Standing up Against Coerced Sterilization in the Health Care System
www.fnha.ca/about/news-and-events/news/standing-up-against-coerced-sterilization-in-the-health-care-system
www.fnha.ca/about/news-and-events/news/standing-up-against-coerced-sterilization-in-the-health-care-system
CBC White Coat Black Art interview with Dr. Brian Goldman
May 13, 2022: Sterilized
Author and activist Morningstar Mercredi is calling for coerced and forced sterilizations to be criminalized so that other women, especially Indigenous, Métis and Inuit women, won’t suffer the physical and mental trauma that she did.
www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/she-was-sterilized-without-her-consent-at-14-now-she-wants-the-practice-made-a-crime-1.6450647
May 13, 2022: Sterilized
Author and activist Morningstar Mercredi is calling for coerced and forced sterilizations to be criminalized so that other women, especially Indigenous, Métis and Inuit women, won’t suffer the physical and mental trauma that she did.
www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/she-was-sterilized-without-her-consent-at-14-now-she-wants-the-practice-made-a-crime-1.6450647
The Decibel
The Globe and Mail
pod.link/thedecibel/episode/c0bfcecced1bc3550fdf19748f9659e9
The fight to end forced sterilization of Indigenous women
Indigenous women are still being forcibly sterilized in Canada. That’s one thing that Sen. Yvonne Boyer wants Canadians to know. The senator, who is Métis herself and was formerly a nurse and a lawyer, has been fighting to raise awareness of this issue. She is also a part of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights that is currently examining the issue. Sen. Boyer discusses how her background inspired her to devote her life to ending forced sterilization procedures, how it’s part of the systemic racism Indigenous women face in Canada’s health care system and why addressing it is an important part of Canada’s reconciliation efforts.
The Globe and Mail
pod.link/thedecibel/episode/c0bfcecced1bc3550fdf19748f9659e9
The fight to end forced sterilization of Indigenous women
Indigenous women are still being forcibly sterilized in Canada. That’s one thing that Sen. Yvonne Boyer wants Canadians to know. The senator, who is Métis herself and was formerly a nurse and a lawyer, has been fighting to raise awareness of this issue. She is also a part of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights that is currently examining the issue. Sen. Boyer discusses how her background inspired her to devote her life to ending forced sterilization procedures, how it’s part of the systemic racism Indigenous women face in Canada’s health care system and why addressing it is an important part of Canada’s reconciliation efforts.
Marie Wilson, Commissioner
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2009-2015
Do not look away! Not if you care as much as you say you do. Read this book! For we still have a lot to learn about the worst of Canada’s modern-day history, and the best of the heroes emerging from its secrets.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has revealed much about our 150-year history of forced residential schooling for Indigenous children. But we are still learning about the devastating practices that often went along with those schools, and well beyond them…practices such as forced sterilization.
Some in our midst have had to live with this ugly secret, bearing its heavy, lonely weight. In Sacred Bundles Unborn, Survivor Morningstar Mercredi exposes the devastation of her own experience. She is the beating heart at the centre of this powerful collection, a multi-dimensional telling of a Canadian medical and political travesty. Her own story is amplified by the caring voices of prestigious human rights and medical experts, academics and social scientists, poets and artists. Each of their perspectives is poignant. Together, they chant a collective dirge for a societal practice that has cost the lives of countless unborn children, and the joys of countless would-have-been mothers.
Forced sterilization of Indigenous women has been a silent practice in modern-day Canada. Birth control and sterilization are not synonyms. One is decided by a woman about her own body for a self-determined length of time. The other is imposed by others on bodies not their own, for a permanent purpose -prevention of all future life. While political and medical decision-makers have justified it with attitudes of moral, intellectual or racial superiority, the practice went on as if invisible to the uncaring, tucked away behind the country’s reputation for human rights, and unknown to most Canadians. This powerful, unflinching collection ruptures that ignorance.
Morningstar, already an accomplished spoken word and performance artist, claims her full creativity with this bundle of tragic beauty, crying out to be read widely, and felt deeply. Bring your kleenex, for your tears may seep out of its pages. Welcome your outrage, for it is warranted. Enjoin your voice to the growing chorus of those who will sing loudly against such injustices still in our midst.
Sacred Bundles Unborn is a treasure offered up with all the illumination, determination and promise of a Morningstar.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2009-2015
Do not look away! Not if you care as much as you say you do. Read this book! For we still have a lot to learn about the worst of Canada’s modern-day history, and the best of the heroes emerging from its secrets.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has revealed much about our 150-year history of forced residential schooling for Indigenous children. But we are still learning about the devastating practices that often went along with those schools, and well beyond them…practices such as forced sterilization.
