Reproductive Justice

Barbara Gurr

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813575421
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Reproductive Justice, sociologist Barbara Gurr provides the first analysis of Native American women’s reproductive healthcare and offers a sustained consideration of the movement for reproductive justice in the United States.
The book examines the reproductive healthcare experiences on Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota—where Gurr herself lived for more than a year. Gurr paints an insightful portrait of the Indian Health Service (IHS)—the federal agency tasked with providing culturally appropriate, adequate healthcare to Native Americans—shedding much-needed light on Native American women’s efforts to obtain prenatal care, access to contraception, abortion services, and access to care after sexual assault. Reproductive Justice goes beyond this local story to look more broadly at how race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, and nation inform the ways in which the government understands reproductive healthcare and organizes the delivery of this care. It reveals why the basic experience of reproductive healthcare for most Americans is so different—and better—than for Native American women in general, and women in reservation communities particularly. Finally, Gurr outlines the strengths that these communities can bring to the creation of their own reproductive justice, and considers the role of IHS in fostering these strengths as it moves forward in partnership with Native nations. 
Reproductive Justice offers a respectful and informed analysis of the stories Native American women have to tell about their bodies, their lives, and their communities. 

Part I

Introductions

The Stories We Tell and Why

1

Introducing Our Relatives and Introducing the Story

In Lako’l wicoh’an (the Lakota way of being in the world), important things—prayers, ceremonies, the telling of stories, and the sharing of lessons—are marked with the phrase mitakuye oyasin. This phrase, which is commonly translated in English as “all my relations” or “we are all related,” carries profound significance for Lakota and other Native people, reminding those who are gathered that all things are in relationship, and that our relationships define who we are and what our purposes might be. Our relationships carry responsibilities, sometimes joyful, sometimes challenging, sometimes tedious. Our relationships contour our lives in a thousand different ways.

The research discussed in this book emerged from my relationships in Indian Country, and from the often joyful, often challenging responsibilities of these relationships. I went to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Oyate (People, or Nation) in South Dakota for the first time in the summer of 1999 to build wheelchair ramps with a service organization. In the year following, I returned to the reservation several times, meeting people, attending ceremonies and rodeos, and learning. My second trip there took me to the Rosebud Wacipi (dance, or pow-wow) and Rodeo; my third to the Black Hills Pow-wow in Rapid City, and to Emma, the director of the Badlands Bombing Range Recovery Project. On my fourth trip, I was invited to ride in the final day of the Sitanka Wokiksuye, the Bigfoot Memorial Ride held every year to remember and honor those ancestors killed at the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890.

I finally grew tired of paying the airfare from Connecticut to South Dakota, I suppose, and moved to Kyle, the “heart of the rez,” in August of 2000. I worked as a teacher at Little Wound School from the summer of 2000 through the fall of 2001. During this time, I learned a great deal about the meaning of relationship as I was welcomed into the homes and families of my Lakota students, colleagues, and neighbors. We shared food and stories, prayed together, searched for lost calves in the springtime, danced together at pow-wow, and cheered together at basketball games. I knew that I had become a part of that community when an elder referred to me as takoja (grandchild), and that moment when she used the term so casually is one of my favorite memories from my time living in Kyle.

I also became pregnant with my son during this time. It is through him that I have learned my greatest lessons about being a relative, and perhaps particularly about being a relative to the Lakota people; his body, nurtured in my body, produced a physical fulcrum for my relationships on the reservation, a physicality that embodied the kinship already begun in the kitchens, classrooms, and prayer ceremonies of the community in which I lived. His body, through my body, is the material link of our web of kinship. Feminist sociologists frequently argue that notions of kinship that rely on blood are patriarchal in their essence. This may be so, as ideas of “family” that exclude relationship outside of genetics or marriage serve a heteropatriarchal function, for example by marginalizing other ways of creating family (queer families come to mind; foster and adoptive families; and the “fictive kin” that anthropologist Carol Stack [1974] so articulately discusses). In Indian Country, relationship is rarely restricted to biology or marriage. Nonetheless, for me and my relatives on Pine Ridge, my son provides tangibility to our attachment.

