NM lawmakers plan truth and reconciliation for forced sterilizations

Monday, February 9, 2026

February 9, 2026 | Antonia Gonzales

For decades, Native women and other women of color were subjected to forced sterilization by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service.

New Mexico lawmakers introduced a memorial last week to create a truth and reconciliation commission that would conduct a study into the history, and continuing impacts of this abuse.

KUNM’s Jeanette DeDios (Jicarilla Apache and Diné) has this report.

Senate memorial 14 includes research dating to the 1970s which shows between 25%-50% of Indigenous women were sterilized, with some of the highest incidents occurring in New Mexico.

The memorial would develop a plan to create a state truth and reconciliation commission to research and find all cases of sterilization in the state, gather survivor testimony, and review and recommend educational policy.

Keely Badger is a human rights advocate who wrote her dissertation on the forced sterilization of Native women.

Lawmakers asked her about challenges finding and accessing records.

“I do think that the requests have to come from an official state body, official agencies, to get to the heart of this information. It is going to be more than one person’s ability to accumulate this information.”

She says this may have been intentional by the states.

“At a national level, they have sealed some of these records for a reason, in the same way that a lot of the information about the boarding school system was very challenging; took decades and decades of research to accumulate to get to a point where we could have a national apology.

“I believe that this is one of those situations where it is going to require real political will and advocacy from civil society groups to get to the real heart of this from a national perspective.”

If the memorial goes into law, New Mexico would be the first state in the nation to formally investigate and acknowledge these violations.

The memorial will head to the senate floor for a vote and if passed, will go to the House of Representatives.

Good Talks

Merle Locke's Ledger Art

By Blog Editor Trace Hentz

I had warned last year that the news was becoming less frequent, that not many stories are being written about adoptees, 60s Scoop and Stolen Generations.   Mostly because the internet has changed and is slowly eroding with a.i. slop, it's harder to find relevant articles to share with you.  But I will keep looking.

I wish you could have been with me at the kitchen table in Porcupine, South Dakota, in the early 1990s.  First, I met Lakota ledger artist Merle Locke at an art show in Oregon, and told him I was trying to write children's stories about a Lakota boy named Redman. He told me to go meet his sister in Porcupine, and she might be able to help me.

Merle's sister Ellowyn was a traditional Oglala, a descendant of Crazy Horse's people, and she was fluent in Lakota.  She was traditional in every way.  I wrote to her, since she didn't have a phone, and asked if I could visit. She wrote back, "yes."

Like meeting anyone new, it takes time and good talks to get to know one another.  I had not met my birthfather Earl yet; that happened later in 1994.  I was honest with her:  I didn't know what tribe or tribes I was, and was still searching for answers.  I explained all that.

Thankfully in Seattle, I was going to "good talks" given by Steven Little Coyote, Northern Cheyenne, who was also traditional. His tribe are "brothers" to the Lakota, so they share many teachings. I learned from Steven, and he helped me to contact the Sundance Medicine Man in Rosebud, to get permission to come to the Sundance in August. I planned to go there first then drive to Pine Ridge and Porcupine to meet Ellowyn.  It was necessary I find out what I needed to do and what not to do, and bring food, gifts and money, etc.

After meeting Ellowyn, I went back every year to see her.  Sitting at her kitchen table, I took pages of notes, writing down "history" from her perspective, and history she had saved on paper to share with me.  The version of history we are given in "school" is either false, wrong, or simply made-up.  I didn't know that.  I knew so little. I still am learning. 

My entire world changed at that kitchen table. I do this blog so you can sit with me, and I'll share what I find.

Mitakuye Oyasin, Ellowyn told me, means we are ALL RELATED.  All of us.  She said that was the most important teaching of all.

 

 

Any “Healing” Conversation must be Grounded in Truth

SUBSTACK: We examine the U.S. government’s Federal Indian Boarding School Report, often framed as a historic apology. We analyze its language, its focus on “assimilation” and “dispossession,” and what it reveals—and obscures—about domination, genocide, and the continuing structure of federal Indian policy

The FEDERAL INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL REPORT: Apology, Assimilation, Domination by Peter d'Errico

More than a historical document—it’s the ongoing reality of domination, land dispossession, and the attempted erasure of entire peoples.

Read on Substack

As we walk through volumes one and two of the report, we look beyond the bureaucratic language and euphemisms to examine how these so called boarding schools functioned as prisons for children — an admitted tool in the overall program to seize Indigenous lands.

We connect the report’s own admissions—about cultural “assimilation,” forced citizenship, and the U.S. government’s ‘trust’ doctrine—to the broader system that tried to destroy Indigenous nationhood while training Native children to identify with “our nation,” the United States, instead of their own peoples.

In this discussion, we also bring in powerful firsthand accounts and historical testimony that the official report only partially grapples with: the chaining and flogging of children, the dungeons and unmarked graves, the parents imprisoned for resisting the kidnapping of their own sons and daughters.

We don’t dwell on these stories to shock, but to insist that any “healing” conversation must be grounded in truth—truth about genocide, about land theft, and about a still active domination system that did not end when the schools closed.

We talk about what a rightful education looks like, about how language shapes identity, and why “remembrance” without legal change serves to mask the operations of the ongoing system.

We encourage you to watch and listen to this conversation and then explore the resources linked with it, including the Boarding School reports themselves and the book Massacre by Robert Gesner.

Resources:

“Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report” –

Volume I - https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf

Volume II - https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/media_document/doi_federal_indian_boarding_school_initiative_investigative_report_vii_final_508_compliant.pdf

“Indian Civilization Act” (1819) - https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/3/STATUTE-3-Pg516b.pdf

“Report of the Committee, to whom was referred so much of the President’s message as relates to the civilization of the Indian tribes” - https://www.loc.gov/item/ca25001025/

“Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide” - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4ds5

Robert Gessner, Massacre; a survey of today’s American Indian - https://archive.org/details/massacresurveyof0000gess_i8w6

 

 

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Monday, February 2, 2026

This Is Our America: Mourning, Memory and Healing on Minneapolis’ Eat Street Reporters Notebook: MINNEAPOLIS — Nicollet Avenue in South Minneapolis was lit with trees trimmed in clear lights on Sunday afternoon.  Read More : https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/this-is-our-america-mourning-memory-and-healing-on-minneapolis-eat-street