Some in our midst have had to live with this ugly secret, bearing its heavy, lonely weight. In Sacred Bundles Unborn, Survivor Morningstar Mercredi exposes the devastation of her own experience. She is the beating heart at the centre of this powerful collection, a multi-dimensional telling of a Canadian medical and political travesty. Her own story is amplified by the caring voices of prestigious human rights and medical experts, academics and social scientists, poets and artists. Each of their perspectives is poignant. Together, they chant a collective dirge for a societal practice that has cost the lives of countless unborn children, and the joys of countless would-have-been mothers.
Forced sterilization of Indigenous women has been a silent practice in modern-day Canada. Birth control and sterilization are not synonyms. One is decided by a woman about her own body for a self-determined length of time. The other is imposed by others on bodies not their own, for a permanent purpose -prevention of all future life. While political and medical decision-makers have justified it with attitudes of moral, intellectual or racial superiority, the practice went on as if invisible to the uncaring, tucked away behind the country’s reputation for human rights, and unknown to most Canadians. This powerful, unflinching collection ruptures that ignorance.
Morningstar, already an accomplished spoken word and performance artist, claims her full creativity with this bundle of tragic beauty, crying out to be read widely, and felt deeply. Bring your kleenex, for your tears may seep out of its pages. Welcome your outrage, for it is warranted. Enjoin your voice to the growing chorus of those who will sing loudly against such injustices still in our midst.
Sacred Bundles Unborn is a treasure offered up with all the illumination, determination and promise of a Morningstar.
SACRED BUNDLES UNBORN
Morningstar Mercredi and Fire Keepers
Roger Epp
University of Alberta
Forced sterilization, as the contributors to Sacred Bundles Unborn make clear, is the most intimate form of settler colonialism in Canada; it is, one writes, the “minutia of genocide.” It represents the long-standing presumption of medical professionals and a health system to decide whether Indigenous mothers are fit to bring Indigenous babies into the world. And, like so much of colonialism, there is no locking it up in the vaults of history; for the story is not over.
That story can resurface in an unguarded instant for individual survivors like Morningstar Mercredi, who, in her essay, describes a harrowing highway reaction to a radio interview and the long descent that followed. Or it can surface in the form of complaints that pushed the Saskatoon Health Authority to commission a report that, in 2017, documented a range of coercive tactics deployed against Indigenous women to have tubal ligations after childbirth. The co-author of that report, Yvonne Boyer, the Metis scholar and senator, fittingly contributes what she calls a letter to her grandchildren – a matter of privilege, she knows, since women like her Aunt Lucy were among those sterilized without their consent, but also a matter of responsibility to generations past and future and to peoples whose survival cannot be taken for granted.
The contributions to Sacred Bundles Unborn, stitched together by Jennifer Leason’s evocative images and poetry, are as jagged as lived experience; they are as sacred as a newborn; they are as direct, as personal, as graceful, and as angry as they need to be. They are the work of storytellers: lawyers, mothers, midwives, advocates, scholars, a filmmaker, and medical professionals – mostly Indigenous, mostly women, sometimes neither. This diversity is important for a number of reasons. First, it bears witness from different vantage points inside and outside the health care system. Second, it enlarges the circle of care, experience, and relevant knowledge; it insists that the book’s struggles ought to be shared by many more people than survivors alone. Third, and not least, it allows a wide range of readers – including people like this reviewer, a white settler, a man, a grandfather, with four generations of ancestors buried in Treaty Six territory – to find an entry point through which the horror-story of forced sterilization can reach deeply.
Sacred Bundles Unborn is both an act of gathering strength and a clear declaration. In the concluding essay, the Indigenous doctor Alika Lafontaine, who is president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association, writes that the same “hostile medical culture” that, for a century, could question whether Indigenous women “should retain the power of life and creation” is still “hiding in plain sight.”
This is, in other words, not an easy book. It should not be. While it will challenge medical professionals and unsettle Canadians who are easily satisfied by the platitudes of reconciliation, it must be part of the reckoning on the path to a different relationship.
Morningstar Mercredi and Fire Keepers
Roger Epp
University of Alberta
Forced sterilization, as the contributors to Sacred Bundles Unborn make clear, is the most intimate form of settler colonialism in Canada; it is, one writes, the “minutia of genocide.” It represents the long-standing presumption of medical professionals and a health system to decide whether Indigenous mothers are fit to bring Indigenous babies into the world. And, like so much of colonialism, there is no locking it up in the vaults of history; for the story is not over.
That story can resurface in an unguarded instant for individual survivors like Morningstar Mercredi, who, in her essay, describes a harrowing highway reaction to a radio interview and the long descent that followed. Or it can surface in the form of complaints that pushed the Saskatoon Health Authority to commission a report that, in 2017, documented a range of coercive tactics deployed against Indigenous women to have tubal ligations after childbirth. The co-author of that report, Yvonne Boyer, the Metis scholar and senator, fittingly contributes what she calls a letter to her grandchildren – a matter of privilege, she knows, since women like her Aunt Lucy were among those sterilized without their consent, but also a matter of responsibility to generations past and future and to peoples whose survival cannot be taken for granted.