I am not Native American (my mother’s people come mostly from Ireland and my father’s from Germany), but I came to understand during my pregnancy that mothering a Lakota child produces particular responsibilities to my relatives through him. I say “I came to understand” this because although my Lakota relatives were always teaching me, they never preached at me; it was through their stories and the ways in which they lived their lives that I learned these things. I took classes at Oglala Lakota College on the reservation to learn more, and these classes were helpful, but I learned the most when I simply listened to the people around me, when they so generously shared their stories with me. In fact, it was some of these stories that turned my attention to reproductive health care as a subject of study, as I discuss below.

Our relatives on the reservation and elsewhere in Indian Country, for their part, also recognize their responsibilities to my son, and through my son to me and to the rest of our family. Since my son’s birth in late 2001 I have returned to the reservation many times, sometimes with him, sometimes also with my husband and our daughter, and sometimes by myself. These visits, as well as the numerous phone calls, letters, and e-mails between my family and our Lakota relatives, have strengthened and broadened our relationships. My desire to provide my son with as strong a connection to his Lakota relatives as possible draws us back to them regularly, to visit, to pray, to learn, and more recently, to conduct research.

The Personal Is Political and Academic

I’m often asked by colleagues, peer reviewers, and friends why I chose to research reproductive justice in Indian Country, given the complexities involved: I am a non-Native sociologist trained in a department without Native Studies affiliations; I live two thousand miles from my field site and funded this research on a graduate assistant’s salary; I needed not only my university’s Institutional Review Board’s approval, but also the approval of the Tribal Research Review Board, a process that took almost a year and needs to be regularly revisited. My response is always the same: I didn’t choose this research—actually, I tried to avoid it. When I first set out to do my thesis in women’s studies shortly after my son’s birth, I chose Frida Kahlo’s art as my first topic. Then I thought I’d look at the day care crisis in our country (if you’re a working parent, you’re probably familiar with that one). I didn’t want to research Native women’s lives because I didn’t want to be yet another white scholar who thought she understood Indian Country and made an academic career out of that arrogance. But I have friends and family on Pine Ridge who shared their stories with me and took care of me when I was a little lost. When I left the reservation to return to Connecticut and give birth to my son, I also reentered a world of familiar resources, and academia has always been one of those. There was, perhaps, a sense of obligation. But there was also a burgeoning sense of responsibility, which is subtly but importantly different. I was aware that I had been treated like a relative by many community members on the reservation, and what kind of relative turns her back on those who have helped her—especially when she gains the opportunity to do research that might potentially help them in return, or at least shed light on some of the oppressions they survive? So I say I didn’t choose it. I felt it was the right thing to do, and I hope I was right.

For this study, entry-level data focusing on the experiences of Native women who utilize the Indian Health Service (IHS) for their reproductive health care derives from participant observations and just over thirty interviews conducted between 2009 and 2011. But almost a decade earlier, when I lived on the reservation, I became increasingly aware of the health disparities between Native Americans and non-Natives as well as the efforts of IHS to address these disparities and the challenges in doing so. Native women’s concerns about reproductive health care were particularly highlighted for me when I became pregnant and many of the Native women in the community in which I lived and worked, including students and colleagues in the school where I taught, reached out to support me in this pregnancy and help me prepare for my upcoming birth experience.

As Native women of all ages shared their stories about pregnancies, childbirths, child loss, and motherhood, I learned a great deal about their relationships with IHS. These stories and the knowledge these women shared with me prompted my research into reproductive health care for Native women, and particularly my interest in reproductive health care through IHS and on Pine Ridge Reservation. In fact, it was my interest in better understanding Native women’s health needs that brought me to sociology.

When I entered graduate school, I carried the stories of my relatives from Pine Ridge with me into seminar rooms and research libraries and computer labs. It’s a good thing I carried them in with me, because I would not have heard them otherwise. Native studies was conspicuously absent from my graduate program—a deafening silence, it seemed to me—and my insistence on “the indigenous question” in class after class grew tiresome for my peers, I’m sure. Although they had little direct experience in Native American studies to offer me, my professors were genuinely supportive of the project that drove me to graduate school, and encouraged me to take extra classes, read particular articles, write, write, and write some more about the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and State regimes. I was fortunate to find those ivory tower relatives.

