Native American Women Snap Up Health Book

Health Outreach Bypassed Reservations

"I've been fortunate to experience wisdom from the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and 'Our Bodies, Ourselves,'" said Katrina Maczen-Cantrell, a Shoshone health activist with Women's Health Specialists, a feminist women's health center in Redding, Calif. But she adds that it was seen by few women on reservations. "Native American women were often overlooked, there wasn't a lot of outreach," Maczen-Cantrell says.

"It's an important, much needed book," says Judy Norsigian, executive director and a founder of the Boston-based collective Our Bodies Ourselves. "Just as those of us in the women's health movement were happy to see health books by black and by Latina women, it is wonderful to at last see a book like this geared to the health concerns of Native American women."

Charon Asetoyer (Photo courtesy of Women's eNews)

Francesca Mason Boring, a Shoshone registered family counselor in Colville, Wash., helps explain the significance of the self-help medical book by talking about two Chickasaw sisters she knew when she was growing up. The women had been girls in the 1920s.

"Both the sisters taught all of their lives and never had children because they had been sterilized in Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools," she says. "They were both lovely and lived to be quite old and few people knew what they had endured."

Beginning in the late 19th century, Native American women suffered not only forced marches to reservations, but also the "Save the Babies" campaign of 1912-1918. During that era, federal agents took children from their homes, judging the impoverished women unfit for "scientific motherhood."

"Various studies revealed that the Indian Health Service sterilized between 25 and 50 percent of Native American women between 1970 and 1976," Jane Lawrence wrote in the Summer 2000 issue of the American Indian Quarterly. Complaints led to a 1976 General Accounting Office investigation, which documented widespread violations including inadequate consent and the sterilization of minors.