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There are still native women alive who were given "free sterilisation" (ie unrequired, undeclared and unasked for sterilisation procedures) while having appendixes removed, kidney operations, and straight out made up procedures as an excuse to carry out eugenics ideals of breeding out Indians. IIRC some of those "doctors" are still alive.
> There are still native women alive who were given "free sterilisation" (ie unrequired, undeclared and unasked for sterilisation procedures)
To make things worse. Supreme court legalized forced sterilization with Buck v. Bell in 1927.[2] All in line with consensus of medical professionals. It didn't really get overturned by the way, just sort of overridden by later laws.
Add some racism into this mix, and guess who will get hurt the hardest? This didn't just happen in America. Entire world embraced this, because it was seen as modern and progressive.[3] And medical professionals, trained to believe it, performed procedures for decades, even after the mores have changed, basically out of habit.
And it's still happening today, in UK for example, it's still perfectly legal for state to enforce sterilization.[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Eugenics
[2] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
[3] https://www.ochrance.cz/uploads-import/ENGLISH/Sterilisation...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31128969
Edit: I forgot to add article specifically about native americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...
It also happened in Greenland [1], Israel [2] (against Ethiopian Jews, the effect of this has been called into question [3]) or in Russia [4].
Homo homini lupus est.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66990670
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26554851
[4] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/10/23/years-of-stone-age...
>> or in Russia
That's not correct.
The article describes a case where over the course of ten years more than a dozen of Russian women living in a facility for people with mental development issues were tricked into consenting to sterilization. It created a nationwide scandal when became public and was under investigation by law enforcement authorities.
Nothing racist, nothing systemic.
Unfortunately, asylum inmates getting sterilized is a very common and sad thing to happen...
Citation needed
For interest, in California in the USofA,
By 1979, long after the peak of the 1930s eugenics movement, California sterilized an estimated 20,000 people, deemed unfit to reproduce, without their consent. The practice ended in 1979 for state hospitals and in 2010 for state prisons, when eugenics laws were finally repealed.
An exposé from The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2013 revealed 148 women were sterilized without proper approval from 2006 to 2010, and a separate state audit found that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation oversaw the illegal sterilization of 144 inmates from 2005 to 2013.
shows that eugenic type sterilization procedures continued after the laws allowing them were repealed in 2010.
Yes, I realise that "the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation" isn't an "asylum" but given the nature of modern US mental health treatment there is now considerable overlap.
What is more recent and alledged to be ongoing is unconsented abortions and sterilizations in ICE centres, eg: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/reproductive-abu...
( there are multiple ACLU articles about different aspects of this ).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service (IHS) and collaborating physicians sustained a practice of performing sterilizations on Native American women, in many cases without the free and informed consent of their patients. In some cases, women were misled into believing that the sterilization procedure was reversible
> are still alive
I would point out, though, that any child sexual abuse happening right now, any sly sterilisations going on today is likely to remained buried for a couple of decades .. just going by a century or so of history on this type of thing.
Reporting of shitty behaviour is getting better and more immediate in the digital age, which gives us hope .. but lack of current reporting isn't always evidence of lack of current activity.
There's also https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2129&...
I'm adopted. I've had people ask me if I have native blood just from features. Not since I moved east of Texas, but all the time on the west coast. I could be part native.
Tell me how I benefit and why I should feel bad forever?
Just being part white and alive today means your ancestors won lots of fights over thousands of years.
White people! Feel bad forever because your ancestors fought, killed, warred!
note: I'm a white person that tans very dark. I'm not gunna demand anyone else feel bad. Oh, i take back my "east of texas" people think i am a Mexican-American sometimes in Louisiana.
Personally I have no direct connection to much of that because all my ancestors arrived in the US around 1900. My point is you can't extricate what the US is today from what was done to people in order to make it what it is today. I still indirectly benefit. I think my ancestors benefited from having white skin in the US as opposed to dark skin, when they arrived.
> Just being part white and alive today means your ancestors won lots of fights over thousands of years.
Being white has nothing to do with it. Everyone's ancestors probably did terrible things if you go back far enough. That's not the point. You're not guilty and you don't need to feel guilty. But you should at least be aware of how the modern context in which you live was derived. It was derived from the suffering of others. How far back do we need to go? I don't think it matters, really, but just as far as is substantially relevant to the present. So for the US today, I'd say it's worth considering at least as far back as the founding of the country because we can still draw direct lines from the way things are today to events that happened from then until now. I mean, it was only in 1967 that many people realistically gained the right to vote, unfettered from schemes like poll taxes and more which were used to disenfranchise them.
> How far back in history are you willing to go, to make everyone feel guilty?
The goal is not to make anyone feel guilty. And there's no benefit in delving through ancient history. Because many of the problems that still exist in this country today are persistent effects of what happening in what is really only very recent history.
Do Italians need to feel bad about the Romans keeping slaves? I don't think so, I think it would be a stretch to say that modern Italian society was built by the slaves of Romans, let alone the Romans themselves.
But if you look around the US today you can easily find buildings that are still in use, sometimes in their original capacity, that were built by enslaved people. So I think it's still relevant. Likewise you can find the direct ancestors of native people who were forcibly displaced and mistreated, and by direct ancestors I mean really only a handful of generations, still very much recent, by historical standards.
by an accident of birth. I didn't ask to be born.
> Being white has nothing to do with it.
that's the only thing i can speak to, personally.
the people in the government that made those decisions area long gone. As i asked elsewhere, "What's the solution?"
they replied "decolonization."
aside: An interesting fact is that Korea had more slaves and for longer than any other peoples on earth. I wonder how they're dealing with that.
It’s uncomfortable if you’re on the benefactor side but it is the truth.
