[News] Native Americans, government authorities, and reproductive politics

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/native-americans-government-authorities-and-the-reproductive-politics-403792/ 



  Native Americans, government authorities, and reproductive politics

October 23, 2019

In the 1970s, doctors in the United States sterilized an estimated 25 to 
42 percent of Native American women of childbearing age, some as young 
as 15.

Even the lower estimate—one quarter of Native women—is a whopping 
statistic. The sterilizations, subsidized by the federal government and 
often undertaken without consent or under great duress, marked the 
culmination of a long history of efforts by federal and local 
authorities to manage the reproductive lives of Native families, 
explains Brianna Theobald 
<http://www.sas.rochester.edu/his/people/faculty/theobald-brianna/index.html>, 
an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester 
<https://www.rochester.edu/>, in her new book, /Reproduction on the 
Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long 
Twentieth Century/ 
<https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469653167/reproduction-on-the-reservation/> 
(University of North Carolina Press).

“The federal government and local authorities have long tried to control 
indigenous families and women’s reproduction, using tactics such as 
coercive sterilization and the removal of indigenous children into the 
white foster care system,” says Theobald.

Her book traces those efforts, but also the response from Native 
Americans themselves—“widespread activism across Indian country” that 
arose as a direct consequence of federal reproductive policies.

Theobald adopts as a case study the Crow Reservation in Montana 
<http://www.crow-nsn.gov/>, telling the story of childbearing, 
motherhood, and activism there from the late 19th century to the 
present, in relation to federal policies and general trends among 
healthcare providers on reservations.

She finds that, while essentially colonial in their approach, federal 
policies regarding Native women’s reproductive decisions were carried 
out unevenly in the early 20th century, hinging largely on local 
conditions and actual enforcement on the ground.

“The implementation, or lack thereof, of reproduction-related policies 
was shaped by local conditions, the availability of resources, the whims 
of individual employees—and perhaps most significantly, Native response 
and engagement,” says Theobald.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


      *What was life like on Native reservations in the first few decades?*

**I focus mostly on reservations in the West. Conditions on these 
reservations were extremely difficult in the late 19th century. Men were 
not allowed to hunt, and government rations were inadequate. At Crow 
there was an incredible demographic loss—deaths really—a result of not 
being able to move around and not being able to do what they had done 
traditionally for sustenance. They were confined to smaller spaces, 
which led to the rapid spread of disease. All of this had an effect on 
women’s health: women of childbearing age were particularly vulnerable 
to tuberculosis. At the same time, because of this demographic decline, 
there was a tremendous urgency among Native people to reproduce. So you 
had fewer women bearing a greater reproductive burden and you can see 
the outcomes in reduced infant and maternal welfare: greater sickness 
and mortality.


      *Why is it important, as you argue, to see reservations as
      colonial spaces?*

These are spaces where the federal government has primary and ultimate 
authority. What I’m talking about here is settler colonialism—when the 
colonizer, in this case the Europeans and later Americans, come to stay. 
Their objective is to replicate the societies they left behind. For 
that, above all, they need land. And to get land, Native peoples had to 
disappear, in one way or another, for these resources to become 
available. Historically, this attempted elimination occurred in 
different ways at different times—through ethnic cleansing and forced 
removal, sometimes through massacres, and then by the 19th century 
through cultural assimilation.


      *How was cultural assimilation, in this context, a form of
      colonialism?*

**The federal government’s assimilation agenda was an attempt to 
transform Native peoples into American citizens by forcing them to 
discard all markers of “Indianness,” adopt English and Western 
practices, and convert to Christianity. A lot of that assimilation 
agenda centered on gender, family, and the home. In the late 19th 
century, federal authorities, missionaries, and social reformers deemed 
it really important for Native people to identify as nuclear family 
units, led by a male head of household. That required marginalizing the 
extended family, which was essential to Native family structures, and 
decreased women’s power within the home, within the family, and within 
her community. The federal government wasn’t entirely successful in this 
effort, but the objective was clear.


      *You argue that colonial politics have always been, and remain
      reproductive politics. How so?*

Efforts to alter and control Native women’s reproductive practices were 
integral to federal policies that at first glance might seem to have 
little to do with pregnancy or childbirth. Their reproductive 
experiences were affected by policies ranging from the allotment of 
tribal land to the relocation program following World War II. More 
generally, the federal government assumed greater control over Native 
reproduction over time.

In the 1910s, the government tried to get Native women to give birth 
with government physicians in hospitals, to move away from midwives and 
bring childbirth under the purview of the federal government instead. By 
the midcentury, when childbirth really had moved into hospitals, the 
federal government had a tremendous amount of control over where women 
gave birth, with whom they gave birth, the family planning options 
available to them, and so forth.


