Forced?

 

Indigenous women in Canada were being forcibly sterilized by state sponsored eugenics operations as recently as 2019.  A report last year concluded “this horrific practice is not confined to the past, but clearly is continuing today.”  In May of 2023, a doctor was caught forcibly sterilizing an Indigenous woman.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220722024420/https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/441/RIDR/reports/2022-07-14_ForcedSterilization_E.pdf

The growing enthusiasm for eugenics thinking reached Canadian borders in the first half of the 20th century.  Even though forced sterilisation was already common throughout the territory, the Province of Alberta officially enacted the Sexual Sterilization Act (SSA) in 1928, followed in 1933 by British Columbia.  Considered the first Canadian eugenics law, this act legalised and regulated the sterilisation of mentally-disabled individuals.

Aggressive assimilation policies quickly extended these measures to Indigenous communities such as the Inuit, Indian, and Métis people.  While it is difficult to provide an accurate estimate, researchers agree that Indigenous women were disproportionately targeted.  Between 1966 and 1976, over 10,000 women would have undergone forced sterilisation in public hospitals, residential schools, and mental facilities.  And It has continued since then in more subtle and nefarious ways.

READ MORE:

https://open.substack.com/pub/gavinmounsey/p/why-i-still-do-not-celebrate-canada?r=cbskx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false 

Vermont’s Uncomfortable Eugenics History

Dormancy Concept Trailer from Luke Becker-Lowe on Vimeo.

Dormancy: A 1930's Vermont Film

Eugenics- noun

noun plural but singular in construction

-  eu·gen·ics    yu̇-ˈjen-iks

A science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed

 

 

DormancyTrailerProRes from Luke Becker-Lowe on Vimeo.

A former U-32 student is back in Vermont to make a movie about the state’s infamous eugenics era.

Luke Becker-Lowe, fellow film students from Emerson College in Boston and a cast of 20 were at the Center for Arts and Learning on Barre Street Saturday and Sunday, filming scenes that staged the sterilization of subjects.

The film is based on the Vermont Eugenics Program that followed a 1931 law legalizing the sterilization of “idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded or insane persons residing in state institutions.” Vermont’s eugenics program, headed by University of Vermont Prof. Harry F. Perkins, led to the sterilization of 253 people, mostly women, between 1931 and 1957, according to UVM’s website.

Becker-Lowe said growing up on dirt roads in central Vermont gave him an appreciation of backwoods life, unique characters and the challenges they face. He is also a fan of 20th century period films that reflect social and cultural shifts over time. Their project, “Dormancy,” was a response to and a reflection of a new era of political and social intolerance in America that serves as a sobering lesson, he said. 

via Filmmakers Explore Vermont’s Uncomfortable Eugenics History

 Eugenics target Pirate Families and Indians?

Lucy Cannon Neel, Chairperson of the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs presented at the Benson Village School on December 21, 2016. Lucy shared about the history and continued presence (of Indians in Vermont)…

READ: Teach the Children Well

Vermont Eugenics: When our branding wasn’t so sweet | Rutland Reader

Excerpt: …Founded in 1925 by University of Vermont zoology professor Henry F. Perkins, the Eugenics Survey of Vermont was built on the “belief in the existence of racial stereotypes,” and “accepted the myth that certain people (particularly those of northern Europe) possess a monopoly of desired characteristics, and thought that human differences were invariably caused by heredity.”

Armed with these beliefs, Perkins and his supporters went out into the hills and valleys of Vermont searching for, studying and analyzing the so-called data on the “pirate families,” those who lived on houseboats and had French-Canadian ancestry; “gypsy families,” those with the dark-skin of African-American, Abenaki or French-Canadian descent; “chorea families,” those with the illness Huntington’s Chorea; and other “defectives.” [Hunting them down? OMG]

The categorization of these “inadequates” included: illiterate, illegitimate, insane, thief, queer, pauper, immoral, dishonest, rapist, sex offender, syphilitic, untruthful, epileptic, twin, stillborn, dependent, alcoholic, speech defect, “just not right,” harelip, “a little odd,” sloppy, light-fingered, “smoked and chewed at age 12,” wild, wanderer, cruel, deserted husband or wife, one-eyed, tuberculosis, poor memory, breach of peace, shiftless, degenerate.     [OK OK… I am several of these, including illegitimate/adopted. How about you?]

The Eugenics Survey of Vermont

seems pretty recent to me

Source: Vermont Eugenics

Footnote:  Well well well… A Zoology Professor was in charge of eugenics in Vermont – this explains so much… His worldview of Indians was obviously “wild savages.”  Again, I bet you never heard this news/history in your textbooks and I know how this kind of BAD His-Story shocks people in a bad way.

PS: My ancestry includes Anishiaabe and French Canadian from Quebec/Ottawa which makes me so very happy to be alive…  I'm a Pirate who is still “here…”

***

EUGENICS: ‘Reprograming the Human Genome’, The Hidden History of Bar Harbor, MAINE…William E. Castle was an organizing member of the Second International Congress of Eugenics (New York, 1921) which in 1922 dissolved into the American Eugenics Society (AES) which was funded by America’s powerful industrial elite.

