irishgrl
08-27-2006, 06:55 PM
first article:
The Power of Thunder
By Rose Aguilar, AlterNet. Posted April 4, 2006.
Cecelia Fire Thunder, president of the South Dakota Ogala Sioux, takes on the state's repressive new abortion ban.
Just two weeks after South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed the state's extreme abortion ban with no exceptions for rape and incest, Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman president of the Oglala Sioux tribe, made national headlines after saying she would personally set up a clinic on her tribe's land in South Dakota to preserve a woman's right to choose. There is currently only one clinic in the entire state of South Dakota that provides abortions, and its status, since the ban, is endangered.
President Fire Thunder's decision to take the lead on this issue is nothing short of remarkable considering the number of challenges on the reservation. Almost half of all Native American women in South Dakota are poor, compared with approximately 10 percent of white women, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research report on the Status of Women in South Dakota. Median annual earnings for women in South Dakota rank last in the nation. Furthermore, the unemployment rate on the reservation is 85 percent and the life expectancy rate is 46 for men and 55 for women.
But President Fire Thunder is a determined woman. Besides announcing plans for the clinic, she has continued to focus on the need to address rape as an issue for South Dakota women, particularly Native American women. One in six American women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. The average annual rate of rape and sexual assault among American Indians is three and a half times higher than the national average.
Fire Thunder is one of the co-chairs of a new coalition called the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families. The group just announced a grassroots plan to contest the abortion ban on the November ballot. They have until June 19 to collect 16,728 signatures.
AlterNet's Rose Aguilar spoke with President Fire Thunder about the clinic, abortion ban and challenges facing women who live in rural areas.
Rose Aguilar: Tell me about the clinic you're planning to build.
Cecelia Fire Thunder: The proposed clinic would be for all women because right now, if a woman needs an abortion, she needs to go all the way to Sioux Falls. This clinic would go beyond abortion and contraception. We're missing out on teaching our boys and men about what they need to do to avoid pregnancies.
Rose Aguilar: I called the governor's office to find out what the penalty would be for women who have abortions if the law goes into effect, but haven't received a call back. If the law is upheld, will women be able to have legal abortions on your reservation?
Fire Thunder: We don't know. We have five Indian lawyers working on this right now. When we go face to face with the South Dakota lawmakers, we'll be ready.
Aguilar: You've made it a point to talk about rape in your interviews. While the abortion ban has received widespread attention, there's been little talk about how this law would force a girl who'd been raped by a male relative to have his baby.
Fire Thunder: We need to start talking about those issues. Americans should be outraged about the number of women who are raped in this country. We need to also speak out for women in places like Afghanistan and other war-torn areas where rape is happening. This is not new. Rape has always been a part of life. Unfortunately, the world is not always a safe place for women.
Ultimately, this is a much bigger issue than just abortion. The women of America should be outraged that policies and decisions about their bodies are being made by male politicians and clergy. It's time for women to reclaim their bodies.
Women in America have something that women in other parts of the world don't have. Women in this country don't appreciate their right to free speech. Women in America can be the voice of women around the world. This is a call to arms by women in the United States.
Aguilar: And not only are the anti-choicers going after abortion, they're also going after birth control.
Fire Thunder: Women should have access to contraception. No questions asked. Contraception is a solution. Why don't they (politicians) get it?
Aguilar: Do the women on the reservation have access to contraception?
Fire Thunder: We have Indian clinics on the reservation, so birth control is available, but it's not enough. We're going to go ahead with the clinic no matter what. If nothing else, we need to establish a place where women feel comfortable.
Aguilar: How will you fund it?
Fire Thunder: I'm not concerned about that. We'll get a lot of support. If it's meant to be, it'll happen. We pray a lot. We trust that there will be people who support it.
Aguilar: How do these laws directly impact the poor women on the reservation?
Women of color and poor women have always known that regardless of what happens, women with money will have access to abortion. Women with money will have access to contraception. No matter which way you cut it, it's always on the backs of poor women.
An elder on my reservation said, "So they don't want you to have contraception or abortions after rape? Are they going to step up and take care of that baby?"
Aguilar: Do you think the pro-choice movement does enough to reach out to poor women?
Fire Thunder: Yes and no. For the most part, we have to empower ourselves. We're becoming much more politically astute, and we're getting a lot more young people involved. We love to get people riled up.
Aguilar: Tell me about your reservation and the realities women living in rural areas face in this political climate.
