Our Crow Indian Hospital

This chapter explores how members of the Crow Nation—especially women—navigated the various terminationist pressures of the post-World War II period. In these years, an influential group of policy makers pursued the dissolution of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the termination of tribal members’ political status as “American Indian.” In practice, one of the most immediate threats was the reduction or elimination of reservation health services. The chapter reveals that the female members of a new Crow Health Committee emerged as leaders in the community’s effort to protect the reservation hospital and to reform the colonial institution to meet the evolving needs of Crow people. In regular meetings with medical officers in the newly created Indian Health Service, these women presented comprehensive health services, and particularly maternal and infant welfare, as a federal obligation and a matter of Indian treaty rights.

Relocating Reproduction

This chapter considers the experiences of the thousands of Native women of childbearing age who migrated from reservations to cities in the decades following World War II. The federal government’s relocation program promoted the urban migration of Native individuals and families and provided basic assistance to facilitate the process. The chapter argues that the Bureau of Indian Affairs’s desired outcome of relocating women alongside men, as well as women’s own agency in pursuing relocation, forced the BIA to make adjustments to relocation policy to accommodate women’s reproductive needs. In cities, Native women navigated the bureaucracy of health insurance but often found that long-term coverage was out of reach. Native women relied on their own ingenuity and the support of familial and social networks both on and off reservations in their attempt to obtain adequate prenatal, obstetric, and postnatal care, as well as in negotiating urban motherhood.

Childbearing and Childrearing

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.

Self-Determination Begins in the Womb

This chapter explores Native women’s quest for reproductive self-determination from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The chapter documents Native women’s diverse attitudes toward and engagement with federal family planning services, while dedicating particular attention to growing concerns regarding unethical and even coercive sterilizations in the 1970s. Native nurses, community health representatives, and other activists struggled in various ways for women’s reproductive autonomy, collectively ensuring the centrality of reproduction to Red Power politics and the ongoing struggle for Native sovereignty. By the end of the decade, activist pressure resulted in the adoption of new federal regulations that provided some protections for Native and other women. Native women also founded grassroots organizations that pursued reproduction-related agendas such as a return to Native midwifery.

Epilogue

This epilogue provides a brief overview of Native women’s reproductive experiences in the twenty-first century, the most pressing issues Native pregnant people currently face, and the wide-ranging reproductive justice agendas that Native individuals and organizations are advancing. In recent years, the Indian Health Service has closed some reservation hospitals and reduced obstetric services in others. In response, Native women are advocating for the return and expansion of reservation women’s health and obstetrics services, as well as the reform of institutions that have not met patients’ needs. Native women are also questioning or outright challenging Western models of medicalized birthing, continuing a longer struggle for the decolonization of pregnancy and childbirth. Native reproductive justice agendas are expansive and incorporate demands such as the right to control one’s own fertility, the elimination of racial health disparities, and the protection of tribal lands from environmental degradation, among many other priorities.

Nurse, Mother, Midwife

This chapter explores Native women’s childbearing experiences during the 1930s through the life story of a single woman: Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail. Yellowtail, born on the Crow Reservation, became one of the first Native American registered nurses and worked briefly at the government hospital on her reservation. Through her experiences as an employee and a patient, Yellowtail became aware of inadequate obstetrics practices at the hospital. Specifically, she alleged that she and other Crow women underwent involuntary sterilization procedures within hospital walls. The chapter places Yellowtail’s experiences within the context of the contemporary eugenics movement. It also documents Yellowtail’s multifaceted response to these injustices, which included a decades-long midwifery practice.

To Instill the Hospital Habit

This chapter explores the Save the Babies campaign, a pronatal campaign spearheaded by the Office of Indian Affairs during the Progressive Era to combat Indian infant mortality. The chapter addresses each of the campaign’s three basic components—home visits conducted by field matrons; annual baby shows, where medical staff evaluated infants; and the promotion of hospital childbirth—while dedicating particular attention to the latter. The chapter further considers the choices Native women made regarding where and with whom they delivered and finds that a minority of women accepted hospital childbirth almost immediately. As maternity patients, Native women disrupted the OIA’s vision of how a hospital should look, sound, and function.

Introduction

This chapter introduces and defines several of the book’s key terms, including biological reproduction, colonialism, settler colonialism, and reproductive justice. Articulating the book’s overarching arguments, the chapter contends that colonial politics have been and remain reproductive politics. It further argues that Native women have navigated pregnancy and birthing in myriad ways that disrupt any tidy dichotomy between “traditional” and “modern” birthing in the twentieth century. The introduction begins with an overview of the founding of the Women of All Red Nations (WARN) in 1978 and suggests that the roots of this 1970s activism are not only in Native struggles for sovereignty and self-determination in post-World War II decades but in Native women’s reproductive-related activism throughout the century.