Native American Women Snap Up Health Book

Protesting Against Sterilization Practices

Two years before that investigation, in 1974, indigenous women protested sterilization practices at federal hospitals on at least four reservations where uninformed women, including minors, had been deceived into consenting to the surgery.

In 1985, other women on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota gathered to fight another type of health assault on their community: fetal alcohol syndrome. It was that effort, in fact, that led Asetoyer to establish the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center, the book's publisher.

Charon Asetoyer (Photo courtesy of
Women's eNews)

Asetoyer, the book's co-editor, says Native American women need to further develop their sense of right to proper health care. She said throughout her 18 years at the center, indigenous women regularly reported inappropriate contraceptive care, such as federal personnel urging them to undergo tubal ligation (sterilization) well before age 30 or failing to tell them its effect is permanent.

"Many documented and undocumented reproductive rights violations committed against Indigenous women fuel the fire for the reproductive health and rights organizing done by the Resource Center," she writes in the book's introduction. "It is that same fuel that gives birth to this book."

Asetoyer edited the book along with two women's center colleagues, Dr. Katharine Cronk, a pharmacologist and neuroscientist working as a health advocate at the center, and Samanthi Hewakapuge, a librarian and information specialist.