Talk:Sterilization of Native American women

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Peer Review
Your article looks really good, it provides a lot of rich information on the subject and is really well-sourced. The one thing I would make sure of is that you are staying neutral on the topic but besides that, it looks really well done! Madison Goulding (talk) 17:24, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

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1) First, what does the article do well? Is there anything from your review that impressed you? Any turn of phrase that described the subject in a clear way?

You give really nice background information that sets the stage for the rest of the article in the Types of sterilization section.

2) What changes would you suggest the author(s) apply to the article? Why would those changes be an improvement? What's the most important thing the author(s) could do to improve the article?

In the intro, I think you could use some more commas to break up sentences a bit more. I also think that the very last sentence is incomplete. There may be a little extra info in the intro.

I would split up the Types of sterilization section and create a background section.

Definitely make use of more subsections (I think thats your biggest priority - i can see multiple ways to split up this article)

Grammar is an issue throughout. Most of the sentences need fixing... I'm not sure if it makes sense for me to clean them all up when I am not an expert on the subject. Jscherer42 (talk) 19:25, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

3) Did you notice anything about the article you reviewed that could be applicable to your own article? Let them know!

No, but it's an interesting article! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Izzysunbear (talk • contribs) 20:05, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

Summary clean up requested
Fascinating topic but currently hard to parse the article. I'd propose that the overall motivation and victim/public responses are critical and belong in the summary. Was this intentional genocide or a medical crime that was viewed positively at the time, similar to forced lobotomisation being considered cutting-edge medical practice during the early 1900s and only later reviled? I wanted to know whether it was considered malicious at the time vs helping, the general pattern of the sterilisations, and finally any reactions of the victims and general public at the time. I was also hoping for more clarity on the actual logistics and persuasion that took place. Any prosecutions/recourse? Can I propose a summary rewrite such as "Reservations were (status) eg chronically underfunded and a understaffed due to (X? mention institutional racism, anti-indian sentiment?). Uncaring medical staff promoted free sterilisation to reservation inhabitants as a form of free contraception, viewing these contraception as in their best interest. Public perception at the time was Y(unaware of the practices?), and the medical staff believed they were in the right/wrong. Indians voiced opposition immediately (example) but public outcry did not occur until ..."

Also there is a section on why, but it starts off with a non sequitur by describing how sterilisation was also performed on other groups. I don't have enough understanding of the topic or else I'd edit it myself, so figure I'll comment here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.233.125.236 (talk) 06:20, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

The number 2 citation here is making the extraordinary claim that 15 percent of white women in the 70's were sterilized. This is to contrast with the much higher number among Native Americans? Is this article claiming that 10's of millions of women were being involuntarily sterilized in America in the 1970's? This is a frankly ridiculous claims and the sources that point at it are either not credible or don't actually say this. I'm not usual wikipedia editor but it's pretty dismaying to see such obviously false claims cited here as fact. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.119.158.22 (talk) 14:04, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Canada
I'm going to add in some sourcing for cases in Canada. Whether this leads to shifting the title of the article a bit to "Indigenous North American", or something else to better encompass First Nations, we can address later. I've started some cleanup to deal with the flagging. - CorbieV  ☊ ☼ 19:54, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Rename / Page Move
This is about Forced Sterilization, not chosen. And I think this is the best place for the Canadian cases, as well, unless I've somehow missed a Canadian article. So, if there are no objections, my choices for this, in order of preference: - CorbieV  ☊ ☼ 21:18, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Forced sterilization of Indigenous women in the United States and Canada (wordy, but covers all the bases)
 * Forced sterilization of Native American women (short, but biased to the US)
 * Forced sterilization of Indigenous women (and could expand for more global coverage?
 * Forced sterilization of Indigenous women in North America
 * I like the idea of expanding it for global coverage with Forced sterilization of Indigenous women. That's assuming someone wants to put in the work and that there aren't duplicate articles about other regions (although they could be merged if so). ~  ONUnicorn (Talk&#124;Contribs) problem solving 21:54, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Compulsory sterilization in Canada discusses the sterilization of indigenous people although it doesn't deal exclusively with them. I would expect Category:Sterilization to have more, but it doesn't seem to. ~  ONUnicorn (Talk&#124;Contribs) problem solving 22:00, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Compulsory sterilization in Canada definitely covers a lot of this already. I wasn't aware of the page because, oddly, it rarely mentions that this was, and still is, targeted at Indigenous people. Looks to me like we should probably merge the two articles to start, either under the North America title or global. - <b style="color:#44018F;">Co</b><b style="color: #003878;">rb</b><b style="color: #145073;">ie</b><b style="color: #006E0D">V</b>  ☊ ☼ 20:20, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, I've proposed the merge and directed discussion here. Other articles I've found in this orbit include: Forced sterilization in the United States, which redirects to Compulsory sterilization, Sterilization law in the United States, Eugenics in the United States, and redirects to Compulsory Sterilizion for India, Romani people and some other ethnic minorities. I think that we should make this article global, and then if any section gets big enough to spin off we'll still have a central Indigenous one. Even if right now we just start with Canada and the US, going with the shorter title, Forced sterilization of Indigenous women, seems to be the best choice for both the short and long term here. - <b style="color:#44018F;">Co</b><b style="color: #003878;">rb</b><b style="color: #145073;">ie</b><b style="color: #006E0D">V</b>  ☊ ☼ 20:39, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep It appears this is the linked discussion for a merge in Compulsory sterilization in Canada, though it appears more broad. If I'm not mistaken Native American may refer to a number of groups in both Canada and the United States, thus Compulsory sterilization in Canada is a subset of Sterilization of Native American women. Currently Compulsory sterilization in Canada is much broader than Sterilization of Native American women, so I would prefer it as being the parent article, and believe it to be sufficient to be a standalone article.  I would keep Sterilization of Native American women as on overview article which links to the corresponding  articles, rather than requiring only one article to "curate" the subject matter.Ethanpet113 (talk) 23:24, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

