Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project

When stigma is attached to HIV, people's vulnerability to the virus is discussed in terms of individual behavioral choices, and a community with disproportionately high HIV rates is blamed for its supposed failures. The injustice that drives HIV is covered up. But when we take the stigma away and look at history, we see that homophobia shapes the epidemic among gay men to a devastating degree, and that sexism makes women vulnerable. In Native American communities, homophobia and sexism also drive the epidemic, but in ways that are deeply rooted in racism, colonialism, and genocide.

"When conducting research among Native Americans, dispossession must be considered as the underlying cause of the many existing health disparities, including those that result in HIV/AIDS," according to a 2007 research brief by John Lowe for the Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care called "The Need for Historically Grounded HIV/AIDS Prevention Research Among Native Americans." Lowe continues: "The policies enacted by the United States government that enforced the dispossession of Native American Indian lands and termination or assimilation of Native American culture have resulted in a trauma of catastrophic proportions with destructive outcomes. Aside from disease, these include disenfranchisement; extermination of tradition, language, and land rights; broken treaties; sterilization of women; placement of children in Indian boarding schools; and other strategies of colonization."

"Many of the problems of alcoholism and drug abuse now prevalent in Indian country can be traced back to the physical, emotional and sexual abuse suffered at the hands of our keepers in the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] and mission boarding schools," Lakota journalist and boarding school survivor Tim Giago wrote in the Huffington Post. Government-sponsored boarding schools have created a legacy of trauma among Native American peoples in the United States. The Boarding School Healing Project documents the abuse and demonstrates how it has led to high rates of childhood sexual abuse, family violence, violence against women, alcoholism, and drug use in Native communities. In addition to the homophobia the schools enforced in children from cultures traditionally welcoming of gay and gender-nonconforming people, most of these symptoms of trauma are the same factors that make Native communities vulnerable to HIV. A look at the brutal history of these boarding schools can teach us a lot about the ways that social injustice fuels the epidemic – and how to fight back.

The United States has twice the HIV prevalence of Mexico, so it isn't surprising that the need to cross the border for work has increased Mexican communities' vulnerability to HIV. But the reasons for HIV's increase in some places in Mexico – indigenous, rural communities far from the border – may not be so obvious. "The state of Oaxaca has the highest HIV rate in Southeastern Mexico," Oaxacan queer activist Leonardo Tlahui says. "One of the primary factors is immigration. The Mixteco people [one of Oaxaca's largest indigenous groups] have a high population of immigrants to the United States." He explains that migrating to a country with double the HIV rate makes immigrants more vulnerable to HIV, and that increased vulnerability is then shared with their home communities since most of the immigrants return home to Oaxaca.

The National Native American AIDS Prevention Center (NNAAPC) created this HIV Prevention Toolkit for Native Communities to help public health workers better serve Native communities. With this toolkit, we hope to enhance your knowledge, skills, abilities, attitudes, and behaviors as they pertain to HIV/AIDS prevention among Native peoples.