The Sterilization of Native American Women in Oklahoma

Abstract

In 1974, the Indian Health Service (IHS) hospital in Claremore, Oklahoma sterilized forty-eight Native American women in the month of July alone. Most of these women were in their twenties. This is a staggering number compared to the amount of Native American women serviced in the surrounding community. At the time, it was also reported that Native American patients were being actively “turned away by the hospital on the grounds that there were not sufficient funds to care for them.” This local event foregrounds the scholarly work done throughout this thesis. The main argument of this paper is that Native nurses were the real leaders of the activist movement against sterilization abuses. This thesis concludes by examining the solidarity between different women’s activist groups of the 1970s. These women activists understood themselves as united through experiences of violence and their fight as a shared effort to overthrow imperialism and colonialism.