Archambault’s brother in tears asking to be picked up.

“She said, ‘Can [you] go get Rhea to come get me ’cause these guys are going to fight me,’” Archambault said. “And so he said, ‘Well where you at?’ And she was just crying and hangs up.”

Leslie never made it home.

When Archambault found her friend in a Bismarck, N.D. hospital, she was black and blue.

“‘I said, ‘Leslie, what happened?.’ She said, ‘Rhea, is that you? Turn the lights on, I can’t see.’ But the lights in the room were on. She said, ‘Rhea, I was raped,’ and she was just squeezing my hand,” Archambault recalled.

Archambault called the Bureau of Indian Affairs police, a small department in charge of all law enforcement on the reservation. A few days later an officer arrived in the hospital room, and Leslie scratched out a statement on a tablet laid across her stomach.

Ironroad told the officer how she was raped and said that the men locked her in a bathroom, where she swallowed diabetes pills she found in the cabinet, hoping that if she was unconscious the men would leave her alone. The next morning, someone found her on the bathroom floor and called an ambulance.

A week later, Ironroad was dead — and so was the investigation. None of the authorities who could have investigated what happened to Leslie Ironroad did — not the Bureau of Indian Affairs, nor the FBI, nor anybody else.

People who know the men who likely attacked her say they were never even questioned.

Archambault couldn’t believe nothing came of Ironroad’s report.

“She named all the people that were there, the ones that were hitting her, the ones that were fighting her, she named everybody — what more else?” Archambault asked.

Unreported, Uninvestigated and Unprosecuted

This case was not an isolated incident. NPR spoke with at least a dozen people on Standing Rock — rape counselors, doctors, tribal leaders and victims — people who were either assaulted or know women who were in cases where no charges were filed.

The story of what happened to Ironroad, and more importantly what happened to the investigation of her death, is a window into what is happening on Native American reservations across the country. Cases like hers are going unreported, uninvestigated and unprosecuted, according to tribal officials.

The Justice Department found that one in three Native American women will be raped in her lifetime. In many cases, on rural reservations like Standing Rock, NPR found that there aren’t enough police to investigate sexual assaults, and few of the cases are prosecuted.

On Standing Rock, there’s one person in charge of law enforcement: Bureau of Indian Affairs police Chief Gerald White.

“I consider any sexual assault a serious problem. I mean, we don’t take them lightly,” White said at the police headquarters on the reservation. “Every sexual assault that is reported to us — we investigate them to the fullest.”

When asked what happened in the Ironroad case, White responded, “I looked back and there was nothing that could substantiate that happening. I’m sure she passed away, but as far as her being involved as a victim of sexual assault, I couldn’t find anything to support that … You know, if a person doesn’t report, then how can we investigate it, if we don’t know about it?”

Overwhelmed and Overworked

Although Ironroad did report her attack to a BIA officer in her hospital room, authorities did not conduct an investigation. Through records, interviews with officials at the hospital, the state medical examiner’s office and the police department, and conversations with more than a dozen people familiar with Ironroad’s case, NPR learned the officer in her hospital room was BIA police officer Doug Wilkinson.

Officer Wilkinson resigned from the Standing Rock police department two months ago. NPR tracked him down in the small town of Little Eagle, S.D. In a phone conversation, he confirmed the basic details of the story.

Wilkenson said a lot of sexual assault cases like Ironroad’s are never investigated. He said he was too overwhelmed and overworked to keep up with the number of calls for rape, sexual assault and child abuse he received each week.

When it came to federal prosecutors, he admitted, “We all knew they only take the ones with a confession … We were forced to triage our cases.”

Wilkenson has now joined a ministry and says he hopes to help survivors through preaching.

“I felt like I was standing in the middle of the river trying to hold back the flood,” he says, describing his decade as a federal police officer.

On Standing Rock, there are five BIA officers for a territory the size of Connecticut. On this and other reservations, police are stretched thin and often can’t or won’t make arrests.

Allocating the Limited Resources

Fourteen years ago, Archie Fool Bear, who sits on the Standing Rock Tribal Council, was chief of the BIA police department on the reservation, heading a force three times as large as today’s. Now, he says, tribe members are coming to him with terrible stories of rapes and crimes, even though he can no longer do anything about them.