All of this led to my dissertation examining Native women’s reproductive health care as this is coordinated, interrupted, informed, and mediated through what I understand to be imperialist medicine. I first began to think about this relationship between the State and the reproductive body during my pregnancy, when, as I have said, friends on the reservation shared stories with me about their own pregnancy and birth experiences. Those stories took me by surprise. They made me angry, and sad. They were not the same stories I tell about my own experiences, and I was acutely aware even before this research formally began that one of the reasons their stories and mine were so different had something to do with settler colonialism (although at the time I didn’t have such fancy academic language to explain it). Those stories are the origin stories of this book.

In this research I look through those stories to the complex institutional organization of reproductive health care in the IHS and the consequences of this organization for Native women and their communities. My experiences on the reservation led me to wonder what the larger institutional forces are that organize Native women’s experiences of reproductive health care, and how these extralocal forces—what Dorothy Smith (1999) has called the “relations of ruling”—actually accomplish this organization. How do dynamic social and political ideologies of race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, and nation inform the ways in which the State understands reproductive health care and organizes the delivery of this health care? In other words, why are my reproductive health-care experiences so different from those of Native women in general, and women in reservation communities particularly?

Thinking about Health Care Institutionally

Mainstream medical practice continues to seek solutions to disease and illness through evidence-based medicine (EBM), a model that relies on empirical evidence, clinical practice, and peer review but is increasingly criticized as acultural and inconsistently generalizable (see, e.g., Fitzpatrick 2001; Rogers 2004). At the same time, mainstream discourses around health care and reproductive health care in particular generally rely on notions of individual choice and agency: women “choose” their contraceptive method, they “choose” abortion, they “choose” their care provider. Evidence-based medicine has undoubtedly helped both care providers and their patients, and choice and agency are certainly integral to understanding health and well-being as well as disease and illness, but these do not tell the whole story. My questions interrogate the social aspects of reproductive health care; they emerge from the micro-level, personal stories of friends and relatives on Pine Ridge, but they focus on the macro-level and institutional processes behind their experiences. This research therefore centralizes some of the broader political, economic, and social forces that produce Native women’s reproductive health-care experiences.

Dorothy Smith’s conceptualization of the ruling relations provides an intellectual organization to the understandings that emerged from my time on the reservation and the research that followed. Smith (1999) argues that our lives are organized by institutional forces beyond our immediate purview, and that these institutional forces constitute relationships that shape our access to certain resources, our subjective experiences, and even our own understanding of these experiences. In thinking about Native women’s reproductive healthcare experiences, it becomes clear that these ruling relations are, like all relationships, complex in both the underlying desires and expectations that inform them and in the material consequences that they produce.

The theoretical framework of reproductive justice developed by Sistersong, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, and others provides a space in which to consider the intersections of social structures such as poverty and institutional violence with social and political ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. My reliance on the frame of reproductive justice anchors this study in an intersectional perspective that allows room for the diverse experiences of Native women as they themselves understand them to guide the overall inquiry. However, my research questions are complicated by the extraordinarily complex and fractured bureaucratic organization of IHS as well as the multiple physical and ideological locations from which Native women seek health care. In this book, I focus specifically on three factors salient to Native women’s health-care experiences: the function of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in reproductive health care as this health care serves the interests of settler colonialism; the organizational neglect and institutional control of reproductive health care within IHS (what I call the “double discourse” of imperialist medicine), which emerges from multiple locations; and the tensions between what Native women want and need and what they can access. These areas of focus allow me to trace the production of health care for Native people as a legal right emerging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treaty negotiations and illustrate the material consequences of decisions made by seemingly abstract forces elsewhere and elsewhen from Native women themselves. Additionally, the impacts of local and community structures on the health, health care, and care-seeking behaviors of Native women emerged as a theme in this research, and therefore, relying on a reproductive justice framework, I make note of the profoundly social nature of health for Native women as they navigate multiple marginalizations in their health care, but also call upon multiple resources to negotiate these marginalizations.

The forces that produce these tensions include not only the decisions of key elite parties (often based on competing interests), but also broad social, political, and economic processes. For example, because IHS is a federal agency that works throughout the contiguous United States and Alaska, the boundaries of IHS are frequently permeated by the national organization of health care as well as the government’s relationship with Native nations. This is particularly relevant when considering reproductive health care, an often contentious area of political debate and one that is frequently used as a political bargaining chip. As well, the role of the government in organizing its own relationship with Tribal nations reflects a deep ambivalence about indigeneity, an ambivalence that leads to a double discourse in the political and cultural economies of sovereignty, dependence, assimilation, and resistance. It thus becomes necessary in this research to incorporate a deliberate interrogation of the State and its role in determining the shape and purpose of reproductive health care, particularly in marginalized communities.

