STATEMENT ON THE LEAKED DRAFT SUPREME COURT DECISION
Native Movement is grieved and outraged by governmental moves to eliminate essential human rights regarding citizen’s decision making agency over our own individual bodies.
The draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is clearly reflected in a history of relentless attacks from governmental agencies and industries on Indigenous lands, waters, and bodies from the onset of colonization. The absence of free, prior, and informed consent perpetuates many forms of violence, from Indigenous Nations to individual persons, the undermining of sovereignty and self-determination has always been and continues to be about control, abuse of power, and profit.
The draft supreme court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is a direct attack on our ability to exercise inherent human rights including body sovereignty – the right to choose what happens to our own sacred being. Accessible, safe, and affordable reproductive health care, including abortion, must be available to everyone. Eliminating safe access to abortion is as much political as it is economic, keeping people with uteruses in lower wage earning jobs and ensuring future generations remain chained to the system of economic disenfranchisement. This Supreme Court decision removes the agency and autonomy of already strained and stressed people from marginalized communities, furthering inequities in a country that does not provide universal healthcare, living wages, and paid parental leave. The impacts of the Court’s decision will continue the perpetuation of systemic racism that disproportionately funnels people of color through state agencies and the prison industrial complex.
In Alaska the news of the draft Supreme Court decision is compounded by local state proposed legislation (SB140) to ban transgender youth from school sports, furthering once again the removal of body autonomy. This bill specifically aims to regulate the bodies of K-12 girls who wish to participate in sports. Policies that seek to control, erase, and eradicate trans people are entirely inhumane and utterly cruel. Trans, two-spirit, and gender expansive individuals are valuable contributing members of our communities, they have the right to childhoods free of trauma and erasure.
Native Movement sees both the Supreme Court draft decision and the Alaska State legislature’s proposed Anti-Trans Sport bill (SB140) as acts of great violence. Additionally, in the week of National Awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (May 5) these acts are particularly heinous. These collective acts of violence further underscore the deep systemic inequities disproportionately impacting women, trans and non-binary relatives, and people of color. The crisis of MMIWG2S is the criminal result of the U.S. justice systems which control and dismember Indigenous Nations by intentionally failing to protect Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.
Native Movement believes in the power of collective organizing – people power. We reclaim agency as we seek community protection and demand our voices be heard, rising together, voting, and mobilizing to fight for justice.