Fire Thunder: My reservation is 50 miles by 100 miles long. It's a large rural community of 40,000 people and 60 percent of our people speak our language. Half of our population is under 18.
In a perfect world, if a woman is raped, she will call the police, and the police will take her to the emergency room. The emergency room will have components in place to help this woman, including the morning-after pill to prevent the pregnancy. In rural America, that doesn't happen. Many places in rural America do not know about the morning-after pill.
On the reservation, we have to take a look at the high rates of alcohol and drug use. More often than not, young women who've been raped while under the influence will be blamed for being drunk. If someone is raped, especially out in the rural community, they may not report it. After three days, they've passed the cut-off point for taking the morning-after pill.
How many babies are conceived during the act of violence? We don't know.
Aguilar: Tell me about your background.
Fire Thunder: I was born and raised on the reservation. Then I went to Los Angeles on a relocation program from 1963 to 1976. The program was the Eisenhower administration's solution to the "Indian problem." What they wanted to do was put us in cities and hope we would disappear. During the '70s, Los Angeles had the largest Indian population in the U.S.
I eventually became a nurse and was able to provide for my two children. I returned to the reservation in 1987 and eventually worked for the state health department.
Aguilar: And eventually became the first woman president of your tribe.
Fire Thunder: Yes, it says a lot about my tribe. My job is to look after 2.7 million acres of land. My job is to take care of the water. My responsibilities are not only about the two-legged, but the four-legged. I have to make sure we have an infrastructure in place, that our educational systems are working, that we have healthcare and that our people have enough food to eat.
Right in my own backyard, I have great possibilities. We're very patriotic on my reservation, however, it's time to get out of Iraq. We need to let people make their own decisions about their future. As a woman and a mother, I personally don't want any more women to cry.
Aguilar: Are many men from the reservation in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Fire Thunder: You bet. We have hundreds of guys over there, and they volunteer to go. We just had a big funeral here last month. It was our first casualty.
Aguilar: How old was he?
Fire Thunder: He was 22. So many of our resources have been taken away from us to support that war. There's a huge groundswell of Americans that say enough is enough. It's time to get out of there.
Aguilar: What are your plans from here?
Fire Thunder: I'll continue pushing the envelope and exerting our sovereignty.
A long time ago, we had medicines that were available to terminate a pregnancy. Women like my grandmother were medicine women, and they had it in their possession. So you look at every culture in the world, and there were ways we took care of ourselves. You didn't have people passing laws to control a woman's body.
As a woman, it's my job to support women. It's my job to support my sisters.
Rose Aguilar is a San Francisco-based journalist who recently returned from a six-month road trip through the so-called "red states." She is writing a book about her journey.
second article:
July 10, 2006
Pine Ridge Leader Faces Battle Over Abortion Ban
By Kara Briggs - WeNews correspondent
PINE RIDGE, S.D. (WOMENSENEWS)-- Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman elected president of the Oglala Sioux Nation, faces impeachment Thursday because of her plan to open an abortion clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota.
A year and a half ago, Fire Thunder, a 59-year-old nurse, swept into office, beating famed American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, whose arguments against her included that she is a woman.
Last spring as South Dakota's Governor Mike Rounds signed into law the most sweeping abortion ban in the nation, which permitted abortion only to save the life of a woman. Only last week pro-choice advocates learned they'd collected enough signatures to put the ban on the November ballot, thus halting a July 1 start date.
"I got really angry about a bunch of white guys making decisions about my body," Fire Thunder said in an interview last week with Women's eNews.
Yet in the days when the ban seemed imminent, Fire Thunder told a newspaper columnist of her plan to open a clinic on the reservation, which operates under U.S. federal law rather than state law.
The news spread like wild fire over the Internet -- those journalists who couldn't reach Fire Thunder relied on other reports and even bloggers for information -- about the president who vowed to open an abortion clinic. Little attention was paid to the tribal government, which had grave doubts about Fire Thunder's pro-choice efforts.
Fire Thunder said that a group of Oglala women had been talking for some time about opening a reproductive health clinic where abortion and other health services could be available locally.
From Pine Ridge, it's a 300-mile drive across South Dakota to Sioux Falls and the nearest abortion clinic. After the ban became law, Fire Thunder realized that the clinic could operate independently of South Dakota laws on the reservation and serve all women.
Yet she didn't anticipate the strength of the anti-abortion sentiment on the reservation. Members of Reservation churches marched against her; others called for her ouster and for an abortion ban as strict as the state's.
