"Indigenous peoples across the globe suffer a disproportionate burden of both mental and physical illness relative to Settler populations. A substantial body of research indicates that colonialism and its associated processes are important determinants of Indigenous peoples' health.
"In the mid-1880s, the Department of Indian Affairs launched an investigation into claims by Indian signatories to Treaty Six that the government was not honoring its treaty commitments. Because its own records were flawed, the department instructed its employees to gather Indian recollections and oral testimonies and relied on this information when it concluded that some treaty obligations did remain unfilled.
"Between 1942 and 1952, some of Canada’s leading nutrition experts, in cooperation with various federal departments, conducted an unprecedented series of nutritional studies of Aboriginal communities and residential schools. The most ambitious and perhaps best known of these was the 1947–1948 James Bay Survey of the Attawapiskat and Rupert’s House Cree First Nations.
"Between 1928 and 1972, the Alberta Eugenics Board ordered an estimated 2,822 people sterilized under the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act.1 The government-appointed Eugenics Board had labelled these people as ‘feeble-minded,’ or ‘mentally-defective,’ and decided that they were unfit to have children.
"This essay explores a particular aspect of the twentieth-century history of Indigenous peoples. The forced sterilization campaign that targeted Indian women in twentieth-century North America and its links to eugenic ideologies remain understudied. While the US and Canadian governments funded these campaigns, according to available estimates, tens of thousands of Indigenous women were compulsorily sterilized.
"Based on government archival sources, fieldwork and the historical perspectives, experiences and oral histories of Aboriginal peoples, this paper argues that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian policy, and more specifically the File Hills farm colony, was deeply influenced by betterment discourses.
"Scholarship on Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act (1928-1972) has focused on the high-level politics behind the legislation, its main administrative body, the Eugenics Board, and its legal legacy, overlooking the largely female-dominated professions that were responsible for operating the program outside of the provincial mental health institutions. This paper investigates the relationship between eugenics and the professions of teaching, public health nursing, and social work.
"An historical analysis of reproductive politics in the Canadian North during the 1970s necessitates a careful reading of the local circumstances regarding feminism, sovereignty, language, colonialism, and access to health services, which differed regionally and culturally. These features were conditioned, however, by international discussions on family planning that fixated on the twinned concepts of unchecked population growth and poverty.
"Between 1929 and 1972, the Alberta Eugenics Board recommended that 4739 residents of the province be sterilized. However, only 60% of these individuals, 2834 in total, were ultimately sterilized since the legislation under which the Eugenics Board operated required patient consent to be obtained unless the individual recommended for sterilization was diagnosed as “mentally defective.” Women, teenagers and young adults, and Aboriginals were particularly targeted by the Alberta Eugenics Board.
"The Province of Alberta in Canada was the only jurisdiction in the British Empire where a eugenic sterilization law was passed (in 1928) and vigorously implemented. The pace of sterilization orders accelerated during the Nazi era and remained high after World War II, terminating only in 1972 when the Sexual Sterilization Act was repealed. The Alberta Eugenics Board operated away from public and legislative scrutiny, and many things done in the name of eugenics were clearly illegal.
