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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/native-americans-government-authorities-and-the-reproductive-politics-403792/">https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/native-americans-government-authorities-and-the-reproductive-politics-403792/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Native Americans, government
authorities, and reproductive politics</h1>
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<p><span>October 23, 2019 </span> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.sas.rochester.edu/his/people/faculty/theobald-brianna/index.html">Brianna
Theobald</a>, an assistant professor of history at
the <a href="https://www.rochester.edu/">University
of Rochester</a>, in her new book, <a
href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469653167/reproduction-on-the-reservation/"><em>Reproduction
on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and
Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century</em></a>
(University of North Carolina Press).</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Theobald adopts as a case study the <a
href="http://www.crow-nsn.gov/">Crow Reservation in
Montana</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<hr>
<h3><strong>What was life like on Native reservations in
the first few decades?</strong></h3>
<p><strong> </strong>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.</p>
<h3><strong>Why is it important, as you argue, to see
reservations as colonial spaces?</strong></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<h3><strong>How was cultural assimilation, in this
context, a form of colonialism?</strong></h3>
<p><strong> </strong>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.</p>
<h3><strong>You argue that colonial politics have always
been, and remain reproductive politics. How so?</strong></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3><strong>How else did federal authorities interfere
in the family lives of Native Americans?</strong></h3>
<p><strong> </strong>The forerunner of the <a
href="https://www.bia.gov/">Bureau of Indian Affairs</a>,
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.</p>
<h3><strong>What precipitated the mass sterilizations in
the 1970s?</strong></h3>
<p><a
href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Family_Planning_Services_and_Population_Research_Act_of_1970">The
Family Planning Services and Population Research Act
of 1970</a> 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.</p>
<h3><strong>Native American resistance is a major theme
of your book. How have Native women, in particular,
resisted these incursions over time?</strong></h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the 1930s, Susie Yellowtail, a Crow woman, took up
midwifery because of her dissatisfaction with her own
birthing experience at a government hospital.</p>
<p>Another example was the establishment of the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Movement">American
Indian Movement, or AIM</a>, 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 <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Power_movement">Red
Power movement</a>.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_All_Red_Nations">Women
of All Red Nations, WARN</a>—the group that
especially took on these sterilization abuses. Under
pressure, the <a href="https://www.gao.gov/">U.S.
Government Accountability Office</a> 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 <a
href="https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Health,_Education,_and_Welfare">Department
of Health, Education, and Welfare</a> adopted new
regulations that offered some tangible protections for
women, which went into effect in 1979.</p>
<h3><strong>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.</strong></h3>
<p><strong> </strong>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Want to hear more about this topic? <a
href="https://www.wxxinews.org/post/reproduction-reservation-history-forced-sterilization-native-american-women">Brianna
Theobald spoke with WXXI morning host Beth Adams.</a></p>
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