Charon Asetoyer

Biography

Asetoyer was born in San Jose, California on March 24, 1951. She helped her father at her printing company and at age 16, started a dress-design company, called Charon of California. In high school, she led a successful sit-in to encourage the school, which had no cafeteria, to find a way to serve lunch to students. Asetoyer later dropped out of school and from 1968 to 1971, she ran a boutique in San Francisco until she decided to attend San Francisco City College. In 1972, she married Dennis Duncan and dropped out of college, and eventually worked at the Urban Indian Health Clinic as a Nutritional Counselor and WIC program specialist. Her marriage was abusive, and in order to escape, she moved to South Dakota in 1979. She went back to school and received a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice from the University of South Dakota in 1981. Asetoyer started using her mother's name, Asetoyer, after her divorce.

She met and married Clarence Rockboy, a Yankton Sioux tribe elder in the early 1980s. They moved to Brattleboro, Vermont and her son, Charles, was born there in 1982, and the couple adopted Rockboy's nephew, Reynolds James Bruguier. She also earned a double master's degree in 1983 from the School for International Training. When Rockboy's father died in 1982, they moved to the Yankton Sioux Reservation and stayed there.

In 1982, Asetoyer's best friend was "beaten to death by her drunken husband," and Asetoyer became to advocate for Native women's rights and justice more actively. She briefly worked as a director for Women of All Red Nations (WARN), but wasn't happy with the administration of the organization's program, so she left. She and her husband created the Native American Community Board (NACB) in 1985 and first established the organization in the basement of their house. NACB worked with the issues of whoever stopped by to ask for help. One of the first issues NACB worked on was dealing with fetal alcohol syndrome. They also had Native women seeking shelter from domestic violence at NACB. Asetoyer was inspired to create a facility for women's health after a visit to the National Black Women's Health Project in Atlanta Georgia. NACB was able to purchase a house in 1988 and they established the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC). Asetoyer became the executive director.

During the 90s, she was an AIDS outreach worker on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In 1997, Asetoyer was on the Indigenous Women's Network board of directors.

Asetoyer was the facilitator of a working group at the United Nations in 2001, where she worked with the Current Status of Health of the World's Indigenous Peoples. She also earned the Jessie Bernard Wise Women’s Award from the Center for Women's Studies in 2001. In 2002, she was awarded the Bread and Roses Award from the National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit for her work on environmental justice for Native communities.

In 2006, when South Dakota approved the United States' most restrictive abortion ban, Asetoyer announced she would run for State Senate. Her platform, pro-choice and stressing women's reproductive rights, had the effect of opening up dialogue about the issue that year.

In December 2006, Rockboy died. In 2016, she was diagnosed with cancer, but because of Indian Health Services (IHS) bureaucracy, waited two months to get surgery that was meant to be done immediately. The cancer moved from stage 1 to stage 2 during that time.

Publications

Asetoyer has edited books and informational pamphlets relating to Native American women's health. A chapter of Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (2001) was written by Asetoyer and titled "From the Ground Up." She edited the indigenous Women's Health Book, Within the Sacred Circle: Reproductive Rights, Environmental Health, Traditional Herbs and Remedies (2003), which is the first reproductive health book for Indigenous women. The book was considered by NWSA Journal to be an excellent overview which "provides understanding of unique cultural contexts among what remains a hidden minority." She was a contributing editor for the manual, What to Do When You're Raped, published by NAWHERC in 2016.