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Reprise/Forced Sterilizations: Native Americans and the "Last Gasp of Eugenics"
On the phone, during long marches, occupying federal surplus property, in court fighting for treaty rights -- wherever Native activists gathered during the Red Power years of the 1970s -- conversation inevitably turned to the number of women whose tubes were tied or ovaries removed by the Indian Health Service, a department of the U.S. government. This was, as one woman joked bitterly, a "fringe benefit of living in a domestic, dependent nation."
Communication spurred by activism provoked a growing number of Native American women to piece together an understanding of what amounted to a national eugenic policy, translated into social reality by copious federal funding. They organized Women of All Red Nations (WARN) at Rapid City, S.Dak., as Native women from more than 30 nations met and decided, among other things, that "truth and communication are among our most valuable tools in the liberation of our lands, people and four-legged and winged creations."
WARN and other women's organizations publicized the sterilizations, which were performed after pro-forma consent of the women being sterilized. Explanations sometimes were not offered in the women's languages, or followed threats that the women would die or lose welfare benefits if they had more children. At least two 15-year-old girls whose ovaries were removed were originally told that they were having their tonsils out.
The enormity of information on government-funded sterilizations had been compiled by Sally Torpy, a graduate student in history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her thesis, "Endangered Species: Native American Women's Struggle for Their Reproductive Rights and Racial Identity, 1970s-1990s," which was defended during the summer of 1998, placed the sterilization campaign in the context of the eugenics movement.
No one knows, even today, exactly how many Native American women were sterilized during the 1970s. The General Accounting Office (GAO) provided one base for calculation, whose study covered only 4 of 12 Indian Health Service (IHS) regions from 1973 to 1976. Within that time frame, 3,406 Native American women were sterilized, according to the GAO.
Lehman Brightman, Lakota, who has devoted much of his life to this issue, including suffering a libel suit from doctors, provided another estimate. He estimated that 40 percent of Native American...