ABSTRACT
While Native American women are a small percentage of the overall United States population (according to the United States Census Bureau, 5.1 million people, or 1.6 percent of the total United States population, are Native American alone or in combination with one or more other races, and women are roughly half of that), they are overrepresented in the justice and/or social service systems as survivors of gender-based violence, in health care systems as patients affected by poor physiological and mental well-being, and in prison systems as incarcerated women. Yet their needs, concerns, and desires are repeatedly made invisible, especially when their status as Native American women intersects with other geographic, economic, and ability statuses. When Native American women are made visible, it is often to highlight their deficiencies. This chapter provides an overview of the overrepresentation of Native American women in United States institutional systems, as well as the relationships among those systems and the relationships to the colonial histories of mainstream United States. The chapter concludes with several recommendations for moving beyond mainstream conceptions and subsequent treatment of Native American women.