      *How else did federal authorities interfere in the family lives of
      Native Americans?*

**The forerunner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs <https://www.bia.gov/>, 
the Office of Indian Affairs, had all these different employees on the 
reservation. Some were supposed to teach the men to farm, field matrons 
were supposed to go into women’s homes and teach them the art of 
domesticity, there were teachers, doctors, nurses. At the Crow 
Reservation in the late 19th century, I found that the superintendent’s 
directive to all these different employees was basically to watch what 
was going on and to report back: report any pregnancies—to curb abortion 
but also to know paternity, to know if this was out of wedlock, and if 
so, to pressure a legal Christian marriage. And if a woman had had 
several births out of wedlock, to determine if punishment might be in 
order. This surveillance was concerned with women’s reproductive lives, 
but also with knowing if a woman had left her husband, which in Crow 
society would have been fine, but was very much frowned upon and 
sometimes punished by the federal authorities.


      *What precipitated the mass sterilizations in the 1970s?*

The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Family_Planning_Services_and_Population_Research_Act_of_1970> 
subsidized sterilizations for Medicaid and Indian Health Service 
patients. Many Native people received their healthcare through the IHS. 
We know that after its passage, sterilization rates on many reservations 
increased. On the Navajo Reservation, for example, they doubled between 
1972 and 1978. That doesn’t mean that all these procedures were 
performed coercively—some women saw it as their best family planning 
option, given their circumstances—but we do know that the subsidization 
of the procedure as well as the increased legitimacy of sterilization as 
a form of birth control at the time facilitated coercive use of the 
technology.


      *Native American resistance is a major theme of your book. How
      have Native women, in particular, resisted these incursions over
      time?*

Until midcentury there was tremendous resistance in some areas to the 
acceptance of government physicians. The women might tell the field 
nurse, “yes, I’ll come to the hospital” and then wouldn’t. It’s actually 
quite funny to read the documentary record. These field nurses would 
write in their reports that they were frustrated that women who were 
visibly pregnant would just lie to their faces and say, “no, I’m not”—in 
an effort to maintain reproductive self-determination, to keep 
reproduction in these gendered and generational networks where they 
believed it belonged.

In the 1930s, Susie Yellowtail, a Crow woman, took up midwifery because 
of her dissatisfaction with her own birthing experience at a government 
hospital.

Another example was the establishment of the American Indian Movement, 
or AIM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Movement>, in 1968 
in Minneapolis. This was an intertribal group that was very committed to 
rejecting the assimilationist pressures of the preceding decades—instead 
focusing on cultural revitalization and the defense of Native 
sovereignty, Native treaty rights. AIM is just one of several militant 
groups that became associated with what’s called the Red Power movement 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Power_movement>.

In the 1970s, Native activism and resistance became very visible, more 
widespread, and ultimately coordinated nationally and internationally. 
That’s when Native women really started to organize independently. They 
formed Women of All Red Nations, WARN 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_All_Red_Nations>—the group that 
especially took on these sterilization abuses. Under pressure, the U.S. 
Government Accountability Office <https://www.gao.gov/> investigated the 
issue in 1976. They released a report, which actually stopped short of 
saying that government divisions performed sterilizations coercively, 
but it did raise a number of concerns regarding the consent process. In 
the aftermath of this report, amidst Native activism, and also activism 
by African-American and Latina women, the Department of Health, 
Education, and Welfare 
<https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Health,_Education,_and_Welfare> 
adopted new regulations that offered some tangible protections for 
women, which went into effect in 1979.


      *Where are Native women today? You write that some hospitals on
      reservations have been forced to limit services or have closed due
      to chronic underfunding and staffing shortages—forcing some women
      in labor to travel an hour or two to the nearest hospital to
      deliver, which is unsafe.*

**There are at least two strands. First, there’s a movement now among 
Native women who do not want a medicalized birthing experience in any 
hospital, and who are trying to create alternatives that seem more 
culturally appropriate to them, and which they view as an enactment of 
their bodily autonomy and sovereignty. As a result we see pockets of a 
resurgence of Native midwifery, and Native doulas.

At the same time, there are other Native women who are very upset, for 
various reasons, that they can no longer give birth at a government 
hospital on the reservation.

I see these two movements as quite complementary, in terms of the 
reproductive justice agenda, in that women should have some control over 
the circumstances under which they give birth. It’s important to note 
that the Native maternal mortality rate continues to outpace that of 
white women, for a variety of reasons that are squarely rooted in the 
colonial history.

Want to hear more about this topic? Brianna Theobald spoke with WXXI 
morning host Beth Adams. 
<https://www.wxxinews.org/post/reproduction-reservation-history-forced-sterilization-native-american-women>


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