통제된 신체, 강제된 침묵: 1970년대 미국에서의 원주민 여성 강제 단종

초록

In the 1970s, it was revealed that thousands of Native American women in the United States had been sterilized without their consent or on the basis of incomplete information. This was not merely a failure of public health administration or a violation of medical ethics. Rather, it was a case of structural and institutional violence occurring at the intersection of the history of U.S. settler colonialism, racialized eugenics, gendered power relations, and discourses of poverty control. In particular, the fact that most of the victims were poor Native American women illustrates a typical case of intersectional oppression—an oppression that cannot be explained solely by their identity as women or as Indigenous people. Since the early twentieth century, the United States has implemented numerous forced sterilization policies grounded in eugenic logic, and these policies continued in transformed forms into the 1970s. While reproductive freedom and abortion rights were being increasingly discussed for white middle-class women, Native American women were denied even the right to bear children. In this way, reproductive rights have functioned as rights for some and as instruments of control for others. This paper seeks to analyze this reality of unequal reproductive politics. To this end, this paper first examines the historical background of American eugenics and Indian health policies, then explores the institutional conditions of forced sterilization by the Indian Health Service (IHS) in the 1970s, the testimonies of affected women, and the social resistance movements and legal responses led by Native women. Through this analysis, it emphasizes that this incident was not merely a past mistake but part of an ongoing structure of colonial reproductive control that persists to this day.

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