American Indian Culture and Research Journal

During the 1970s, the majority of American protest efforts focused on the feminist, civil rights, and anti-government movements. On a smaller scale, Native Americans initiated their own campaign. Network television periodically broadcast scenes of confrontation ranging from the Alcatraz Occupation in 1969 through the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973. The consistent objective was to regain treaty rights that had been violated by the United States government and private corporations. Little publicity was given to another form of Native American civil rights violations- the abuse of women’s reproductive freedom. Thousands of poor women and women of color, including Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and Chicanos, were sterilized in the 1970s, often without full knowledge of the surgical procedure performed on them or its physical and psychological ramifications. Native American women represented a unique class of victims among the larger population that faced sterilization and abuses of reproductive rights. These women were especially accessible victims due to several unique cultural and societal realities setting them apart from other minorities. Tribal dependence on the federal government through the Indian Health Service (IHS), the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) robbed them of their children and jeopardized their future as sovereign nations. Native women’s struggle to obtain control over reproductive rights has provided them with a sense of empowerment consistent with larger Native American efforts to be free of institutional control. The following two situations are examples of the human rights violations committed against Native American women. Both reflect the socioeconomic climate of the 1970s that led to the overt and massive sterilization that irreversibly changed thousands of Native American families’ lives forever.