indigenous women

Whether we like it or not, the legacy of colonization has shaped Canadian society and continues to permeate its political practices. Since 2008, the Harper government has made major cuts to aboriginal health and school funding, turned a blind eye to the over 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, refused to share residential school documents with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, dropped land claim negotiations, stood by as Aboriginal youth suicide rates hit crisis levels, and attempted to erode environmental protection laws enshrined in First Nations treaties.

Earlier in this series I did a post on the bluestockings and a Facebook commenter suggested I do a follow-up piece on Japanese anarchist feminists. I thought now would be a good opportunity to mention them and some more feminerd forerunners from around the globe, including Kurdistan, Indigenous North America, and even ancient Babylon.

If we're going to talk about voluntary sterilization—or even the simple act of opting to have few or no children—we've got to get everyone on the same historical page. While I tend to take for granted that people understand the history of forced sterilization in the U.S., as well as countries such as China that mandate single-child families as part of population control, it may not be a given that everyone understands the connections between modern eugenics, race/class/ability privilege, reproductive justice, and the struggle for voluntary sterilization. Much as I know loads of folks use it as a jumping off point, skimming the Wikipedia entries for compulsory sterilization and eugenics in the United States only gets you so far.