Amid an extended, international discussion of and female confession, it has occurred to me that sometimes it can be difficult for women to understand one another’s pain. We are often told that experiences of oppression are actually the result of the supposedly overwrought emotional set point of womanhood, a pressure that compels us to keep our stories to ourselves — or, in the worst of cases, to look upon each other’s stories with excessive scrutiny, behavior prescribed by the poison of internalized misogyny.

Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society.

I spoke to a young girl today, who was gang raped by TMC workers. She says she was targeted because she was a Hindu woman and because she worked for BJP. She is still being hounded and threatened to take her complaint back... After a 1.5 hour conversation with her, I was left numb and nauseous. There are several like her who aren’t speaking up. Brutalised by TMC workers. She is a brave girl because she says she won’t take her complaint back even if it means death for her...

And once they see these videos, that's when they see the pain that these girls undergo, and that's when they say: 'I will not allow my daughter, or I will not allow my sister to undergo the same

in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. And what’s her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she’s disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, her beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!

American Indian women struggle on every front for the survival of our children, our people, our self-respect, our value systems, and our way of life. The past five hundred years testify to our skill at waging this struggle: for all the varied weapons of extinction pointed at our heads, we endure. We survive war and conquest; we survive colonization, acculturation, assimilation; we survive beating, rape, starvation, mutilation, sterilization, abandonment, neglect, death of our children, our loved ones, destruction of our land, our homes, our past, and our future. We survive, and we do more than just survive. We bond, we care, we fight, we teach, we nurse, we bear, we feed, we earn, we laugh, we love, we hang in there, no matter what.

When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain.

Pain is a part of growing-up. It is how we learn..

Pain is a part of growing-up. It is how we learn

Girls who survive trauma do wear a certain vulnerability around them, but this kind of vulnerability is from where their greatest strength stems.

It's hard being a girl with nothing to thrust.

They’re denying a lot of the pain that women and girls are going through, and just calling it Western influence.

In my profession I have learned that women can bear more pain than men.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.