{"id":27327,"date":"2022-08-15T16:25:04","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T20:25:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.indianz.com\/News\/?p=27327"},"modified":"2022-08-15T16:25:06","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T20:25:06","slug":"mother-jones-weve-been-under-these-genocidal-policies-for-500-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/indianz.com\/News\/2022\/08\/15\/mother-jones-weve-been-under-these-genocidal-policies-for-500-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Mother Jones: ‘We\u2019ve been under these genocidal policies for 500 years’"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Women's<\/a>
Participants in the Women’s March walk through the streets of Washington, D.C., on July 9, 2022, in support of a woman’s right to choose. Photo: Miki Jourdan<\/a><\/figcaption>\r\n
Abortion Was Already Inaccessible on Reservation Land. Dobbs Made Things Worse.<\/div>\r\n
Federal and state abortion restrictions have been interfering with tribal sovereignty for years.<\/div>\r\n
Monday, August 15, 2022<\/div>\r\n
By Emily Hofstaedter<\/div>\r\n
Mother Jones<\/div>\r\n
motherjones.com<\/a><\/div>\r\n

<\/p>\r\nSince the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade<\/em> in June<\/a>, millions of people have faced new barriers to abortion access: increased wait times, longer distances to travel, and in many cases, an inability to access the procedure altogether. But for many Native people, especially those living on reservation land, these kinds of obstacles feel especially familiar. \r\n

<\/P>\r\n\u201cIt is sad to say that we’re kind of used to these types of policies being passed and implemented,\u201d says Krystal Curley, who is Din\u00e9 and the executive director of Indigenous Lifeways, an Indigenous health and social justice group. \u201cNow it’s the whole US that’s going to have to experience what we’ve been experiencing\u2026and it\u2019s traumatic.\u201d

<\/P>\r\nNative American tribes are sovereign nations that have a government-to-government relationship with the United States. Tribes have the right to make many laws on their land and for their citizens\u2014and in theory, that right applies to making decisions about health care, including abortion. But in practice, decades of state and federal laws have limited tribal nations\u2019 ability to provide reproductive health services, leaving Native people with disproportionate barriers to abortion access. In a post-Roe<\/em> world, the obstacles to abortion access on tribal land have only gotten greater. For advocates like Curley, the ruling feels like just the latest escalation in a centuries-long attack on bodily and tribal autonomy.

<\/P>\r\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been under these genocidal policies for 500 years,\u201d Curley says, pointing to a legacy of violence that began with the use of rape as a weapon against Native women during colonization. Since then, federal and state governments have spent decades trying to control Native people\u2019s decisions about their families and reproductive health\u2014from forcibly removing<\/a> Indigenous children from their families<\/a> to the Indian Health Service\u2019s forced sterilization<\/a> of Native women in the 1970s.

<\/P>\r\n\u201cAmerica has always been after our natural resources, and one of the ways that you go about doing that is to target Native women, because we bring forth the next generation,\u201d says Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, who is Comanche. \u201cIf you can sterilize or control our fertility, you can control our population. The agenda is the same: harvest our natural resources.\u201d

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The legacy of colonialism continues to exist in 2022 through this most recent action by the U.S. Supreme Court to deny Native \u2014 and all \u2014 women the right to body sovereignty.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div>\n\t

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<\/P>\r\nToday, federal government restrictions continue to limit Native people\u2019s ability to access reproductive health services. That\u2019s in large part because more than<\/a> half<\/a> of<\/a> American Indian and Alaska Native people access health care through the severely underfunded<\/a> Indian Health Service, which was established by a combination of treaties and legislation as partial payment for millions of acres of Native lands. Because IHS is a federal agency, the 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibits it from funding abortion. \u201cThey decide what is best for us,\u201d says Asetoyer, who has been advocating for a repeal of the Hyde Amendment since the Obama administration. \u201cIt\u2019s really very paternalistic.\u201d

<\/P>\r\nAlthough IHS is technically allowed to perform abortions in cases of rape or incest, research has found that most of its clinics don\u2019t. The only comprehensive report on the issue is a 2002 study<\/a> from Asetoyer\u2019s group that found the IHS system performed only 25 abortions between 1976 and 2002.

<\/P>\r\nSmaller reservations typically have just one IHS or tribal clinic<\/a>, and on larger reservations, clinics can be spread hundreds of miles apart. For the 22 percent<\/a> of Native people who live on reservations, that often means leaving tribal lands and traveling hundreds of miles to get care. Since 2020, the New Mexico-based abortion network Indigenous Women Rising has seen about one-third of its calls coming from Oklahoma, which is more than 40 percent reservation land and had some of the nation\u2019s strictest anti-abortion laws even before Dobbs<\/em>. The group has helped people travel as far as Granite City, Illinois\u2014at least a six-hour drive from Tulsa\u2014for an abortion, says IWR’s executive director, Rachael Lorenzo, who is Mescalero Apache, Laguna Pueblo, and Xicana. Since Dobbs<\/em>, those long trips have<\/span> only gotten more common for pregnant people in Oklahoma. In July, Indigenous Women Rising ran through its allotted abortion fund<\/a> for the month in just three weeks<\/span>. And <\/span>Oklahoma is just one of several states with vast federally recognized reservations, including both Dakotas<\/a> and Utah, that have enforced or are trying to enforce total abortion bans<\/a> this year.

<\/P>\r\nEver since news<\/span> of Justice Samuel Alito\u2019s opinion leaked this spring, the issue of abortion on tribal lands has attracted national attention. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt warned<\/a> that the state would be \u201cwatching\u201d tribal nations, who, he claimed, are \u201csuper liberal\u201d and will \u201ctry to set up abortion on demand.\u201d Similarly, non-Native activists on the left<\/a> have speculated that sovereign tribes could set up clinics on their land as a way to evade state abortion bans.

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While we are sovereign Native Nations the onus of your reproductive care and choices is not on us.

1) Do not ask us to undo what your colonialism has done to you when you've sat idly by as it works every day to destroy us.<\/p>— Frances *Deadly SoverAuntie* Danger (@FrancesMFDanger) June 24, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote>