various other states began to include the measure of “Indian” in their miscegenation laws prohibiting marriage between whites and non-whites, including Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and Oregon (Pascoe, p. 98). Following the passing of such laws, however, there remained concern about what exactly should define “Indian,” rooted in the idea that Native Americans with lighter skin tones should, perhaps, not be included in the legislation. Continual debates and appeals on individual state laws reflected the struggle in determining how to “racialize” the American Indian (Pascoe, p. 100). Pascoe notes that sexual relationships between white men and Native American women were prosecuted as a means of forcing them to officially recognize their relationship as a marriage or to discontinue their behavior. In other words, such prosecutions were a means of controlling interpersonal relationships of European men and perpetuating the separation between the races (p. 100). When examining the years in the late nineteenth century it becomes clear that this was a very debatable issue to lawmakers. Emergence of terms such as the “Indian Custom Marriage” (a marriage between two Native Americans or between a Native American woman and a white man), the common-law marriage (the notion that marriage is a thing of “common right” and that Native American women in common-law marriage with white men shall be treated as white women would), or the “white man’s common right to marriage,” reflect the loopholes created due to a lack of unanimity regarding whether Native Americans should be assimilated into white culture or separated from it (Pascoe, p. 97). This debate reflects the somewhat blurred lines that inherently come with the creation of supposedly measurable racial characteristics, as it is difficult to provide a scientific method for measuring such traits other than physical observation. Furthermore, the Western miscegenation laws were somewhat contradictory
(p. 23). This is particularly intriguing because Native American women should, theoretically, have one of the lower counts based simply on the fact that their population size is so much smaller than other racial groups. This suggests a discriminatory policy at work in the late 20th century. Moreover, it is crucial recognize that reproductive abuses were imposed upon other minority races as well. In the initial eugenics period, other minority races were targeted in addition to Native Americans, such as French Canadians in Vermont (Gallagher, p. 82). Furthermore, there has historically been an extreme disproportion of forced or coerced sterilizations performed on Hispanics, as studied in the works of Ehrenreich (2008) and Espino (2007). Criticisms of the governments’ motivations for sterilizations arose within Hispanic communities in the 1970’s as well, where again the alleged reasoning for the lack of informed consent provided to Hispanic women was blamed on the women’s inability to understand English and, thus, attributed to an unintentional miscommunication (Jaeggli, p. 12). Additionally, African American communities voiced concern about what they believed was a targeting of their reproductive rights by the government, as the sterilization rate in 1970 of African American women was literally twice as high as that of the average white American woman (Jaeggli, p. 10). Many African American women living in the South in the 1960’s have attested to having had their uteruses removed after undergoing unrelated abdominal surgeries and not knowing about it until much later in life, perhaps when they tried to become pregnant. As in the cases of procedures performed by the IHS, physicians who performed such procedures on African American women claimed that all surgeries were consented to (Kluchin, p. 73). This supports the idea that implementing sterilizations to
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