HELENA — A woman’s shawl, laid across a chair, told a story almost too painful for words.
Patty McGeshick, the chairperson of the Montana Native Women’s Coalition and a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribes, laid the empty shawl over the back of the chair and began a ceremony during Wednesday’s two-day conclave held at the Red Lion Colonial Hotel. The event concludes late this afternoon.
The event is a listening session that focuses on domestic abuse and sexual assault on Native American reservations.
“What this represents is all the women out there who are,” she began and then stopped as though memories would not let her continue. The silence lengthened before she could continue speaking. Her voice was shaky as she said, “living in violence and who need help.
“The ceremony that we’ve done here is to honor them,” she said.
McGeshick asked that those attending the morning session pray for these women. She said she hoped that someday people would live in a violence-free community and in the safety of their own homes.
“We are still living in a time when women and men are still being hurt, still being battered, and it’s really a shameful thing,” she said.
She called upon Native American men to answer the call for help from women in their communities, to answer it on behalf of their mothers, their grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
According to an online account of an October 2011 hearing by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 1 in 3 Native American women will be raped at least once in their lives and 3 out of 5 will be victims of an assault.
McGeshick cited the statistic on the prevalence of rape before beginning the ceremony and said, “We want people to be accountable if they commit these acts” against Native women.
Gov. Steve Bullock, who delivered opening remarks before Richard Opper, the new director of the state Department of Public Health and Human Services, said, “Whether you are a survivor, an advocate or a policymaker, the work you do every single day does not go unnoticed. Your effort, whether individual or collective, is valued — it is needed, and I hope that you will never stop fighting for what is right.
The rate at which violence occurs in Indian Country is much higher than elsewhere in the state, Bullock said.
“I stand with you and do our part to help the victims who survive, to heal, to support them, to share our strength with them and to let them know that they are not alone. Today, victims no longer have to remain silent and or feel any shame.
“The next generation, and all the generations that follow, must learn that the behaviors that lead to violating others are not something to be proud of. Our prevention efforts must be diligent,” the governor said.
Cathy Cichosz, a member of the Gros Ventre tribe who lives in Hays, which is on the Fort Belknap Reservation, is an Army veteran from some 40 years ago. She was asked to attend the conclave to carry the American flag during the opening ceremony. Native singers with drums provided the backdrop.
Waiting for the conclave to begin, she said that since those days in uniform she worked for seven years to put herself through nursing school in San Francisco then eventually returned home to take care of her ailing mother who would live to be 111.
The conclave, she said, “will make people more aware of what’s going on and hopefully how to prevent it.”
Discussing domestic and sexual violence helps bring it out in the open, she said, instead of having its victims “push it under the rug.”
“It used to be such a shame; they were ashamed to talk about it, go to anybody,” Cichosz said. “It will be more preventable this way.”
The goal of the event is explain what is happening to Native American women and children, said Elaine Topsky, an at-large member of the coalition and a member of the Chippewa Cree tribe who lives on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation.
Topsky is the program director for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program in her community, which is a federal block grant program that seeks to help move recipients into work and turn welfare into temporary assistance.
Her program works with about 150 families and affects about 1,000 people, she added.
The isolation of living in small communities on reservations means that violence may go unreported, Topsky said.
A Native woman will endure domestic violence at a higher rate before she is willing to leave the home, said Donny Ferguson, a child advocate with the Rocky Boy’s Children Exposed to Violence Project.
“It’s the way we believe, the way we’ve been conditioned,” Ferguson said. “It’s a normal way of life sometimes.”
Topsky’s efforts on behalf of her agency are to try and keep the family together until the environment becomes abusive.
“As Indian women, our families are who we are,” Topsky said.
“They’re the backbone of the family. It’s their responsibility to keep the family intact.”
Her program offers a variety of services aimed at helping families that are experiencing difficulties to make steps toward improvement. Parenting classes can be one of those steps. Making sure the family’s children are attending school each day can be another one.
Advocates appointed by tribal councils, who are called peacemakers, help to intervene using tribal values to assist families reconcile their troubles.
“That’s one of the best things we’ve ever done,” Topsky added.
McGeshick said the coalition wants to improve local, state and federal relationships so there is better communication on issues of Native women and violence.
She said that she doesn’t see Native women as being more vulnerable to violence as there are other dynamics involved in reservation life where communities are smaller. Others said that help for those involved in violence can take a while to arrive and locating other housing to get a woman out of a home where an abusive situation exists can be difficult as there is a housing shortage in some reservation communities.
All women should be treated with respect, McGeshick said, and those living in these communities should have access to the same services such as domestic abuse shelters that are available to women in more urban communities.
“I want to have all the rights for the Native women as all other women in Montana,” McGeshick said. “We want to have the same rights.”
“I don’t want to draw a line between Native and non-Native women. We’re all women,” she said.
Life on a reservation is rich in culture, rich in beliefs. People are truly tied to the land where generations of their families have lived before them, McGeshick said.
“We have to focus more on our successes rather than out problems,” she said.