A Whole Way to be A Woman: Decolonizing Indigenous Reproduction in the 1970s and 1980s

In 1977, men and women from the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy joined in Loon Lake, New York, for a conference on sovereignty.  The group identified “control of reproduction” as one of sovereignty’s five essential components and pointed to a resurgence in midwifery as one way Native women were already reclaiming this control.  Katsi Cook, a Mohawk mother who attended the conference, helped spread this message at the first annual meetings of Women of All Red Nations (WARN) in 1978 and 1979.  Much of the scholarship on the women’s health movement skims over Cook and other WARN women’s health-related activism and ignores the work of less-known Native women entirely.  This paper examines the women’s health movement by placing Native women at the center of the analysis. I use oral histories to explore how Native women in the Plains—primarily South Dakota and Montana—attempted to “decolonize” pregnancy and childbirth in the 1970s and early 1980s.  Many of these women did not identify as activists, and only a few shared Cook’s enthusiasm for midwifery.  Yet in various ways these women responded to abuses Native women faced in the government health system and worked to counter the colonial erasure of Indigenous birthing cultures.  The paper further explores why despite some Native women’s willingness to collaborate with national women’s health organizations, most of my interviewees understood their task as fundamentally different from that of other women’s groups.