The Genocide Continues: Population Control and the Sterilization of Indigenous Women

Indigenous Peoples in Canada have experienced coerced sterilization under eugenics legislation since the 1930s, and the violence has never stopped, even though eugenics fell into disrepute. In The Genocide Continues, Karen Stote traces the historical, political, economic and policy context informing the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women from 1970 onward. She shows how a powerful idea paved the way for the expanded violations of Indigenous People’s bodies and futures. That idea was population control -- a concern with who occupied land and how resources were distributed -- and it was a central thread guiding public health interventions from eugenics to family planning.

The Genocide Continues offers new insights to show how federal, provincial and corporate activities intersected to criminalize and regulate Indigenous reproduction. Saskatchewan, which first established family planning policies in the 1970s and is now the province with the highest number of Indigenous women coming forward with experiences of coerced sterilization, is Stote’s case study to demonstrate why family planning activities consistently targeted Indigenous women.

Stote weaves compelling archival evidence with principled storytelling to connect violence against Indigenous bodies to violence against Indigenous lands. Unless and until colonialism, extractivism and dispossession are addressed, a genocide against Indigenous peoples will continue.

Karen Stote is a queer settler with Irish, Scottish and English roots who grew up on the unceded territories of the Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) and L’nu (Mi’kmaw) Peoples. She is associate professor in women and gender studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, located within the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe, Chonnonton and Haudenosaunee peoples. She teaches on Indigenous-settler history, feminism and the politics of decolonization, and issues of reproductive and environmental justice. She has been researching the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women for nearly 20 years and is the author of An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women. She has served as expert witness and appeared before the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights and the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health in their investigations into coerced sterilization in Canada, and she is regularly consulted by other researchers and media. She is a SSHRC-funded scholar whose work has appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, Native American and Indigenous Studies and Sacred Bundles Unborn, 2nd Edition.