The contributions to Sacred Bundles Unborn, stitched together by Jennifer Leason’s evocative images and poetry, are as jagged as lived experience; they are as sacred as a newborn; they are as direct, as personal, as graceful, and as angry as they need to be. They are the work of storytellers: lawyers, mothers, midwives, advocates, scholars, a filmmaker, and medical professionals – mostly Indigenous, mostly women, sometimes neither. This diversity is important for a number of reasons. First, it bears witness from different vantage points inside and outside the health care system. Second, it enlarges the circle of care, experience, and relevant knowledge; it insists that the book’s struggles ought to be shared by many more people than survivors alone. Third, and not least, it allows a wide range of readers – including people like this reviewer, a white settler, a man, a grandfather, with four generations of ancestors buried in Treaty Six territory – to find an entry point through which the horror-story of forced sterilization can reach deeply.
Sacred Bundles Unborn is both an act of gathering strength and a clear declaration. In the concluding essay, the Indigenous doctor Alika Lafontaine, who is president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association, writes that the same “hostile medical culture” that, for a century, could question whether Indigenous women “should retain the power of life and creation” is still “hiding in plain sight.”
This is, in other words, not an easy book. It should not be. While it will challenge medical professionals and unsettle Canadians who are easily satisfied by the platitudes of reconciliation, it must be part of the reckoning on the path to a different relationship.
Review of Sacred Bundles Unborn, ed. Morningstar Mercredi & Fire Keepers, Friesen Press One Printers Way, Manitoba, 2021
Dr. Brenda Anderson
Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Religion & Critical Studies
Luther College, University of Regina
Sacred Bundles Unborn must not be entered into lightly. This book is about the forced and coerced sterilization of Indigenous women across Canada. Contributing author Dr. Alika Lafontaine writes, “As we compartmentalize the past, we will fail to connect today’s hostile medical cultures to a continuation of historical abuse. The abuse never stopped, it just moved places, and was relabeled with different words. Indigenous women have lived for a century within health systems that normalize the questioning of whether they should retain the power of life and creation. Ongoing harm is hiding in plain sight.”
It is morally imperative that readers lean into the consequences of reading this book. In the words of Morningstar Mercredi at a 2008 international conference on MMIWG, “Some of you will be uncomfortable hearing the truth…well, get uncomfortable.” As editor of the book, Morningstar lends her own raw experiences, and has meticulously gathered together those who have been violated, as well as lawyers, midwives, doctors, policy makers, artists and poets, politicians, students, men and women, Indigenous and non-Indigenous into this volume to lend both personal and professional analysis to the topic. While the book is valuable for its explanations of how health care is or is not offered, and is equally valuable in outlining the political legalities of autonomy vs forced sterilization that protect all who live under our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the book is invaluable because it brings to us the experiences of the personal. The contributors describe what it is like to live in a powerless state, how the constant implicit bias in and outside of the healthcare system becomes internalized, what it is like to face systems under duress. Turning injustice to justice, pain to healing, always begins with story-telling.
What we hold in our hands with this book is, as Yvonne Boyer so poignantly writes, like the gossamer wings of fairies. These are the lives, the flesh, the hearts and spirits of women living on this land, who are part of our whole, who were never meant to be looked at with suspicion, or pity, or aversion. Centuries of prejudice has resulted in the medical profession – where we go when we are most vulnerable - condoning and asserting that forced sterilization is acceptable. It is not a surprise that numerous authors in the book use the word eugenics.
Yet, what we are not called to do is to perpetuate the stereotype of the powerless victim. Indigenous women continue to thrive on Turtle Island, not because of, but rather in spite of, the experiences related in this book. As non-Indigenous author Karen Stote conveys, to them the mantle of leadership must reside. Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers in this book call us into the path of possibilities. Global solidarity is identified as a place of hope, as organizations in Peru map out what resistance could look like in Canada. International bodies are watching Canada, and demanding change. And, traditional teachings from all across Turtle Island offer old/new insights about women’s power and value as sites of resistance and hope.
Like the issue of global femicide of Indigenous women, it is the inescapable intentionality of acts like sterilization that cannot be ignored. The clarion call is that Canada as a nation must connect the dots on racialized and gendered violence against Indigenous women. Only until medical colonialism is understood as one amongst many of the intentional weapons of colonialism, only when non-Indigenous academics, policy-makers, institutional governing bodies listen to, and believe, Indigenous women relating what it feels like to live in a “dangerous space” – and only when leadership comes from Indigenous and non-Indigenous people aligning together to move out of these dehumanizing and dangerous spaces – only then will any systems of violence be removed. The question is whether Canada wants to change. I believe that, with evidence such as is found in this book, the nation finally has no choice.
