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“The Saskatoon Health Region has apologized to Indigenous women who felt coerced into surgery that prevented them from bearing more children.
The agency commissioned an independent report earlier this year after women complained they were pressured by medical staff and social workers to have a tubal ligation, a procedure that involves clamping or severing the Fallopian tubes.
“I’m sorry that you were not treated with the respect, the compassion and all of the support that you needed and deserved,” Jackie Mann, a health region vice-president, said Thursday.
“No woman should ever be treated the way you were treated.”
The health region failed the women and the report is a call to do better, Mann said as she choked back tears.
“This report states that racism exists within our health-care system and we as leaders acknowledge this.”
The report was penned by two Indigenous health experts who are of Métis descent. Yvonne Boyer is a lawyer and Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Health and Wellness at Brandon University, while Judith Bartlett is a physician and former University of Manitoba professor.”
– The Star, Saskatoon Health Region apologizes to Indigenous women pressured into tubal ligation surgery.
“Two fifteen-year-old Native American women went into the hospital for tonsillectomies and came out with tubal ligations. Another Native American woman requested a “womb transplant,” only to reveal that she had been told that was an option after her uterus had been removed against her will. Cheyenne women had their Fallopian tubes severed, sometimes after being told that they could be “untied” again.
For many, America’s history of brutal experimentation on people of color is perhaps best summed up by the Tuskegee Experiment, in which doctors let African-American men suffer from syphilis over a period of 40 years. But another medical outrage is less well-known. Jane Lawrence documents the forced sterilization of thousands of Native American women by the Indian Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s—procedures thought to have been performed on one out of every four Native American women at the time, against their knowledge or consent.
Both the IHS and its dark history of forced sterilization were the result of longstanding, often ham-fisted attempts to address American Indians’ health care needs, writes Lawrence. Medical services were part of U.S. agreements with sovereign tribes from as early as 1832, when a treaty with the Ho-Chunk, then often called the Winnebago, included the services of a physician in exchange for land in what is now Wisconsin. With the arrival of the Progressive Era, health interventions became even more of a priority and the Department of the Interior and later the newly-formed Indian Health Service devoted resources to education and medical care for American Indians on reservations.”
– JStor Daily, THE LITTLE-KNOWN HISTORY OF THE FORCED STERILIZATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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