THE AMHERST
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVII, ISSUE 24 l WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2018
Women’s Lax Overcomes Five-Goal Deficit Against Tufts See Sports, Page 9 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
DOJ Investigates Colleges for Early-Decision Practices Emma Swislow ’20 Managing News Editor
Photo courtesy of Sarah Wishloff ’19
University of Kansas professor Sarah Deer spoke in the Powerhouse on April 10 about her research, which focuses on federal Native-American law and its intersection with the rights of victims of sexual violence.
Scholar Sarah Deer Speaks on Victims’ Rights Sehee Park ’20 Staff Writer
Sarah Deer from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation gave a talk titled “Sovereignty of the Soul: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America” in the Powerhouse on April 10. The talk was cosponsored by Sexual Respect Education, the Peer Advocates of Sexual Respect, the Multicultural Resource Center, the English department, the Queer Resource Center and the Women’s and Gender Center. Deer was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2014 and is currently a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies and public affairs and administration at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on the intersection of sexual violence victims’ rights and federal Native American law. Her most recent book, “The Beginning and the End of Rape,” has won several awards including the Labriola Center’s American Indian National Book Award. Amanda Collings Vann, the associate director of health education and sexual respect, opened the event by acknowledging that the town of Amherst is located on the indigenous homeland of the Nonotuck Indians and neighbors other Native Ameri-
can nations. Vann also listed other events that will be occurring on campus in April as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Deer started her talk by speaking a few words in the Muscogee people’s language, which she said she is slowly learning. She also acknowledged the indigenous lands that Amherst stands on, saying that “their absence makes our presence possible.” Moving on, she shared some data released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2016, saying that “we have to know what the problem is before we can possibly figure out a solution.” According to the study, over 84 percent of Native women have experienced some form of violence. 56 percent of Native women have experienced sexual violence, the highest rates in the country. Another data point from the 2016 DOJ report that Deer provided was related to interracial crime. “Most violent crime in the United States is what we call intraracial, which means that if you’re a white victim, statistically, your perpetrator is more likely than not to be white, and that goes for pretty much any race in the United States,” she said. The only exception to this rule are Native Americans, who report that most of their attackers are not a member of their own race.
“So we have a crisis on our hands,” Deer said. “My goal … has been to try to figure out what we do about it because it is not acceptable.” She then talked about the concept of sovereignty because it “very much relates to why the rates are so high, and thus, the solutions have to lie here at some level.” Sovereignty, simply defined, is the concept that “a government has the power to make its own laws and to govern by them,” Deer said. In the United States, sovereignty is often taken for granted and very rarely perceived to be under attack. In contrast, “when it comes to tribal nations, sovereignty is something that has been under attack from very early on,” she said. Deer also talked about self-sovereignty, defining it as “the ability to make decisions about who comes into our body space, who is going to be allowed to touch us, who is going to be allowed to make decisions about what happens to our body.” Being under the control of the U.S. justice system has not always been the case, however: tribal nations had sovereignty for many years, and had jurisdiction over all crimes such as domestic violence, sexual assault and homicide. Because the tribal nations had “good systems,” they had “rare or
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Amherst College, along with several other colleges including Williams, Middlebury and Tufts, is being investigated by the DOJ for alleged violations of federal antitrust laws in its early-decision program. The colleges were notified on April 5 and 6 by letters from the DOJ requesting the schools to maintain records of all communications between officials at other schools regarding applicants and any communication that indicates decisions that were made about applicants. The letter sent to schools said that it would be investigating “a potential agreement between colleges relating to their early decision practices,” according to the New York Times. The department, which aims to enforce laws surrounding competitive business practices, has not yet specified exactly why the colleges are being investigated for antitrust violations. In the past, other colleges have faced similar scrutiny. The Antitrust Division investigated Ivy League universities in the 1990s for sharing information and collaborating on financial aid offers. It is still unclear how many schools were contacted in the investigation, but Dean of Admissions Katie Fretwell confirmed that Amherst has been contacted by the department and that the school is “fully cooperating with their request for information.” She refused to comment any further. According to an article in the Boston Globe, it is commonly-accepted practice for schools to share early-decision information with other colleges to make sure that students are not applying early-decision to more than one school, which breaks the rules of early-decision. In an article published in the U.S. News and World Report in 2016, Fretwell explained that Amherst and around 30 other schools typically share lists that identify the students who were admitted through the early decision program.
