This review published in Indian Country Today Media Network covers Sarah Deer’s upcoming book The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. Citing the statistic that “American Indian and Alaska Native women are raped at a rate 3 to 10 times greater than the national average” Deer argues that “rape is a direct and serious threat to tribal sovereignty.”

Quotes from the review:

• “Native people suffer from a high rate of social ills—drug abuse and addiction, as well as mental and physical health challenges. Experiencing rape has been shown to increase rates of lung disease, heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, obesity.”
• “It’s difficult to really be a true, strong sovereign government when so many of the people in the community have suffered sexual assault, because when you have these very high rates of health disparities and other challenges, this means that those people who are suffering may not be able to contribute to the health and welfare of the tribe because they are struggling with their own issues.”

• “If we look at the foundational experiences that the teens who commit suicide have had we find a very common theme in quite a few cases that these suicides are connected to some form of sexual violence that they’ve experienced.”

Sarah Deer is an attorney and professor of law at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Read the entire review

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