Reproduction on the Reservation

Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century

Brianna Theobald

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469653174
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women's reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women's resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been--and remain--reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.

CHAPTER ONE

Childbearing and Childrearing

A year or two before her husband, Goes Ahead, scouted for General George Armstrong Custer in the fateful Battle of the Little Bighorn, a young Crow woman named Pretty Shield gave birth to her first child. When Pretty Shield went into labor, her mother and Left-hand, a “wise-one”—healer and midwife—directed her to a lodge constructed for birthing. Once in the lodge, Left-hand placed four live coals on the ground in each cardinal direction and dropped grass on each coal. She then instructed Pretty Shield to “walk as though you are busy.” As Pretty Shield recalled the experience decades later, the delivery proceeded quickly from that point: “I had stepped over the second coal when I saw that I should have to run if I reached my bed-robe in time. I jumped the third coal, and the fourth, knelt down on my robe, took hold of the two stakes; and my first child, Pine-fire, was there with us.” Left-hand wrapped a strip of tanned buffalo skin around Pretty Shield’s waist to help expel the afterbirth, cleaned and dressed Pine-fire, and left the infant in the care of her mother and grandmother.1 The story of Pretty Shield’s first delivery reveals key features of a Crow birthing culture: she labored in a female-only space, and knowledgeable—in Left-hand’s case powerful—older women played a critical role in her experience.

In the decades after Pine-fire’s birth, Pretty Shield and other Crows experienced major changes to their way of life, as formerly dispersed people relocated to a new and reduced reservation and government employees and missionaries sought to transform the Crow people’s world. Despite hardship and demoralization, Crows persisted and in fact proved remarkably adaptive. Barney Old Coyote Jr., a Crow educator and spokesman, later argued that “flexibility” was Crow society’s “greatest strength.”2 In the realm of biological reproduction, a Crow birthing culture endured the disruptions of early reservation life, albeit not without adaptation to colonial circumstances.

This chapter explores Crow reproduction from the 1880s through the early 1900s, the years after Pine-fire’s birth and the first decades after Crows’ relocation to the flatland along the Little Bighorn River. Relying on oral histories, contemporary ethnographic sources, and recollections recorded in the early twentieth century, the chapter establishes the parameters of a Crow birthing culture as it existed in the years surrounding the turn of the century. The above account of Pretty Shield’s delivery provides only a glimpse of a longer reproductive process extending at least from pregnancy, if not before, through early infant care. As in many Indigenous societies, Crow reproduction was not only a biological process but a social, cultural, and spiritual one. Gender roles, clan and kin relationships, and a distinctly nonnuclear conception of child care that I call “flexible childrearing” were expressed and buttressed through reproductive practices.3 The chapter further considers government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy and childbirth in the early reservation years. Through the turn of the century, Native reproduction was a source of fascination for many Euro-Americans, including Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) employees.4 Although the reproductive process remained almost entirely outside government purview, reservation employees scrutinized and theorized women’s reproductive practices. Ultimately, Native reproduction, much like Native family life more broadly, came to occupy a significant symbolic and material position in the federal government’s assimilationist agenda.

Crow Life after “Nothing Happened”

Before the nineteenth century, Crows had minimal contact with Euro-Americans. According to the tribal historian Joseph Medicine Crow, the ancestors of modern-day Crows originally migrated from northeastern North America, crossing the Mississippi River during the 1500s. The bands that would eventually become the Crow Nation separated from the Hidatsa sometime in the seventeenth century and traveled farther west to present-day northern Wyoming and southern Montana, where they created a new homeland.5 After acquiring horses in the early eighteenth century, Crows developed a lifestyle of mobility in a land equipped with water, vegetation, and game. As Arapooish, a Crow chief, explained in the nineteenth century, “The Crow country is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it exactly in the right place.”6 Crows lived and traveled first in two and then in three groups: the River Crow resided in the plains between the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, the Mountain Crow dwelled in the mountain ranges to the south, and the Kicked in The Bellies splintered off from the Mountain Crows.7

Life changed dramatically for Native peoples in the West in the nineteenth century. Like other Plains Indians, Crows established closer relationships with Euro-American fur traders early in the century. The growth of the fur trade in the region intensified military conflict between Crows and their Native neighbors, including the Blackfeet, Cheyenne, and Lakota, as these groups increasingly competed for environmental resources, Euro-American goods, and commercial opportunities. Crows also established a more formal relationship with the federal government during this period. In 1825, leaders signed the tribe’s first treaty with the United States, a pledge of friendship to which the former has remained faithful.8 At midcentury, the U.S. government transferred the OIA from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior, a transition that did not mean the end of military violence but that signaled the federal government’s shift toward the reservation era. In 1851, Crow and other Plains Indian leaders signed the first Fort Laramie Treaty, in which the U.S. government recognized 33 million acres in present-day Montana and Wyoming as Crow land. In a second Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government recognized only 8 million acres as Crow land, and other Plains Nations faced similar reductions. Despite repeated betrayals, Crow leaders maintained a military alliance with the United States, and Crow warriors fought alongside the U.S. military in a series of battles against the Lakota, their primary rivals in the region, in the 1860s and 1870s.9