Professor Hannah Holleman Discusses the Dust Bowl’s Legacy Olivia Gieger ’21 Managing Arts and Living Editor In a crowded Paino Lecture Hall on April 12, Dean of Faculty Catherine Epstein introduced assistant professor of sociology Hannah Holleman as this year’s Lazarowitz Lecturer, a distinction given to a professor each spring semester. In her talk, titled “Can We Survive Climate Change? Lessons from the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Holleman led the audience through the questions and findings she encountered in writing her soon-tobe-published book. The book, “Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism” is slated for publication in November through Yale University Press. Holleman approached her study of the 1930’s Dust Bowl through a sociological and environmental lens. She framed the talk and her analysis through this outlook. The lecture followed an outline of three guiding questions: why have we seen a resurgence of interest in the Dust Bowl? What is the Dust Bowl? And, what is wrong with how we
understand it? The study of the massive drought and dust storms of the 1930’s midwest has been revived because of its similarity to environmental patterns today, Holleman said. Issues such as erosion, drought and stress on water systems are prevalent today and in the Dust Bowl. These contemporary issues, Holleman said, stem from the lack of proper preventative measures in the immediate response to the Dust Bowl. Holleman also drew parallels between the cause of the 1930’s natural disaster and the climate change-plagued world today, as both come from people’s “extreme demand and abuse of the planet.” The environmental conditions of the Dust Bowl resulted from farmers bringing agricultural practices suited for humid regions into the arid regions of Oklahoma and Texas. To describe this phenomenon of profit-driven ventures, Holleman quoted the words of historian Donald Worster, who said that westward expansion stemmed from a “capitalist ethos that brought Henry Fordism to the plains in the form of industrial agriculture and an all-out
dedication to cash.” “Fields are planted when they are meant to be laid fallow, herds are expanded when they should be culled,” Holleman said. Additionally, “this happened on the plains despite many advanced warnings that the region couldn’t handle this type of agricultural development and that the problem of soil erosion was becoming intractable.” Steps could have been taken earlier on to reduce the intensity of the Dust Bowl effect, and as scientists learn more about the state of the world today, Holleman said, humans find themselves in a similar situation; there are steps that, if taken soon, could help mitigate the future impacts of climate change. In her discussion of the driving forces behind western expansion, Holleman also analyzed the influence of imperialism and white supremacy, which she said spurred white farmers to exploit not only the land, but the Native Americans who lived on it. She described the interactions between farmers and Natives as “relations of unequal exchange.” This legacy of racism persists today, Holleman
pointed out, as Americans romanticize images of the Dust Bowl, nearly all of which depict only the stories and struggles of white people, such as Dorothea Lange, John Steinbeck or Woody Guthrie. Holleman explained that social injustice was inextricably linked with the environmental degradation she outlined. “When we talk about ecological crises … at the root, we are talking about social problems,” she said. She argued that the same holds true for the social and environmental injustices experienced today. “The projected [environmental] changes have extreme consequences, like the Dust Bowl, but also extreme are the social forces, historical developments, policies and practices that produce such massive socio-ecological crises,” she said. For Holleman, at the heart of the matter is the need to challenge the root problems of social inequality and injustice, rather than taking “shallow approaches” to address the symptoms. She said, “it’s important to understand that allowing for the accumulation for injustice makes inevitable what the environmental historian William McNeil called ‘the accumulation of catastrophe.’”