However, the State itself must be understood broadly. Theorists differ widely in how they understand “the State” and particularly the varied powers and authorities of State apparatuses: many argue that the State is inherently racial, organizing racial formations and the exclusions and inclusions associated with it (Goldberg 2002; Omi and Winant 1994); others argue that the State is essentially patriarchal, producing and reifying structures of inequality which rely on binary, essentialist, and hierarchical constructions of sex and gender (Connell 1990; Eisenstein 1981). Still others focus on the role of capitalism and class inequalities in the production of a “welfare State” (Abramovitz 1996; Haney 2000). More recently, the State is understood from an increasingly intersectional perspective that attempts to understand the roles of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social constructions of identity in the production or erasure of citizenship experiences (Cantu 2009; Rosen 2009; Smith 2006).

The State is, in fact, all of these things, and therefore is almost immeasurably variable, dynamic, and fluctuating. Although I acknowledge the necessarily porous nature of any definition of the State, when I refer to the State in this book I have in mind the diverse set of institutions subject to management by the ruling apparatuses located in the federal government. This understanding, already somewhat ambiguous, is further complicated by the changing motivations of these apparatuses, which are inherently fractured and often contradictory, directed by individuals, agencies, legislatures, and courts that are themselves frequently driven by competing interests and marked by poor communication. Nonetheless, despite the seeming inconsistencies often found in federal policy and practice, these multiple State parties both produce and mediate State interests, and ultimately serve State purposes. In the case of Native America, as I will argue, the State’s underlying but driving aim is disappearance, either by extermination or through assimilation, into a (fictive) collective ethnicity (which is always already raced, gendered, and sexed).

Not only federal apparatuses, but also regional states (such as South Dakota, where Pine Ridge Reservation is located) and Tribal councils influence the reproductive health care available to Native women. The Indian Health Service is accountable in different ways to all of these. Further, IHS is institutionally linked to and deeply influenced by lateral organizations in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) where it is located, particularly the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the commissioned corps of the US Public Health Service (USPHS), and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare.

Additionally to these institutional complexities, Indian Country itself is a complex and dynamic location for study. (The term “Indian Country” was statutorily defined in 1948 by 18 U.S.C. 1151 as land within the limits of an Indian reservation, all dependent Indian communities within the United States, and all Indian allotments. The term “Indian Country” has also come to denote not only physical space but also the cultural and intellectual space predominantly influenced by Native America.)

In early 2014 there are 566 federally recognized Tribes, not all of whom have a federally recognized land base (known as a reservation in most of the contiguous United States). There are several dozen more recognized only on the level of one of the fifty states, and several dozen more than that seeking some level of recognition. All of these Tribes and nations, of course, have their own distinct cultures, languages, cosmologies, histories, and relationships with the United States.

Further complicating this dynamic is the imposition of political boundaries designating the “homes” of certain nations as here, or there, or somewhere in between. Additionally, approximately 78 percent of Native people do not live on a reservation land base, but reside in urban centers and other non-reservation communities (Norris, Vines, and Hoeffel 2012), although reservations continue to provide the controlling image of Native America in the twenty-first century.

Thinking about Settler Colonialism

Given these complexities, a degree of generalization becomes necessary in any discussion of Indian Country; as Native scholar and poet Paula Gunn Allen explained, “One of the articles of faith among people who write about and study Native Americans is their diversity” (1991, 205). Allen’s work confirmed that “while the distinctions among native communities are many, and . . . the differences are vast, the similarities are far greater and much more profound” (205). She viewed the deliberate reification of separate Indian nations as a tool of colonization, for “united they resist conquest” (206). Choctaw scholar Devon Mihesuah presents a similar argument, contending tha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Commonly Used Acronyms
• Part I. Introductions: The Stories We Tell and Why
• Part II. Tracing the Ruling Relations: Health Care, the Reproductive Body, and Native America
• Part III. Consequences of the Double Discourse: Native Women’s Experiences with the Indian Health Service
• Part IV. Reproductive Justice for Native Women
• Appendix A: Methods and Methodologies
• Appendix B: A Brief Chronology of Federal Actions Affecting Native Health Care
• References
• Index
• About the Author
• Footnotes