Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Reproduction

My research builds on the work of scholars who understand American westward expansion as a concerted effort on the part of white settlers and the federal government to acquire Indigenous land and to establish a white dominion in the region.  Settler colonialism, in the United States and elsewhere, required the displacement and subordination of the Indigenous groups occupying desired land.  My project demonstrates that U.S. settler society’s evolving efforts to address “the Indian problem” in the twentieth century hinged on the regulation of Indigenous women’s biological reproduction.  From federal pronatal initiatives in the Progressive Era to the widespread sterilization abuse in government hospitals in the 1970s, my study documents a relatively continuous history of colonial reproductive violence.  I also document the emergence of a broad-based reproductive rights agenda female Indigenous activists labeled “reproductive justice,” and I am particularly interested in how Indigenous activists understood reproductive violence in relation to other anticolonial political struggles, specifically with regard to land.  In this roundtable discussion, I will also talk through what I see as the relationship between the federal government’s intervention in Indigenous women’s reproduction and the federal government’s efforts to control the movement of Indigenous individuals and groups throughout much of the twentieth century.