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. Lawmakers introduced a memorial Tuesday in the Senate Indian, Rural and Cultural Affairs committee to create a truth and reconciliation commission that would conduct a study into the history, and continuing impacts of this abuse.
Senate Memorial 14 includes research dating to the 1970s which shows between 25 and 50% percent of Indigenous women were sterilized, with some of the highest incidents occurring in New Mexico.
The memorial calls for the Indian Affairs Department and the Commission on the Status of Women to conduct a study into the history, scope and continuing impacts of forced sterilization on Indigenous women and women of color in New Mexico.
It 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, 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 said.
She said 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's going to require real political will and advocacy from civil society groups to get to the real heart of this from a national perspective,” she said.
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.
Support for this coverage comes from the Thornburg Foundation.