There are levels to it and some oppressive acts of the past were magnitudes worse than others. I mean literal genocide.
Including the Shawnee people. So it makes this stance just a tad hypocritical.
My people lived under imperial colonial rule. Cool we got railroads but trillions looted and millions killed in famines.
Just because some people sold out their own doesn’t forgive the sin of the atrocities brought forth that set generations back.
Does that make them any different? My ancestors were nearly wiped out several times before, although much earlier in the history.
The same applies pretty much to any group of humans.
> My people lived under imperial colonial rule. Cool we got railroads but trillions looted and millions killed in famines.
"Trillions looted" is another example of hypocrisy.
> Just because some people sold out their own doesn’t forgive the sin of the atrocities brought forth that set generations back.
And the notion of "generational sin" is another example of hypocrisy.
Like which ones? Sure, the US (being former colonies) is doing exceptionally well, but off the backs of others.
The principal thing I wonder is doesn't get boring to not move forward? If you live in squalor, what does it matter if you blame yourself or blame somebody else? You're still stuck there in the dirt.
Barbados, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei, Botswana...
the US (being former colonies) is doing exceptionally well, but off the backs of others.
Ah so the poorer ex-colonies are simply too moral to develop. How noble of them.
The TLDR; is that the countries where colonizers moved in to settle are doing better than the countries where colonizers moved in to exploit the natural resources.
1978.
Until 1978, Native American families were being separated against their will.
To say that no one currently alive screwed then over is absurd. This month, the President made motions to try and remove birthright citizenship for indigenous people.
No, there are absolutely people still alive who screwed them over.
White Americans want it both ways: keep the stolen treasure but take no responsibility for it.
If I stole your car, then gave it to my son when he turned 16, would you just sit back and say "Oh well, his son didn't do the stealing so I guess it's his now"? No, you'd demand the car back.
That's exactly what's happening here. The privileged ancestors of thieves may not be thieves directly, but they don't get to claim ownership either. You don't get to nullify a crime with the "I didn't personally do it" defense, knowing full well it was stolen while refusing to give it back. Insisting on hoarding the stolen treasure is indistinguishable from theft.
If you steal my car, kill me, forge the title transfer, give it to your kid who believes they got it in good faith and century goes by, then their descendants get to keep it and mine are out of luck.
Isn't it possible (and typical) for contracts to specify a particular forum for dispute resolution?
Tribes are sovereign under U.S. law. In most cases when you sign a contract with a tribe (or under tribal law), the tribe is free to modify it ex post facto.
No, the New World figured out empires, exploitation and abrogration of treaty obligations all on its own. The Maya are notorious. But there is a reason even e.g. the Navajo call the ancestral Puebloans the Anasazi [1].
Uh, not really. We basically have a pattern of countries with excess power-projection capabilities going on a rampage as soon as they can. Russia in Ukraine (and Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of Europe). China in Tibet and Hong Kong, with the Philippines and entire UNCLOS treaty system and now Taiwan. Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the region; same for Iran and Israel.
The U.S. was sort of with Europe for a few years on trying to hold the rules-based international order together. Now we're jumping into the international-law-doesn't-matter pool.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, is a massive war crime and against international law (specifically, it's against the international law of aggression, the specific one for which the Nazi leadership were hanged). But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade - Russia last promised in a treaty not to do this in the 1990s, when Ukraine agreed to renounce the nuclear weapons the USSR kept there. So it's *not great", to put it extrmelet mildly, but at least that treaty lasted for 20-30 years.
In contrast, look at the Iran nuclear deal. That went into effect in 2016, and the US unilaterally withdrew from it and reinstated sanctions in 2018, not even two years later (they claimed some breach, but no other party to the treaty agreed that the breach existed, and the EU even tried to block the US sanctions to try to keep the deal going).
Or look at the Paris climate accord, which the US has signed twice and withdrew from twice in the last few years.
Or the USMCA agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020, which the USA has violated in 2025 by seeking to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
And these are just some of the bigger, better known ones, with the clearest terms. Even Trump's actions on Ukraine right now are a clear breach of some less formal deals made by the previous administration a few years ago, when they were urging Ukraine not to seek a quick peace treaty with Russia - but it's less clear there what the deals were and to what extent they've been breached.
Whenever you'll look at a US deal, at least in the past few decades, you'll have a better than 50% chance it was broken by the USA within at most a decade.
Again, this is separate from the new era of ignoring international law by many powerful countries, and it coexists with the times when the USA was one of the biggest proponents of the rule of international law.
I don't think that's true. In fact, I think in the last decade (or, 11 years), the russians have done this ~25 times.
A standard russian tactic appears to be to ask the enemy to lay down their weapons, and then when the soldiers comply, the russians shoot them in the face anyway.
Utter barbarians.
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/07/russia-launche...
- https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/risks-russian-...
As bad as many of the US unilateral cancelations of treaties I mentioned are, they do not in any way compare to the horrifying aggression that Russia is showing in Ukraine, both at the basic level of invading a neighbor to steal their land, and in the details of how they are pursuing this illegitimate goal. Putin and his general are war criminals to a degree that few others in the last decade could be described (Netanyahu and Assad probably being the main "competitors", and Assad was only able to do what he did with Putin's help).
I should note that, on this particular ground, I don't necessarily blame Trump as the one who backed out of the deals. It's very much possible that the blame should rest on Obama for signing a deal he knew had insufficient support in his country and wouldn't be followed through by his successors. If he were an honest man, he wouldn't have signed the deal in this case, even if he believed (as I do) that the deal is critically important for the future of the world. Falsely committing to do the right thing is no less dishonest than going back on a word you gave.
Still, to be very clear, I don't mean in any way to claim that Russia has any justification whatsoever for invading Ukraine and stealing their land, with or without some treaty.