In the early 1880s, U.S. officials reduced Crow land still further and moved the tribe’s agency headquarters to its current location along the Little Bighorn River. The once-dispersed people moved to their newly bounded reservation in 1884, settling in decentralized groups according to band and kin networks. The government eventually subdivided the reservation around these settlements, creating five bureaucratic districts. (A sixth would be added in the first decade of the twentieth century.)10 Additional land reductions followed. In 1890, 1899, and 1904, government representatives persuaded Crow leaders to agree to land cessions. These cessions followed the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, the centerpiece of policy makers’ objective to privatize Indian land. Policy makers and social reformers hoped that allotment would transform the way Native Americans related to land and to one another. To the delight of encroaching Euro-American settlers, it also facilitated the transfer of vast swaths of land from Native to non-Native hands. The Crow Nation lost more than three-quarters of its homeland during the allotment era, which continued until the early 1930s.11

The Crow Reservation.

Although policy makers envisioned the reservation system as an “alternative to extinction,” for many groups the first decades of reservation life were characterized by suffering and death.12 Crows struggled to survive within new geographic constraints at the same moment that the buffalo almost completely disappeared from the region, depriving them and their Native neighbors of sustenance and their livelihoods.13 Increasingly reliant on inadequate government rations, some families endured extreme hunger.14 Malnutrition, combined with a forced sedentary lifestyle, created the conditions for the rapid spread of diseases. At Crow as elsewhere, these circumstances resulted in an alarming demographic decline. The historian Frederick Hoxie has concluded that nearly one-third of the Crow population died in the 1890s, and youth were disproportionately affected. The demise of the younger generation had demographic consequences into the next century.15

Pretty Shield was a young mother during these dislocations. Like many of her peers and many Crow elders, she found life on the reservation disorienting and demoralizing. Decades later, she refused to talk about this period, insisting “there is nothing to tell, because we did nothing.”16 Pretty Shield responded not only to her people’s newly restricted mobility and the morbidity and mortality she witnessed but also to the new set of expectations that government employees and missionaries imposed on her people. In the decades after the Civil War, policy makers, social reformers, and government bureaucrats embarked on a multifaceted campaign to assimilate Native peoples. Many optimistically believed that Indians could be transformed into American citizens quickly, perhaps within a single generation. Crows had mostly managed to evade these ad hoc assimilation efforts before the 1880s, but the government’s presence and reach increased after the move to the Little Bighorn.17

Along with land reform, the education of Native children was a cornerstone of the government’s assimilationist agenda. Social reformers and policy makers reasoned that at boarding schools, separated from their families, Native youth could be trained to reject their cultural beliefs and practices and adopt English, Christianity, and Western ways.18 The government had operated a boarding school for Crow children in the 1870s, which Pretty Shield briefly attended, but the school rarely attracted more than a dozen Crow students at any given time.19 In subsequent decades, the Indian Service resorted to more coercive measures to enforce attendance at the new government school at Crow Agency, methods that employees simultaneously implemented on other reservations. Superintendents dispatched tribal policemen to act as truant officers, and they withheld rations from families that proved uncooperative. In some cases, authorities resorted to bribery and outright deceit.20

Native children later described the lengths to which their families went to resist these coercive methods. Tall Woman, a Navajo woman also known as Rose Mitchell, recalled the fear that accompanied policemen’s efforts to fill the reservation boarding school that was constructed in the 1880s: “I guess some children were snatched up and hauled over there because the policemen came across them while they were out herding, hauling water, or doing other things for the family. So we started to hide ourselves in different places whenever we saw strangers coming to where we were living.”21 Tom Tobacco, who first went to school in the late 1890s at the age of six or seven, had similar memories of Crow policemen, who traveled the reservation on horseback to “round [children] up just like rounding horses up.”22 The paternal grandmother of Robert Yellowtail, one of Tobacco’s contemporaries, took her grandson into the hills each day to avoid capture by policemen, just as she would later do with Robert’s younger siblings. Eventually, a member of the tribal police force discovered the duo and delivered Robert to Crow Agency.23

Government employees on the Crow Reservation were under significant pressure to fill the boarding school at Crow Agency in the late nineteenth century. These young women attended the school in the late 1890s and received academic, vocational, and assimilationist training at the government-run institution. Catalog number 955-926, Legacy Photograph Collection, Montana Historical Society (Helena, Montana).

Robert Yellowtail, like many Native children, later journeyed still farther from his family when he left Montana to attend a government boarding school in Riverside, California. Some of his peers attended Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, and his younger brother Thomas later attended Bacone Indian School in Oklahoma. At government or denominational boardi...