“We know with that size of force, I know from experience, there are cases that are going to be sitting on the shelf or cases where people don’t want to come forward because they have no confidence in law enforcement,” he said.

Money for new officers can only come from one place: Washington, D.C. The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ director Pat Ragsdale sits in his office just across the street from the White House grounds. Ragsdale says he knows cases may be falling through the cracks. He’d love to have more officers, he says, and expects the situation to improve with $16 million in new funding that the Bush administration has proposed, which would add about 50 new BIA police officers.

Spread among 200 tribal jurisdictions, 50 new officers comes out to well below one per tribe. Director Ragsdale says they plan to cluster the officers on reservations where they are needed the most.

On Standing Rock, getting an officer to respond to a call for help can mean waiting for days or even months. The reservation’s only women’s shelter is still waiting for police to come after someone cut all of their phone lines two months ago.

The shelter’s director, Georgia Littleshield, can attest firsthand to the lack of police response. When her daughter’s boyfriend, a non-native, broke her daughter’s nose, her daughter filed a report and attached statements and photos from the doctors. But when Littlefield called special investigators the next morning, an officer told her that her injury was not considered a broken bone, but broken cartilage and that the case would not be prosecuted.

“This is a lawless land where people are making up their own laws because there’s no justice being done,” Littleshield said.

A study from the Justice Department found that Native American women are two and half times more likely to be raped than other women. The majority of victims said they were raped by men from outside the reservation, according to a victimization survey.

Many of those victims wind up at the Indian Health Service Center. When Ironroad arrived at the center, her injuries were so severe that doctors told the ambulance to take her two hours north to Bismarck.

The health center does not have rape kits to collect the vital DNA evidence needed to prosecute attackers. They are also inadequately staffed and cannot spare an exam room for the hour it takes to complete the rape examination.

For that, women must go to Bismarck, but most women don’t want to go because they don’t know how they will get back home.

Staff physician Jackie Quizno says she sees rape cases several times a month. When she and other doctors turn over their information to the BIA police and federal prosecutors on the women they see, she says nothing happens.

“I have only been involved in one court hearing where I was actually called to testify,” Quizno said, who has worked at the center for more than five years.

A Federal Responsibility

Tribal leaders say the Justice Department ignores them, and one of the department’s own former top officials agrees.

“Our committee was frequently met with indifference,” said Thomas Heffelfinger, who until last year chaired the department’s Indian Affairs Committee, which tried to get resources to Indian country. He said department officials “simply don’t recognize the magnitude of the problem and the degree to which it is a federal responsibility.”

Mary Beth Buchanan, acting director of the Justice Department’s Office of Violence Against Women, disagrees. She says Indian sexual assaults are a priority, especially for U.S. attorneys.

“Most prosecutors in Indian country are very committed to assisting in the prosecution of these cases and are very sensitive to the problems associated with crime in Indian country,” she countered, citing millions of dollars the department has funneled to a new pilot project to reduce violence and a new study that will examine the rate of sexual assaults on reservations.

However, actual figures are difficult to pin down. Justice officials and local U.S. attorneys say they can not provide the number of sexual assault cases they decline from Indian reservations or even the number of cases they take.

A 2004 study conducted by the department found that the number of suspects investigated by U.S. attorneys for crimes on Indian land declined 21 percent from 1997 to 2000.

On Standing Rock, where the bright green grass seems to stretch as far as the sky, women like Ironroad can live and die without any federal official taking notice.

The tribe’s chairman, Ron His Horse Is Thunder, stood on the porch of his log cabin overlooking the plains where his people have lived for thousands of years.

“Rape amongst our people was one of those unheard of crimes, he said. “Not because people didn’t talk about it, but at one point in time, it didn’t occur.”

That is no longer the case, and the chairman says that as long as the tribe must depend on the federal government to police and prosecute people on their own land, anyone who comes here may well be able to rape or assault women, like Leslie Ironroad, and get away with it.

“There’s a word amongst our people,” he said, pronouncing an Indian phrase. “Simply stated, that we are all related, but it’s more than just me and my cousin being related. It means that anything that happens to the tribe or one its members will affect everybody.”

Two weeks after NPR began requesting documents and interviewing officials, the Bureau of Indian Affairs reopened the investigation into Leslie Ironroad’s death. Officials say the results are still pending.

Article credited to Laura Sullivan of NPR.