"She put her presidency in jeopardy because she is so committed to helping Native American women," said Charon Asetoyer, director of the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center, a nonprofit organization located on Yankton Sioux Reservation.
Raucous Tribal Politics
In the raucous world of Oglala Sioux politics it's not unusual for tribal councils to reprimand presidents, who seem to diverge too far from the council's interests, with suspension and impeachment.
Still Fire Thunder's year and a half in office has been one for the record books. She's been suspended three times and threatened with impeachment twice. Even her critics say the earlier attacks on her presidency were aimed at management problems that predated Fire Thunder's administration.
The underlying fact of life in Shannon County, which is dominated by the Pine Ridge Reservation, is economic poverty. The county is consistently ranked each decade by the U.S. Census as the poorest in the nation, while the reservation endures 85 percent unemployment.
"You can't control poverty," Fire Thunder said, "until you can control population."
Legal abortion, Fire Thunder said, is particularly important for Native American women, who lack access to birth control, who tend to live in poverty and who face epidemic sexual violence.
Native American women are raped three times more often than women of all other races in the United States, according to 1999 U.S. Department of Justice data.
Abortion, Fire Thunder said, is part of the aboriginal right of tribal women throughout North America. Until the advent of missionaries and their boarding schools a century ago, the knowledge of terminating pregnancies, both physically and spiritually, was passed down through women's societies.
"You would talk to that spirit," Fire Thunder said of the fetus. "You would say, 'I can't take care of you right now. Please, go back.'"
Smoke Screen Charges
Will Peters, an Oglala councilmember who is one of Fire Thunder's most vocal critics, said she wasn't talking about poverty and violence against women when she started advocating for abortion. He calls her use of these topics a "smoke screen" to cover up her stand.
"If this was her original intention it should have been brought with all its intensity to the table, instead of now trying to lay a guilt trip on everyone for not dealing with it," Peters said in a telephone interview last week.
The council, grown weary of Fire Thunder's pro-choice stands in the media, grew angry as mail flooded the tribal offices and the story continued to circulate on the Internet.
Mail flooded the tribal office, said Emma Featherman-Sam, who works in the tribe's transportation office.
The council accused Fire Thunder of soliciting money for an abortion clinic without getting their permission. Fire Thunder countered that the clinic was always intended to be privately run, not a tribal enterprise.
Featherman-Sam, who is a board member for the Sacred Choices Wellness Center -- the name of the proposed clinic incorporated earlier this month -- doesn't know how much money was received. But she said it will take a large-scale campaign to raise the dollars necessary to build on the rural reservation.
By May 25 the rumblings about Fire Thunder's stand against the ban came to a head. Two hundred tribal members filed into the council meeting to call for Fire Thunder's ouster. A reservation newspaper captured the mood with a headline: "Wilma Mankiller, Cecelia Babykiller."
Fire Thunder was absent, she said, because of a medical appointment.
Council Passes a New Ban
The council proceeded without her. First an abortion ban -- clearly aimed at the Sacred Choices center -- was unanimously passed. It contains a provision to banish from the reservation anyone who considers getting an abortion or helps someone else obtain one.
Then the council turned to Fire Thunder. In a 14-to-1 vote, the council of 18, mostly men, suspended her, pending an impeachment hearing.
Peters, as reported by the newspaper Indian Country Today, thanked those who may have been conceived as a result of rape for attending the meeting. Later, in an interview for Women's eNews, he called for a forum where tribal members could discuss the merits of abortion.
But Asetoyer said such a public debate is in complete opposition to the traditional practice of tribal women.
"These matters are not up for scrutiny by our male counterparts," she said. "This is a discussion for women to have in privacy of other women. Whoever calls for public debates has been totally converted to a colonial way of thinking."
At Pine Ridge, South Dakota's abortion ban is background noise to the urgent debate about Fire Thunder's impeachment hearing on Thursday. The Sacred Choices center is inching forward, but it could take months or years to open, and then may be hamstrung by the tribe's ban.
Fire Thunder is taking the long view. The important thing now, she said, is that tribal families are talking about the issues. And women are delving more deeply than they have since missionaries filled the reservation with tidy, little churches into their tribe's reproductive health knowledge.
"We're in the middle a quiet revolution in Pine Ridge," Fire Thunder said. "And it's awful painful."
Kara Briggs is senior fellow of American Indian Policy and Media Initiative at Buffalo State College in New York. She lives in Portland, Ore.
Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at [email protected] .
For more information:
South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families: - http://www.sdhealthyfamilies.org/
anyone have any info on how this turned out?
