Second-rate victims: the forced sterilization of Indigenous peoples in the USA and Canada

This essay explores a particular aspect of the twentieth-century history of Indigenous peoples. The forced sterilization campaign that targeted Indian women in twentieth-century North America and its links to eugenic ideologies remain understudied. While the US and Canadian governments funded these campaigns, according to available estimates, tens of thousands of Indigenous women were compulsorily sterilized. This decades-long campaign reached its peak between the immediate aftermath of WWII and the 1970s, at a time when the native population – after the demographic collapse of the previous centuries – had begun to increase significantly. Indigenous population growth troubled eugenicists determined to safeguard the racial ‘purity’ of the white nations and corporate interests targeting resource-rich Native lands.