After the Scholarly Interviews...

So, I've been doing quite a bit of reading on my Junior Theme topic, Native American domestic and sexual violence. To be honest, after reading hundreds of pages about my topic, I still felt like I was not learning much new information. The same statistics kept coming up over and over: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in their lifetime, Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped than any other group (Weisman), 6 in 10 Native women will be physically assaulted ("Restoring Safety to Native Women and Girls and Strengthening Native Nations")...

However,  after my interviews with experts on my subject, my mind was quickly opened up to new ideas and possible reasons for the current state of domestic violence for Native Americans. The first interview I had was via email with Mr. Duthu, a professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth and my second interview was via Skype with Dr. Palmer (she insists I call her Jane), a professor on domestic violence at American University. In both interviews, I asked what they thought about my reasons for the rate of domestic violence on reservation (poverty, racist policies, and the remoteness of reservations). Both Dr. Palmer and Mr. Duthu seemed to agree with my ideas and they added to my list of reasons with "intergenerational trauma," (Palmer) "colonial-era racism," (Duthu) and "the affects related to alcoholism" (Palmer). One term that Dr. Palmer mentioned that I was especially interested in finding out more about was intergenerational trauma, which Dr. Palmer defined as "[when] multiple generations have experienced excessive trauma, perpitrated by the European colonists and some has translated to [the modern generation]." I agree completely that much of what is currently going on on the reservations is due in a great part to the actions of European colonists. Though I already have research that points to the same conclusion, I was glad that Dr. Palmer gave me the correct term, intergenerational trauma. 

I feel very lucky that both professors I interviewed provided me with invaluable information that solidified some of my previous reasons as well as giving me some new ideas. Both professors also gave me several additional sources that I plan on using give more background on new topics we discussed. In short, the interviews have helped me a great deal in terms of looking at new information and addressing the other sides of the issue of Native American violence.