The Power of Thunder
By Rose Aguilar, AlterNet. Posted April 4, 2006.
Cecelia Fire Thunder, president of the South Dakota Ogala Sioux, takes on the state's repressive new abortion ban.
Just two weeks after South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds signed the state's extreme abortion ban with no exceptions for rape and incest, Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman president of the Oglala Sioux tribe, made national headlines after saying she would personally set up a clinic on her tribe's land in South Dakota to preserve a woman's right to choose. There is currently only one clinic in the entire state of South Dakota that provides abortions, and its status, since the ban, is endangered.
President Fire Thunder's decision to take the lead on this issue is nothing short of remarkable considering the number of challenges on the reservation. Almost half of all Native American women in South Dakota are poor, compared with approximately 10 percent of white women, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research report on the Status of Women in South Dakota. Median annual earnings for women in South Dakota rank last in the nation. Furthermore, the unemployment rate on the reservation is 85 percent and the life expectancy rate is 46 for men and 55 for women.
But President Fire Thunder is a determined woman. Besides announcing plans for the clinic, she has continued to focus on the need to address rape as an issue for South Dakota women, particularly Native American women. One in six American women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. The average annual rate of rape and sexual assault among American Indians is three and a half times higher than the national average.
Fire Thunder is one of the co-chairs of a new coalition called the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families. The group just announced a grassroots plan to contest the abortion ban on the November ballot. They have until June 19 to collect 16,728 signatures.
AlterNet's Rose Aguilar spoke with President Fire Thunder about the clinic, abortion ban and challenges facing women who live in rural areas.
Rose Aguilar: Tell me about the clinic you're planning to build.
Cecelia Fire Thunder: The proposed clinic would be for all women because right now, if a woman needs an abortion, she needs to go all the way to Sioux Falls. This clinic would go beyond abortion and contraception. We're missing out on teaching our boys and men about what they need to do to avoid pregnancies.
Rose Aguilar: I called the governor's office to find out what the penalty would be for women who have abortions if the law goes into effect, but haven't received a call back. If the law is upheld, will women be able to have legal abortions on your reservation?
Fire Thunder: We don't know. We have five Indian lawyers working on this right now. When we go face to face with the South Dakota lawmakers, we'll be ready.
Aguilar: You've made it a point to talk about rape in your interviews. While the abortion ban has received widespread attention, there's been little talk about how this law would force a girl who'd been raped by a male relative to have his baby.
Fire Thunder: We need to start talking about those issues. Americans should be outraged about the number of women who are raped in this country. We need to also speak out for women in places like Afghanistan and other war-torn areas where rape is happening. This is not new. Rape has always been a part of life. Unfortunately, the world is not always a safe place for women.
Ultimately, this is a much bigger issue than just abortion. The women of America should be outraged that policies and decisions about their bodies are being made by male politicians and clergy. It's time for women to reclaim their bodies.
Women in America have something that women in other parts of the world don't have. Women in this country don't appreciate their right to free speech. Women in America can be the voice of women around the world. This is a call to arms by women in the United States.
Aguilar: And not only are the anti-choicers going after abortion, they're also going after birth control.
Fire Thunder: Women should have access to contraception. No questions asked. Contraception is a solution. Why don't they (politicians) get it?
Aguilar: Do the women on the reservation have access to contraception?
Fire Thunder: We have Indian clinics on the reservation, so birth control is available, but it's not enough. We're going to go ahead with the clinic no matter what. If nothing else, we need to establish a place where women feel comfortable.
Aguilar: How will you fund it?
Fire Thunder: I'm not concerned about that. We'll get a lot of support. If it's meant to be, it'll happen. We pray a lot. We trust that there will be people who support it.
Aguilar: How do these laws directly impact the poor women on the reservation?
Women of color and poor women have always known that regardless of what happens, women with money will have access to abortion. Women with money will have access to contraception. No matter which way you cut it, it's always on the backs of poor women.
An elder on my reservation said, "So they don't want you to have contraception or abortions after rape? Are they going to step up and take care of that baby?"
Aguilar: Do you think the pro-choice movement does enough to reach out to poor women?
Fire Thunder: Yes and no. For the most part, we have to empower ourselves. We're becoming much more politically astute, and we're getting a lot more young people involved. We love to get people riled up.
Aguilar: Tell me about your reservation and the realities women living in rural areas face in this political climate.
Fire Thunder: My reservation is 50 miles by 100 miles long. It's a large rural community of 40,000 people and 60 percent of our people speak our language. Half of our population is under 18.