First Nations Canada: Eugenics

 

Seven facts about eugenics in Canada

• Of the more than 3000 eugenic sterilizations in Canada, the vast majority were performed in Alberta under the direction of a Eugenics Board.
• While eugenic sterilization waned across the world following the end of the Second World War in 1945, Alberta’s sterilization program continued until the repeal of the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta in 1972.
• Leilani Muir won a landmark lawsuit against the province of Alberta in 1996 for wrongful confinement and sterilization; two documentaries, The Sterilization of Leilani Muir (1996) and Surviving Eugenics (2015) engage general audiences with issues that the case and its aftermath raise, and their significance for Canadians today.
• The explicit or implicit grounds for eugenic sterilization were typically that a person’s undesirable mental or physical disabilities were thought to be heritable, and that such a person was thus unsuitable to parent.
• Although central amongst those targeted by eugenic practices were people with a variety of disabilities, many children institutionalized, sterilized, and otherwise subject to eugenic practices in Canada did not in fact have disabilities.
• Members of other marginalized groups–single mothers, First Nations and Métis people, eastern Europeans, and poor people—were disproportionately represented amongst those subjected to eugenic ideas and practices, such as sterilization.
• The legacy of eugenics, expressed in sterilization laws and in social policies concerning immigration, schooling, and prenatal screening, remains with us today.

 SEE MORE

Adoption Secrecy and Truths #flipthescript #NAAM2014

“My problem is secrecy. I believe that perpetually secret adoptions assure un-accountability and lack of transparency. And secret adoptions are only the tip of the iceberg. The secrecy permeates the process: secret identities, secret parents, secret records, secret foster care providers, secret social workers, secret judges and lawyers (all their identities are sealed, typically), secret physicians, secret statistics and, in the case of some adoption-oriented organizations, secret budgets and secret boards of directors. In any social practice, when people in positions of power hide behind masks, one can be pretty sure that they have something to hide.”

-        Albert S. Wei,

-        Special Advisor to the Bastard Nation Executive Committee

“Everyone has a right to knowledge about their lineage, genealogy and identity. And if they don’t, then it will lead to cases of incest...”

-Lord David Alton quoted after married adoptee twins were granted annulment in Great Britain (January 2008)

“Storytelling is an important aspect of Ojibwe culture. My ability to tell a good tale can be used as a tool for teaching and connecting. Even though I grew up outside of my Native community and culture, my stories helped me to become a part of the community that I had lost. Adoption is part of the contemporary tales that Native people need to tell…”

- Tamara Buffalo, published author-poet-visual artist

…Adoption professionals who believed in making adoption work believed that it was a “social crime” to place inferior children with parents who expected — and deserved — normal children. Agencies sometimes required parents to return children if and when abnormal characteristics appeared and laws, such as the Minnesota Adoption Law of 1917, treated feeble-mindedness as cause for annulment.  Medical writers in the popular press warned parents to “be careful whom you adopt.” Adopters faced frightening risks because children unlucky enough to need new parents were also unlucky enough to be genetic lemons.

             [Read about Eugenics: www.darkwing.uoregon.edu]

Excerpt from One Small Sacrifice

Danger was an enduring theme in modern adoption history. The genetic lemon theory was heard around the world, I guess.  I read about eugenics.      

Feeling “adopted” made it seem like they did me a great big favor! How heroic for them to adopt - when I could be dangerous or the “bad seed” of immoral unintelligent people.

I never heard, “Tracy was illegitimate or she is someone’s dirty little secret!” but I knew it’s what people were thinking. Obviously my parents were wildly happy to get us as babies, praised for doing such a selfless act. They hid any uneasiness. Since my adopted sibling and I were not biological offspring, if we didn’t turn out ok, then it can’t totally be their fault. 

Funny, I always seemed to know who was adopted. Our parents usually introduced us or we introduced ourselves as adopted. I had two friends named Kim and another friend Lisa who knew they were adopted. This became our bond, our shared identity.

No "orphaned child" can escape this– it is fact, a heart broken too often turns to stone.

- Trace L Hentz (formerly DeMeyer)

"Get out of the way" & Aboriginal suicide rates will drophttp://thestringer.com.au/get-out-of-the-way-aboriginal-suicide-rates-wi...

16 Nov 14: "Please return our son because my wife cannot go on without him, she will suicide, please return our son," wrote a Noongar father and husband to the Western Australian Government's Chief Protector in 1905.
"The fundamental issues which underpin suicide rates nationally vary from cultural group to cultural group, geopolitically and demographically. The fundamentals that underpin suicide rates of some First Peoples communities are vastly different to those of non-Aboriginal communities. The Western Australian Government’s recent statements that 100 to 150 remote Aboriginal communities should be closed makes it clear that lessons from the past have not been learned. ... " By The Stringer
"Declaration of conflict of interest - the author of this article, Gerry Georgatos is a suicide prevention researcher and a senior national consultant to the ATSISPEP (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention Evaluation Project)"