Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country.

Abstract

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country Brianna Theobald (bio) Even as the field of reproductive history dedicates greater attention to racial subjectivities and other forms of difference, attention to Native peoples and Indian Country remains limited; this relative absence persists despite Indigenous feminists’ frequent engagement with the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The cause of such marginalization is not a complete mystery. The marginalization of Native reproductive histories reflects continuing patterns of Indigenous erasure in the context of U.S. settler colonialism and derives from the specificity of tribal nationhood, sovereignty, and Native nations’ trust relationship with the U.S. government, all of which defy tidy integration into the field’s existing narratives.1 It is also a product of the methodological challenges that these realities pose for nonspecialists. I wrote Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century in part to intervene in these trends. Published in 2019, Reproduction on the Reservation is the first book-length history of reproduction that centers Native American women.2 It contends that in a nation like the United States, colonialism is a vital frame for understanding histories of reproduction. This is the vantage point from which I have been assessing the consequences of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and from which I approach this forum. A Native-centered historical analysis underscores the limitations of a narrow scholarly or political focus on the now overturned Roe v. Wade and the question of abortion’s legality, a point long emphasized by Indigenous women, women of color, and working-class [End Page 39] women. As Indigenous Women Rising founder Rae Lorenzo (Mescalero Apache, Laguna Pueblo, and Xicana) recently argued, “Roe v. Wade has never been a reality for Native people.”3 Nor, one might add, has Roe ever been enough to meet Native people’s needs, as they have faced countless other obstacles in the pursuit of abortion access, reproductive health, and bodily autonomy. And yet, as Native attorneys and reproductive activists powerfully argued in an amicus brief submitted for the defendants in Dobbs, the overturning of Roe portends particularly harmful consequences for Native peoples.4 While in tension, these realities—that Roe was illusory in the lives of many Native people and that its repeal carries particular burdens and dangers—reflect the duality of federal control and neglect that the sociologist Barbara Gurr has identified in the provision of “imperialist medicine.”5 They speak to the need for robust reproductive justice agendas that attend to settler colonialism in the past and present and imagine vibrant Indigenous futures.6 Native reproductive agendas have long been informed by the exigencies of Native women’s struggle to have children and Native families’ struggle to raise them in safe, healthy, and culturally centered environments without undue external intervention.7 For centuries, Native peoples have endured the efforts of policy makers, Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, and missionaries to assimilate them into U.S. society, a thankfully unsuccessful yet nonetheless destructive attempt to eliminate Native cultures and dissolve tribal nations. The education of Native children was a cornerstone of federal assimilation efforts. Well into the twentieth century, authorities removed Native children from their homes and communities to carry out this education, an intentional effort to destabilize children’s ties to their families and homelands. Authorities justified these actions [End Page 40] in part on allegations of Native maternal apathy or incapacity.8 Such stereotypes existed alongside and buttressed self-serving tropes regarding Indigenous promiscuity and domestic deficiency, even as colonization rendered Native women vulnerable to sexual violence.9 Colonial surveil-lance of and intervention in Indigenous home and family life rested on racist assumptions about the need for “moral uplift” of individuals and communities. Health and healing, too, were sites of assimilationist intervention in Indian Country. The reservation system that federal officials embraced following the Civil War produced a cascade of public health disasters. Native nations faced land dispossession, a forced sedentary lifestyle, malnutrition due to government neglect, and economic underdevelopment. These conditions facilitated the rapid spread of disease, and infant mortality and maternal morbidity rates reached alarming heights in many locations. The federal government further hindered communities...