In a perfect world, if a woman is raped, she will call the police, and the police will take her to the emergency room. The emergency room will have components in place to help this woman, including the morning-after pill to prevent the pregnancy. In rural America, that doesn't happen. Many places in rural America do not know about the morning-after pill.
On the reservation, we have to take a look at the high rates of alcohol and drug use. More often than not, young women who've been raped while under the influence will be blamed for being drunk. If someone is raped, especially out in the rural community, they may not report it. After three days, they've passed the cut-off point for taking the morning-after pill.
How many babies are conceived during the act of violence? We don't know.
Aguilar: Tell me about your background.
Fire Thunder: I was born and raised on the reservation. Then I went to Los Angeles on a relocation program from 1963 to 1976. The program was the Eisenhower administration's solution to the "Indian problem." What they wanted to do was put us in cities and hope we would disappear. During the '70s, Los Angeles had the largest Indian population in the U.S.
I eventually became a nurse and was able to provide for my two children. I returned to the reservation in 1987 and eventually worked for the state health department.
Aguilar: And eventually became the first woman president of your tribe.
Fire Thunder: Yes, it says a lot about my tribe. My job is to look after 2.7 million acres of land. My job is to take care of the water. My responsibilities are not only about the two-legged, but the four-legged. I have to make sure we have an infrastructure in place, that our educational systems are working, that we have healthcare and that our people have enough food to eat.
Right in my own backyard, I have great possibilities. We're very patriotic on my reservation, however, it's time to get out of Iraq. We need to let people make their own decisions about their future. As a woman and a mother, I personally don't want any more women to cry.
Aguilar: Are many men from the reservation in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Fire Thunder: You bet. We have hundreds of guys over there, and they volunteer to go. We just had a big funeral here last month. It was our first casualty.
Aguilar: How old was he?
Fire Thunder: He was 22. So many of our resources have been taken away from us to support that war. There's a huge groundswell of Americans that say enough is enough. It's time to get out of there.
Aguilar: What are your plans from here?
Fire Thunder: I'll continue pushing the envelope and exerting our sovereignty.
A long time ago, we had medicines that were available to terminate a pregnancy. Women like my grandmother were medicine women, and they had it in their possession. So you look at every culture in the world, and there were ways we took care of ourselves. You didn't have people passing laws to control a woman's body.
As a woman, it's my job to support women. It's my job to support my sisters.
Rose Aguilar is a San Francisco-based journalist who recently returned from a six-month road trip through the so-called "red states." She is writing a book about her journey.
second article:
July 10, 2006
Pine Ridge Leader Faces Battle Over Abortion Ban
By Kara Briggs - WeNews correspondent
PINE RIDGE, S.D. (WOMENSENEWS)-- Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman elected president of the Oglala Sioux Nation, faces impeachment Thursday because of her plan to open an abortion clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota.
A year and a half ago, Fire Thunder, a 59-year-old nurse, swept into office, beating famed American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, whose arguments against her included that she is a woman.
Last spring as South Dakota's Governor Mike Rounds signed into law the most sweeping abortion ban in the nation, which permitted abortion only to save the life of a woman. Only last week pro-choice advocates learned they'd collected enough signatures to put the ban on the November ballot, thus halting a July 1 start date.
"I got really angry about a bunch of white guys making decisions about my body," Fire Thunder said in an interview last week with Women's eNews.
Yet in the days when the ban seemed imminent, Fire Thunder told a newspaper columnist of her plan to open a clinic on the reservation, which operates under U.S. federal law rather than state law.
The news spread like wild fire over the Internet -- those journalists who couldn't reach Fire Thunder relied on other reports and even bloggers for information -- about the president who vowed to open an abortion clinic. Little attention was paid to the tribal government, which had grave doubts about Fire Thunder's pro-choice efforts.
Fire Thunder said that a group of Oglala women had been talking for some time about opening a reproductive health clinic where abortion and other health services could be available locally.
From Pine Ridge, it's a 300-mile drive across South Dakota to Sioux Falls and the nearest abortion clinic. After the ban became law, Fire Thunder realized that the clinic could operate independently of South Dakota laws on the reservation and serve all women.
Yet she didn't anticipate the strength of the anti-abortion sentiment on the reservation. Members of Reservation churches marched against her; others called for her ouster and for an abortion ban as strict as the state's.
