The Cherokee Nation is one of the largest tribes in the United States, with more than 390,000 tribal citizens worldwide. Although the legal obligation of America is to provide good healthcare for Indian people like Cherokee, many reports published have mentioned that in comparison to other U.S. populations, Native American communities confront severe disparity in health care and health status. And one of the concerns is the concern over severity of forced sterilization had led some Native Americans to consider them genocidal.
Unlike other groups, Native Americans are entitled to health care from the federal government, but the system is poorly run and funded. According to The Economist, Native Americans' life expectancy is 4.4 years below the American average and at the highest rates of pre-existing health conditions out of any ethnic or racial group in America. American Indian and Native women have greater rates of teenage pregnancy, late or no prenatal care, and alcohol and tobacco use during pregnancy as compared to other demographics. Preterm birth, mortality, and sudden infant death syndrome are all more common among their babies than in the general population.
At that time, in the political perspective of the government, they declared a new policy to assimilate and decrease the Indigenous populations because of the Native American genocide. As early as 1907, Congress passed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, which subsidized sterilizations for Medicaid and IHS patients- without including measures to safeguard against abuse. Therefore, Indian Hospitals were allowed "to sterilize unwilling and unwitting people." The sterilization of Native American women seriously affected their descendants and their tribes for generations. This government-forced sterilization is additionally the reason why countless miserable women have suffered from the sterilization abuse perpetrated.
How did sterilization abuse perpetrate shocking news spread out in the Cherokee community?
In November 1972, a 26-year-old Native woman visited the office of Dr.Connie Pinkerton-Uri in Cherokee, Choctaw, and asked for a "womb transplant" because she and her husband wanted to start a family. Shocked by request, Doctor Uri said that she knew women at the age of twenty do not undergo complete hysterectomies unless diagnosed with cancer, have uncontrolled bleeding, or as an elective procedure. Pinkerton-Uri discovered that six years prior to the visit, the Native woman was given a full hysterectomy by an Indian Health Service (IHS) doctor because she had a drinking problem. The IHS physician had lied to the woman by telling her the procedure could be reversed when she wanted to have children. Pinkerton-Uri had to inform the young woman that a complete hysterectomy could not be reversed. Doctor Uri states that it is difficult to find statistical figures on the rate of sterilization because many Native Americans depend on staying hidden for survival, but claims through her studies that twenty-five percent of Native American women are sterilized. It took her one week to find twenty-six women who were sterilized. She found this to be alarming because, at the time, there were only 23,000 people in Cherokee total. Later, Pinkerton-Uri opened thousands of similar cases of complete hysterectomies. She also found out that Indian Health Service (IHS) had "singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures." She said at least 3406 American Indian women were sterilized without their permission during the 1970s. Following pressure from Doctor Uri, Cherokee activists found the report's numbers too low, claiming that investigators failed to identify the extent of coercion underlying these surgeries. Native American women, like Cherokee women, were one of the most targeted populations for forced sterilizations in the twentieth century, especially in the state of North Carolina. North Carolina was among one of the first states to enact a voluntary sterilization law in 1960 and one of the most active state sterilization programs. Native women reported fearing the relocation of their children if they refused to cooperate with tubal ligation, among other concerns.
Forced and coerced sterilization has affected Indigenous populations; it is hard for them to change the future. How does the Cherokee Nation continuously grow today?
Cherokee Jimmie Durham and many other Indian leaders fought battles on multiple fronts to resist suspected federal efforts to diminish the Indian population. Their most significant achievement came in 1977 when Jimmie Durham achieved NGO status for IITC. Their goal was to gain international attention and status for Native nations. They were the first Indigenous entity in the world to acquire such status. Nowadays, the Eastern Cherokee community runs an expanding experiment in decentralization. Specifically, profits from the tribe's casino have helped the 12000 members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian's opt out of the troubled U.S. government-run Indian Health service. Because twenty percent of federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma, California, and Arizona have been approved to take complete management of their healthcare, this experiment has a reasonable chance of succeeding. For the North Carolina Cherokee, self-governance will deliver care that not only improves patients' health but also is tailor-made for the tribes' needs. An Indigenous woman who has a mental collapse after the forced sterilization said the hospital is a medical home for Indigenous people.
Aboriginal people in Australia also had a long history of sterilized women. In 2003, a Pine Creek man required a full investigation to claim. Aboriginal women in Arnhem Land were being sterilized without their consent. The tribe that lives in Arnhem Land is the Yolngu people, who have occupied the region for at least 60,000 years. Lance Lawrence said a sterilized woman had contacted him to let him know that Indigenous women were still being sterilized without understanding the procedure. "She's still in communication with her community, and I guess because of the numbers of people she knows that it's been done to, and their lack of understanding of the procedure, and their lack of English and so on, their concern is that they had no way of bringing this to anybody's attention and getting something done about it," he said.
In Canada, the International Justice Resource Center (IJRC) says that forced sterilization is currently classified as a sexual battery in the civil domain and sexual assault in the criminal arena. Although the full scale of the problem is unknown because there has been no comprehensive investigation and a lack of publicly available data, many Indigenous women were still subjected to forced sterilization in public hospitals in 2019. Brenda Pelletier has received an apology from the Saskatoon Health Region after she went public with her story about being persuaded to submit to tubal ligation surgery. The International Justice Resource Center (IJRC) has aided Indigenous rights lawyers in their investigations into Indigenous women's forced sterilization in Canada and in obtaining reparation for victims. As a result of their duty to manage the public healthcare system, the Canadian government recognized their role in forced sterilizations of Indigenous women and committed to releasing the material it has.
The United States, Australian, and Canadian governments forced sterilization on the Indigenous people. As a student studying Aboriginal Issues, what sort of thoughts and feelings come to mind when you read till the end of this blog?
I think Indigenous people are vulnerable populations, so forcing them into government policies is unjust from the humanity and ethical point of view. The sterilization of Native women in the 1970s was horrible and deplorable, and its traumatic legacy will be everlasting. And much like the violence perpetrated against Native women, we will never forget this dark history of genocide. As a student, I know about the history of colonialism and why we have people who are vulnerable, living in poverty, in such dire circumstances, and to share my compassion with them.
Reference
International Justice Resource Center. (2019, October 16). Forced Sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada. International Justice Resource Center. https://ijrcenter.org/forced-sterilization-of-indigenous-women-in-canada/.
Khandaker, T. (n.d.). This Woman Says a Hospital in Canada Pushed Her to Undergo Sterilization. VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/9kj3vp/this-woman-says-a-hospital-in-canada-pushed-her-to-undergo-sterilization.
Cherokee. (2015, March 23). BELIEFS, CULTURE AND CUSTOMS. CHEROKEE. https://cherokeehazel.wordpress.com/customsbeliefs/.
Virdi, J. (2020, January 2). The coerced sterilization of Indigenous women. New Internationalist. https://newint.org/features/2018/11/29/canadas-shame-coerced-sterilization-indigenous-women.
Katja Ridderbusch, K. H. N. (2019, July 27). How the Eastern Cherokee tribe took control of its healthcare. Modern Healthcare. https://www.modernhealthcare.com/providers/how-eastern-cherokee-tribe-took-control-its-healthcare.
The Economist. (n.d.). How do Native Americans get health care? The Economist. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/04/26/how-do-native-americans-get-health-care.
Nation Voice. (n.d.). Government admits forced sterilization of Indian Women - Timeline - Native Voices. U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/543.html.
Theobald, B. (2019, December 5). The Native American Women Who Fought Mass Sterilization. Time. https://time.com/5737080/native-american-sterilization-history/.
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