For Native American peoples in the United States, reproductive justice is a complex issue with a long historical context. Native peoples’ reproductive health and general wellbeing was severely diminished by the United States through genocidal wars enacted by the U.S. military, the deliberate spreading of disease with contaminated goods, rampant sexual violence against Native women and children, and the destruction of Native food systems and homelands.

Beginning in 1832, in exchange for peace and land cessions, the U.S. consistently agreed to provide medical services to Native American tribes via treaties and executive orders to alleviate the harm that their colonial occupation deliberately inflicted. Medical services to Native American tribes were initially provided through the Bureau of Indian Affairs but after 1958 became a formal agency under the Public Health Service called Indian Health Services (IHS). IHS provided, and still provides, essential services to Native peoples particularly those with no other access to medical care. However, IHS is also a U.S. government agency and has often acted unethically and caused immeasurable harm to Native communities. One example of IHS maltreatment of Native patients is the mass forced sterilization of Native American women and children in the 1970s.

In 1970, the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act was passed; it was a law that reflected the racist eugenic ideology that some people, particularly poor people, should be sterilized for the greater social good of the country. Native Americans, as well as Latinos and African Americans, were targeted for sterilization under this law. Sterilizations consisting of hysterectomies or tubal ligations which ended an individual’s ability to biologically reproduce were performed on Native women and minors by IHS during this time of widespread abuse.

In 1976 a Congressional investigation of the sterilization practices of IHS found that IHS had not been in compliance with federal guidelines which placed a moratorium on sterilizing minors and required prior informed consent. Native peoples’ activism and defense of their communities interrupted the IHS abuses, but the losses were considerable. It is estimated that 25% of Native women between 1970-1976 were sterilized, although in some studies the figure was even higher. In 1972, Dr. Constance Redbird Pinkerton-Uri (of Choctaw and Cherokee descent) helped to uncover the sterilization scandal when she learned that one of her 26 year old patients had been sterilized without her knowledge or consent at an IHS facility. Dr. Pinkerton-Uri and other Native women activists such as chief judge Marie Sanchez from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe were instrumental in ending this terrible practice and defending Native peoples’ rights to reproductive justice.