"She put her presidency in jeopardy because she is so committed to helping Native American women," said Charon Asetoyer, director of the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center, a nonprofit organization located on Yankton Sioux Reservation.
Raucous Tribal Politics
In the raucous world of Oglala Sioux politics it's not unusual for tribal councils to reprimand presidents, who seem to diverge too far from the council's interests, with suspension and impeachment.
Still Fire Thunder's year and a half in office has been one for the record books. She's been suspended three times and threatened with impeachment twice. Even her critics say the earlier attacks on her presidency were aimed at management problems that predated Fire Thunder's administration.
The underlying fact of life in Shannon County, which is dominated by the Pine Ridge Reservation, is economic poverty. The county is consistently ranked each decade by the U.S. Census as the poorest in the nation, while the reservation endures 85 percent unemployment.
"You can't control poverty," Fire Thunder said, "until you can control population."
Legal abortion, Fire Thunder said, is particularly important for Native American women, who lack access to birth control, who tend to live in poverty and who face epidemic sexual violence.
Native American women are raped three times more often than women of all other races in the United States, according to 1999 U.S. Department of Justice data.
Abortion, Fire Thunder said, is part of the aboriginal right of tribal women throughout North America. Until the advent of missionaries and their boarding schools a century ago, the knowledge of terminating pregnancies, both physically and spiritually, was passed down through women's societies.
"You would talk to that spirit," Fire Thunder said of the fetus. "You would say, 'I can't take care of you right now. Please, go back.'"
Smoke Screen Charges
Will Peters, an Oglala councilmember who is one of Fire Thunder's most vocal critics, said she wasn't talking about poverty and violence against women when she started advocating for abortion. He calls her use of these topics a "smoke screen" to cover up her stand.
"If this was her original intention it should have been brought with all its intensity to the table, instead of now trying to lay a guilt trip on everyone for not dealing with it," Peters said in a telephone interview last week.
The council, grown weary of Fire Thunder's pro-choice stands in the media, grew angry as mail flooded the tribal offices and the story continued to circulate on the Internet.
Mail flooded the tribal office, said Emma Featherman-Sam, who works in the tribe's transportation office.
The council accused Fire Thunder of soliciting money for an abortion clinic without getting their permission. Fire Thunder countered that the clinic was always intended to be privately run, not a tribal enterprise.
Featherman-Sam, who is a board member for the Sacred Choices Wellness Center -- the name of the proposed clinic incorporated earlier this month -- doesn't know how much money was received. But she said it will take a large-scale campaign to raise the dollars necessary to build on the rural reservation.
By May 25 the rumblings about Fire Thunder's stand against the ban came to a head. Two hundred tribal members filed into the council meeting to call for Fire Thunder's ouster. A reservation newspaper captured the mood with a headline: "Wilma Mankiller, Cecelia Babykiller."
Fire Thunder was absent, she said, because of a medical appointment.
Council Passes a New Ban
The council proceeded without her. First an abortion ban -- clearly aimed at the Sacred Choices center -- was unanimously passed. It contains a provision to banish from the reservation anyone who considers getting an abortion or helps someone else obtain one.
Then the council turned to Fire Thunder. In a 14-to-1 vote, the council of 18, mostly men, suspended her, pending an impeachment hearing.
Peters, as reported by the newspaper Indian Country Today, thanked those who may have been conceived as a result of rape for attending the meeting. Later, in an interview for Women's eNews, he called for a forum where tribal members could discuss the merits of abortion.
But Asetoyer said such a public debate is in complete opposition to the traditional practice of tribal women.
"These matters are not up for scrutiny by our male counterparts," she said. "This is a discussion for women to have in privacy of other women. Whoever calls for public debates has been totally converted to a colonial way of thinking."
At Pine Ridge, South Dakota's abortion ban is background noise to the urgent debate about Fire Thunder's impeachment hearing on Thursday. The Sacred Choices center is inching forward, but it could take months or years to open, and then may be hamstrung by the tribe's ban.
Fire Thunder is taking the long view. The important thing now, she said, is that tribal families are talking about the issues. And women are delving more deeply than they have since missionaries filled the reservation with tidy, little churches into their tribe's reproductive health knowledge.
"We're in the middle a quiet revolution in Pine Ridge," Fire Thunder said. "And it's awful painful."
Kara Briggs is senior fellow of American Indian Policy and Media Initiative at Buffalo State College in New York. She lives in Portland, Ore.
Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at [email protected] .
For more information:
South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families: - http://www.sdhealthyfamilies.org/
anyone have any info on how this turned out?