He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
The Declaration of Independence
Because the German and American wings collaborated so closely, the German archives clearly traced the development of German race hygiene as it emulated the American program. More importantly, because the American and German movements functioned as a binary, their leaders bragged to one another and exchanged information constantly. Therefore I learned much about America’s record by examining Reich-era files. For instance, although the number of individuals sterilized in Vermont has eluded researchers in that state, the information is readily available in the files of Nazi organizations. Moreover, obscure Nazi medical literature reveals the Nazis’ understanding of their American partners. Probing the prodigious files of Nazi eugenics took my project to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Heidelberg University and many other repositories in Germany.
When it was finished, the journey to discover America’s eugenic history had taken me from an austere highway warehouse in Vermont, where the state’s official files are stacked right next to automotive supplies and retrieved by forklift, to the architectonic British Library, to the massive Bundesarchiv in Berlin—and every type of research environment in between. Sometimes I sat on a chair in a reading room. Sometimes I poked through boxes in a basement.
Edwin Black: War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race
Dr. Perkins drafted a new research plan for his advisory committee's approval. The Eugenics Survey would document demographic and economic trends and select representative towns in the state for a more detailed study. That the towns "in decline" selected for the study were ones inhabited by some of the "degenerate" families in the Eugenics Survey files comes as no surprise. From 1925-1928 Perkins "conducted extensive investigations on selected kinship groups in Vermont to develop ‘pedigrees of degeneracy’ among Vermont’s rural poor". Perkins released five reports during his studies of eugenics and Vermonters. Here, the term "survey" refers to a concentrated campaign of isolation, stereotyping, segregation, and sterilization. The committees of the VCCL completed their final reports in January 1931 and compiled their findings in Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future. Every chapter addressed the specific means by which the state could restore the land, culture and values to the kind of people who had colonized the state and who were most deserving of the title "Vermonter." Perkins focus fell on the 3 D's that were beginning to show up in higher numbers late in the 19th century- delinquency, dependency and mental defect. During the first three years of Perkins's project, evidence was gathered through town records, social workers, government officials, policemen, and other various informants. Significant information was gathered about families who were found to have these defects. It became clear that many were extended families and tribes.
Of all the people affected by the eugenics movement in Vermont, the people who suffered the most were the Abenaki. It was during this time period that the Abenaki were left with little choice but to go underground. The Abenaki were out in the open and the obvious targets. Many Abenaki were forced to assume other identities or hide their heritage. "It is my opinion that the "new racism" of Vermont's elite eventually permeated Abenaki society, leading to shame at being different or fear that we or our children would be "discovered" by the state of Vermont and have evil things done to them. " (The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation, pp. 147-49). The easiest route for the Abenaki to take was to fit in with the French-Canadians of Vermont. Many of the Abenaki families investigated by Perkins' social workers were institutionalized and sterilized. Eugenics measures in Vermont followed the lead of other states in providing institutions for segregation of socially or mentally handicapped persons, followed by laws permitting sexual sterilization and denial of marriage licenses to those deemed "mentally unfit" for parenthood. As progressive reformers routinely attributed social welfare problems to "feebleminded women of child bearing age," poor women, particularly unwed mothers, became the primary targets of such measures. This went on for years and was backed by the Vermont Sterilization Laws passed in 1931. There are still Abenaki women today who were sterilized by the midwives that delivered their babies. It is estimated that nearly 300 Abenaki people were sterilized.
The history of Eugenics is a sad and damaging one. What it left behind is a loss of culture and a trail of broken families. The Abenaki of Vermont were the hardest hit. Although they took personal pride in their heritage, Abenakis had been discriminated against during much of the previous two centuries and many wanted their children to grow up free from the pain of prejudice. They believed that the only way for their children to get ahead in the white man's world was to act white. They maintained traditional Indian family structures and value systems but many of the outward manifestations of Abenaki culture nearly disappeared from Vermont in the past century. To this day in Vermont, the Abenaki are suffering the effects of the Eugenics Program. When the Abenaki went into hiding, they broke their historical trail. Because the tribe has not been a continuous entity, and many show up with the ethnicity of French-Canadian, it is difficult to decipher who belongs to the tribe
From: Abenakis and Eugenics A Culture Torn Away
A young Indian woman entered Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri's Los Angeles office on a November day in 1972. The twenty-six-year-old woman asked Dr. Pinkerton-Uri for a "womb transplant" because she and her husband wished to start a family. An Indian Health Service (IHS) physician had given the woman a complete hysterectomy when she was having problems with alcoholism six years earlier. Dr. Pinkerton-Uri had to tell the young woman that there was no such thing as a "womb transplant" despite the IHS physician having told her that the surgery was reversible. The woman left Dr. Pinkerton-Uri's office in tears.
Two young women entered an IHS hospital in Montana to undergo appendectomies and received tubal ligations, a form of sterilization, as an added benefit. Bertha Medicine Bull, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, related how the "two girls had been sterilized at age fifteen before they had any children. Both were having appendectomies when the doctors sterilized them without their knowledge or consent." Their parents were not informed either. Two fifteen-year-old girls would never be able to have children of their own.
What happened to these three females was a common occurrence during the 1960s and 1970s. Native Americans accused the Indian Health Service of sterilizing at least 25 percent of Native American women who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four during the 1970s. The allegations included: failure to provide women with necessary information regarding sterilization; use of coercion to get signatures on the consent forms; improper consent forms; and lack of an appropriate waiting period (at least seventy-two hours) between the signing of a consent form and the surgical procedure. This paper investigates the historical relationship between the IHS and Indian tribes; the right of the United States government to sterilize women; the government regulations pertaining to sterilization; the efforts of the IHS to sterilize American Indian women; physicians' reasons for sterilizing American Indian women; and the consequences the sterilizations had on the lives of a few of those women and their families.
The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women
Jane Lawrence
On November 6, 1976, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) released the results of its investigation into similar events at four of twelve IHS areas (Albuquerque, Aberdeen, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix). Records verified that the IHS performed 3,406 sterilizations between 1973 and 1976.[iv] “Tip of the iceberg” is indeed an appropriate metaphor. Per capita, this figure would be equivalent to sterilizing 452,000 non-Native American women.[v]Albuquerque contracted out their sterilizations to local, non-IHS physicians; therefore their region inaccurately added zero procedures to the government count. Independent research estimated that as many as 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.[vi]Independent verifications were critical. The GAO did not interview a single women subjected to sterilization. The GAO also admitted that “contract” physicians were not required to comply with any federal regulations (including informed consent) in the context of these surgical procedures. Study of consent forms utilized revealed that three different forms were in use. It also appeared the “consent,” in many instances, was obtained through coercion.
What may be the most disturbing aspect of the investigations followed: it was physicians and healthcare professionals in the IHS who coerced these women. It was they who abandoned their professional responsibility to protect the vulnerable through appropriate, non-eugenic indications for surgery and informed consent prior to the procedures. On a Navaho reservation alone, from 1972-1978, there was a 130% increase in abortions (a ratio of abortions per 1000 deliveries increasing from 34 to 77).[vii] The same study demonstrated that between 1972 and 1978, sterilization procedures went from 15.1% to 30.7% of total female surgeries on that one reservation. Healthcare professionals’ coercive tactics included the threat of withdrawing future healthcare provisions or custody of Native American children already born—if consent for sterilization was withheld.[viii] The scandal of this replay of earlier twentieth century eugenic programs and genocidal tactics led to a congressional hearing (Senator James Abourzek, Democrat, South Dakota), but little else in terms of publicity, justice, or public outcry. It has also not been scrutinized from a careful bioethical perspective.
Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies
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