The first time Elena Giacci (Diné) heard of forced sterilization, she was at a conference. It was 1994, and she had just given a presentation on sexual violence in Native American communities, part of her job as an advocate and trainer for New Mexico’s Office of Family Representation and Advocacy.
“A woman came up to me after and said, ‘I think they did something to me down there,’” Giacci told Native News Online. “I asked her what she meant.”
The woman’s answer shocked her.
“She said, ‘I think they took something out.’”
That woman was the first of many who would disclose to Giacci that they had been sterilized without their full and informed consent. Some had given birth and unknowingly left the hospital with their tubes tied. Others had undergone unrelated surgeries and woken up from anesthesia without their uterus. Most told her the abuse took place at the hands of the federal agency that promised to provide them healthcare through trust and treaty obligations: the Indian Health Service.
“So many women said, ‘No one believes me,’” Giacci said. “People have no clue that that even happened to us.”
Giacci, with the help of Oxford-educated human rights attorney Keely Badger, channeled decades of those disclosures into action. The women were the force behind a groundbreaking memorial passed unanimously by New Mexico lawmakers last month that will investigate the forced and coerced sterilization of Native women.
“It’s surreal,” Badger, who authored the memorial, told Native News Online. “There are so many extraordinary women who made this happen. It’s been a long time coming.”
The History
From 1907 until as recently as 2018, tens of thousands of Native women underwent procedures that rendered them unable to bear children without their free, prior, and informed consent.
The practice thrived unquestioned for decades. In the early 1970s, Native American doctor Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri (Cherokee/Choctaw) treated three Native women of childbearing age who had undergone sterilization procedures by the Indian Health Service: a 20-year-old who had a total hysterectomy, and two young women who received tubal ligations during appendectomy procedures.
Pinkerton-Uri conducted her own independent investigation and found that 1 in 4 Native women had been sterilized without consent between 1960 and 1978.
An investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, following Pinkerton-Uri’s findings, reported that from 1972 to 1975, in just four of the twelve IHS service areas, 3,406 sterilizations were performed.
In 2017, Badger wrote her Oxford dissertation on forced sterilizations. Her dissertation notes that, per capita, 3,406 procedures translate to the equivalent of sterilizing 452,000 non-Native American women.
“I wanted to go right for what I thought was one of the most critical pieces of U.S. history, particularly Indigenous women’s rights history that nobody was talking about, that was deeply understudied and that people weren’t looking at from a legal lens,” Badger said. “I really wanted to build a case that what happened to Native American women and women of color in the United States constituted crimes against humanity under international law, which it does.”
Badger’s research pulled from disparate accounts, including Pinkerton-Uri’s findings and the 1970s GAO report. She found that upwards of 70,000 Native women were sterilized at IHS clinics throughout the Southwest.
“It’s biological and cultural genocide,” Badger said. “When we think about the lost generations of children, we think of the loss of culture, of language, of traditions, of oral histories as a result of this, beyond just, of course, the horrendous damage to the women.”
Lone Voices Meet
On the other side of the world, Giacci was a lone voice speaking about forced and coerced sterilization.
“At the very beginning of my presentations on sexual violence, I talk about sterilization,” Giacci said. “Bad news is, I was the only one who was talking about it.”
While woman after woman told Giacci that they had been made unable to bear children against their will, she faced a line of detractors.
“I received a tremendous amount of resistance and got vilified,” she said. “People would tell me, ‘You’re lying,’ especially from people from the healthcare and IHS community. They were defensive over what I was saying.”
In 2020, Badger and Giacci were both invited to present at a conference on generational healing hosted by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.
“I met Keely, and within about, oh, eight minutes, we both brought up the fact that we’re kind of loners in the field of forced and coerced sterilization,” Giacci said.
The two women kept the conversation going. With Giacci’s relationships with New Mexico lawmakers and Badger’s legal acumen, they decided they had a shot at writing legislation that could yield justice for victims.
“We had discussions — a lot of, ‘Do we think we can do this? Is this the right time?’” Giacci said. “Both of us are pretty significantly stubborn, and we went, ‘What the heck? Let’s see what we can do.’ And nobody else was doing it.”
The memorial passed in late February and was sponsored by five lawmakers, including two Native American women, Sens. Shannon Pinto (Diné) and Angel Charley (Laguna/Diné). It is a stunning feat in a political system seemingly designed to delay justice for Native people.
While other states have passed resolutions to investigate forced sterilization of marginalized groups, New Mexico is the only state to focus specifically on Native women.
Giacci and Badger will partner with the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department and the Commission on the Status of Women to conduct an investigation into the scope and ongoing effects of the abusive practice. Now, they are assembling a task force to gather records from the IHS and GAO.
Both women say they hope this is just the beginning of establishing a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the forced sterilization of Native women nationwide.
“That would be absolutely paramount,” Badger said. “I do look a lot to the legacy that Nelson Mandela left in South Africa to bring South Africa out of apartheid … to try to heal a nation, as hard as that is to do, and to make it a clearly defined break in that history of oppression to one of acknowledgement and repair. This is something that is kind of the first step toward that nationally.”
Giacci said that bringing awareness to the abuses of forced sterilization will give victims a language to name and talk about what happened to them — a language to heal.
“Women will say, ‘I feel really stupid even bringing it up.’ ‘They thought I was lying.’ ‘They said I was making stuff up, and I was to blame,’” Giacci said. “It’s important to give people correct and good information so that they start to breathe and say, ‘Maybe this was something that happened to me.’”
“We can help people know that it wasn’t their fault. That is just one of my few little wishes in this world.”