To life-givers who are reading this, whether you have given birth, cannot, hope to, choose not to, or had that right stolen from you, whatever your circumstance, may Alisa R. Lombard’s words resonate in each of you: “In the face of reproductive injustice, women will stand by one another until things are made right, as they must.” And, as the male authors in the book exemplify, men must stand alongside.
Do not let the storytellers and artists and activists in this book, the mothers, the women, the midwives, do not let them down. Do not let future Indigenous girls and women down. This is how we honour the bravery of those who write and draw and weep within these pages, how we honour and protect all others who have not had the opportunity of agency to tell their stories, and, in particular, how we honour the Sacred Bundles Unborn.
Dr. Brenda Anderson
Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Religion & Critical Studies
Luther College, University of Regina
Sacred Bundles Unborn must not be entered into lightly. This book is about the forced and coerced sterilization of Indigenous women across Canada. Contributing author Dr. Alika Lafontaine writes, “As we compartmentalize the past, we will fail to connect today’s hostile medical cultures to a continuation of historical abuse. The abuse never stopped, it just moved places, and was relabeled with different words. Indigenous women have lived for a century within health systems that normalize the questioning of whether they should retain the power of life and creation. Ongoing harm is hiding in plain sight.”
It is morally imperative that readers lean into the consequences of reading this book. In the words of Morningstar Mercredi at a 2008 international conference on MMIWG, “Some of you will be uncomfortable hearing the truth…well, get uncomfortable.” As editor of the book, Morningstar lends her own raw experiences, and has meticulously gathered together those who have been violated, as well as lawyers, midwives, doctors, policy makers, artists and poets, politicians, students, men and women, Indigenous and non-Indigenous into this volume to lend both personal and professional analysis to the topic. While the book is valuable for its explanations of how health care is or is not offered, and is equally valuable in outlining the political legalities of autonomy vs forced sterilization that protect all who live under our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the book is invaluable because it brings to us the experiences of the personal. The contributors describe what it is like to live in a powerless state, how the constant implicit bias in and outside of the healthcare system becomes internalized, what it is like to face systems under duress. Turning injustice to justice, pain to healing, always begins with story-telling.
What we hold in our hands with this book is, as Yvonne Boyer so poignantly writes, like the gossamer wings of fairies. These are the lives, the flesh, the hearts and spirits of women living on this land, who are part of our whole, who were never meant to be looked at with suspicion, or pity, or aversion. Centuries of prejudice has resulted in the medical profession – where we go when we are most vulnerable - condoning and asserting that forced sterilization is acceptable. It is not a surprise that numerous authors in the book use the word eugenics.
Yet, what we are not called to do is to perpetuate the stereotype of the powerless victim. Indigenous women continue to thrive on Turtle Island, not because of, but rather in spite of, the experiences related in this book. As non-Indigenous author Karen Stote conveys, to them the mantle of leadership must reside. Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers in this book call us into the path of possibilities. Global solidarity is identified as a place of hope, as organizations in Peru map out what resistance could look like in Canada. International bodies are watching Canada, and demanding change. And, traditional teachings from all across Turtle Island offer old/new insights about women’s power and value as sites of resistance and hope.
Like the issue of global femicide of Indigenous women, it is the inescapable intentionality of acts like sterilization that cannot be ignored. The clarion call is that Canada as a nation must connect the dots on racialized and gendered violence against Indigenous women. Only until medical colonialism is understood as one amongst many of the intentional weapons of colonialism, only when non-Indigenous academics, policy-makers, institutional governing bodies listen to, and believe, Indigenous women relating what it feels like to live in a “dangerous space” – and only when leadership comes from Indigenous and non-Indigenous people aligning together to move out of these dehumanizing and dangerous spaces – only then will any systems of violence be removed. The question is whether Canada wants to change. I believe that, with evidence such as is found in this book, the nation finally has no choice.
To life-givers who are reading this, whether you have given birth, cannot, hope to, choose not to, or had that right stolen from you, whatever your circumstance, may Alisa R. Lombard’s words resonate in each of you: “In the face of reproductive injustice, women will stand by one another until things are made right, as they must.” And, as the male authors in the book exemplify, men must stand alongside.
Do not let the storytellers and artists and activists in this book, the mothers, the women, the midwives, do not let them down. Do not let future Indigenous girls and women down. This is how we honour the bravery of those who write and draw and weep within these pages, how we honour and protect all others who have not had the opportunity of agency to tell their stories, and, in particular, how we honour the Sacred Bundles Unborn.
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