History of sterilization in America
This section is incomprehensible garbage. There's no grammar, no structure, the spelling is poor, it's not fixable the way it is. Also, Bush supported Planned Parenthood, nothing to do with "mandatory sterilizations" that I can find, and he was neither president nor governor at the time, so he couldn't "pass" legislation. Really, this entire section needs euthanized and replaced with something better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.32.182.152 (talk) 08:08, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Erroneous information and incorrectly cited sources: planned fixes
I happened upon this article and was surprised by the information in the opening paragraph, but when I attempted to chase down additional information in the cited sources, I ran into problems. From the article:

In 1976 the U.S. General Accounting Office found that the IHS sterilized 3,406 Native American women during the fiscal years 1973 and 1976 including twenty-three women that were under the age of twenty-one; which was against the Department of Health and Welfare's regulations. The findings showed that 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized using various methods however, the main methods were tubal ligation or a hysterectomy.

There are several problems here.

1. The two sentences are logically incompatible. If the US GAO findings said that 3406 women were sterilized, this would mean that from 2.3% to 3.4% of all Native American women of childbearing age were sterilized, so there's no way it's possible for the GAO to have found that "25-50%" were sterilized.

2. The second sentence makes several claims, i.e. about what the GAO found, and by implication makes factual claims about how many women were sterilized. However, the cited source does not contain these claims. This could be due to poor grammar in this sentence that makes it imply things the author did not intend for it to imply.

3. None of the four cited sources contains any kind of first-hand source for the claim that much larger numbers (e.g. over 10000) Native American women were sterilized in the early to mid 1970s. Only the fourth source contains this claim at all, but cites only "Figures estimated by Indian researchers" and not any specific source in a footnote.

Because articles about issues like this one are understandably contentious, I wanted to post all the information here on the talk page to explain changes I make to the opening paragraph. I plan to leave in the higher figures, because they do have some support in the literature and because even the US GAO source mentions limitations to its accounting. However, I think it's best to be much more clear about where these numbers come from than than the article currently is.

amfucla (talk) 00:25, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Article cleanup: correcting erroneous, unsourced, and irrelevant information
The previous section was about problems I found in the first paragraph. I've rewritten that, but I wanted to have a look at the rest of the article now. I still think on the whole it's very poor and so I'm going to take a stab at improving it. I'm going to document some problems I see here, so that the reasoning behind any changes I make will be clear. Feel free to leave ideas or point out additional problems you see with the article here.

1. Misuse of the term "sterilization". For example "Non-permanent forms of sterilization were used was Depo-Provera and Norplant." In addition to grammar issues, sterilization is usually considered to be permanent (or intended to be so) by definition. The two mentioned techniques are methods of birth control, not sterilization.

2. The "history of sterilization" section needs a complete rewrite, if not to be removed entirely. A representative sentence: "There were a total of 32 states who contributed in federally funded sterilization procedure is the Native American families, people of color, poor people, and those who were disabled." I'm not even fully sure what this is saying, let alone how to try to verify it.

3. In general, the article doesn't do a good job at all of getting across a consistent narrative, containing a lot of repeated information and poor organization.

4. So far, in my limited review, the article seems to frequently cite sources that don't actually contain the claims made. Even basic stuff like "The Indian Health Services (IHS) is a government organization created in 1955" is at risk. The source cited doesn't actually say when the IHS as such was formed, but it does say that it didn't exist by that name until 1958.

amfucla (talk) 08:45, 4 December 2019 (UTC)


 * I've now made some substantial changes to try to improve the article, mostly reorganization and editing. I think it's now at the very least readable and provides some of the most important points (though I'd vote for getting rid of the sections on the IHS and US history and expanding the others).


 * I think the biggest thing that's missing at the moment is reliable information about how many sterilizations occurred, and how many of these were non-consensual. That seems like an incredibly important point, but I haven't seen anything persuasive yet. The source for the widely-quoted 40% figure seems to be Lehman Brightman, but our source for that cites Johansen (1998), who describes this figure as an "educated guess (without exact calculations to back it up)". That's a pretty startling limitation for a figure that gets repeated in subsequent literature. Maybe the earlier 25% figure is better, but the source is still a medical doctor, not an expert in the field as far as I can tell. It would be nice to have a look at her study, but I'm having trouble finding it. Actually, it's kind of shocking that the article currently has nothing to say about Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri since according to the sources she's the one who kicked off investigations into all this with her initial report. amfucla (talk) 11:35, 4 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Bibliography for potential additions to the article as well as already-made changes.

-NorPlant Information

-DeProvera Information

-Current IHS Laws Pertaining to Sterilization Practices

-Statistics on Contraceptive-use/Sterilizations of Indian/Alaskan Natives versus Whites Ellietuskluvr (talk) 04:14, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

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