There is in urban America a prevalent belief that violence against women is done more systematically elsewhere, or more frequent among racial/ethnic minorities. It is considered acceptable public discourse to label the treatment of women in the Middle East or South Asia as barbaric in light of honor killings. However, there may be more similarities between cultures than it at first appears. In the US, domestic slayings of women are not uncommon.
American Indians are often perceived through a lens of sentimentality dating back to the Romantic Era and, alternately, a fear-based lens of dehumanization going back to the Puritans and even before. Misconceptions abound about differences between dominant culture and those cultures found in Indian Country, especially in terms of gender dynamics including domestic abuse.
In recent times, progressive allies and Indians both have become apt to stress the egalitarian aspects found in American Indian societies. While there is much truth to the examples given, it is an incomplete picture due to the fact that there is such wide divergence among the 500 sovereign Indian nations in the United States. Only the American Indians of North, South and Caribbean America, along with sub-Saharan Africans, can be commonly generalized as having one distinct identity. One would not homogenize the Germans and the French. In that vein, some American Indian societies traditionally were and still are matriarchal but others were patriarchal. In addition, some tribes are matrilocal historically (residing with the mother's family) vs. other tribes, patrilocal in nature.
The distribution and use of power within culture portends significantly for the likelihood of family violence. In Natalie Sokoloff's Domestic Violence at the Margins, an anthology of readings on gender violence, there is a rich and fascinating chapter on American Indians written by Sherry Hamby. Hamby denotes the markers where domestic violence among Indians is absent or minimal:
Levinson's (1989) ground-breaking crosscultural work is still the main source of quantified information in this area. His results indicate that patterns of dominance between husbands and wives can help explain both high and low levels of domestic violence. He reviewed the ethnographic records of ninety societies worldwide. Of these, seventeen were native communities in North America. Of those seventeen, three were found to have no or minimal levsl of family violence: Iroquois, Fox, and Papago (also known as Tohono O'Odham). The orthers, such as the Arapaho, showed evidence of domestic violence at least back to the nineteenth century. Societies that lacked family violence were generally characterized by shared decision making, wives' control of some family resources, equally easy divorce access for husbands and wives, no premarital sex double standard, monogamous marriage, marital cohabitation, peaceful conflict resolution within and outside the home, and immediate social responses to domestic violence. Some of these, such as shared decision making, clearly represent authority aspects of dominance, whereas others, such as divorce access and lack of sexual double standard, indicate that societies that do not restrict or disparage women tend to be less violent. In general, his findings support the feminist conclusion that higher levels of male dominance are associated with high rates of domestic violence. Levinson's work is also consistent with the proposition that variation among native communities exists and can be partly attributed to differences in dominance dynamics.
Generalizations become exceeding tenuous across our many Indian nations. It would be best to understand the "matriarchal" Iroquois society "as one with complementary gender roles, matrilineal descent, and matrilocal residence." While Iroquois women had strong authority in their respective spheres of labor and decision-making, they could only influence but not vote on war, a domain that fell unto men.
On the other hand, Hamby notes that gender roles were sometimes more flexible for women than men. Among the Ojibwe and Apache "some women became healers and warriors, but it was not generally accepted for men to take on women's roles."
Some Indian societies commonly featured domestic violence, especially in cases of female infidelity. At the extreme end, researchers documented female mutilation as as an form of punishment among some Western tribes.
American Indians are often idealistically held up as examples of egalitarian or matriarchal societies (for example, Guemple, 1995; Gunn Allen, 1990). The implication of these portrayals is that violence was not part of male-female relations in matriarchal societies.
That accounted for, it is very much true that white dominance through colonization and assimilation altered and even disrupted gender dynamics in Indian Country. The Seneca, an Iroquois people, are listed as having been influenced by Quaker missionaries to abandon matrilineal structure, establish a patrilineal one, and substitute the nuclear family for a clan system. Historical markers such as shared decision making, mutually easy access for divorce, and social impact from behavior were affected by the westernization of Indian peoples, from the Dawes Act and the effort to turn land into paternally-owned and exchanged parcels, to the religious and educational institutions.
We find today that American Indian women, with high incidence of domestic violence, rape, and other gender violence forms, have diverse historical backgrounds, went through differing conquest and assimilation processes (often nationally directed, and at least sharing great similarities, too) and endure multiple kinds of inequality, especially gender and racial/ethnic but not limited to these.
In the past, we as kossacks have supported Pretty Bird Woman House, which helps the Standing Rock Reservation's women find shelter from abuse.
UPDATE: From a comment by our elder, cacamp:
It's so very hard to differenciate how our societies functioned before and after invasion and conquest. Everything changes when 90% of a population is lost to disease aand war. Since one common denominator was a belief in the sacredness of the circle most of our societies were formed in that way (as a reflection of a circle). So it's hard to classify them as being matriarchal or patriarchal in that a circle has no up or down.