Library: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Guide: Caltech-specific equity topics

Eugenics

Between 1909 and the 1960s, the state of California sterilized 20,000 mental patients and prison inmates. Most did not consent to sterilization. They were disproportionately Mexican and Mexican-American.

California’s sterilization program was part of an international movement, eugenics, which sought to breed stigmatized traits such as mental illness out of humanity. In Pasadena, in 1928 Ezra Gosney and Paul Popenoe founded the Human Betterment Foundation to research and advocate for eugenic sterilization. They argued California and other states should sterilize even more people, and influenced Nazi Germany’s eugenic sterilization law.

Among the Human Betterment Foundation’s roughly 30 members, several were also affiliated with Caltech: Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, lawyer Henry Robinson, and businessman Albert Ruddock were Caltech trustees. Historian William Munro was a Caltech professor. And physicist Robert Millikan was Caltech’s leader as chair of its Executive Council. Caltech is evaluating the legacy of these men through its Committee on Naming and Recognition.

-University Archivist Peter Collopy

We hope that this guide will help provide a shared understanding of our past that we can use to inform a better future.

If you have questions or ideas about resources to add to this guide, please contact us.

Human Betterment Foundation Records, Caltech Archives and Special Collections

The records of the Human Betterment Foundation contain the Foundation’s business records, correspondence with others in the eugenics movement, pamphlets and other printed materials on eugenics from around the world, and survey data from the research which resulted in the publication of Sterilization and Human Betterment.

The collection has not been digitized; anyone interested may contact the Caltech Archives at archives@caltech.edu to arrange for access.

Superior by Angela Saini
Publication Date: 2019
Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between "races"--to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions--stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science--and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
Imbeciles by Adam Cohen
Publication Date: 2016
One of America's great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court's infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of "undesirable" citizens the law of the land New York Times bestselling author Adam Cohen tells the story in Imbeciles of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court's decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an "imbecile." It is a story with many villains, from the superintendent of the Dickensian Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded who chose Carrie for sterilization to the former Missouri agriculture professor and Nazi sympathizer who was the nation's leading advocate for eugenic sterilization. But the most troubling actors of all were the eight Supreme Court justices who were in the majority - including William Howard Taft, the former president; Louis Brandeis, the legendary progressive; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., America's most esteemed justice, who wrote the decision urging the nation to embark on a program of mass eugenic sterilization. Exposing this tremendous injustice--which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans--Imbeciles overturns cherished myths and reappraises heroic figures in its relentless pursuit of the truth.
Eugenic Nation by Alexandra Minna Stern
Publication Date: 2015
First edition, Winner of the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize, American Public Health Association. With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details demonstrating that eugenics continues to inform institutional and reproductive injustice. Alexandra Minna Stern draws on recently uncovered historical records to reveal patterns of racial bias in California's sterilization program and documents compelling individual experiences. With the addition of radically new and relevant research, this edition connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies.
Eugenics and Education in America by Ann Winfield
Publication Date: 2007
Education in America was designed to organize, classify, and sort students according to a definition of ability and human worth provided by a racialized scientism known as eugenics - an ideology whose ultimate goal was the establishment of a superior White race. Eugenicists targeted entire ethnic groups, the urban poor, rural «White trash,» the sexually «deviant,» Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, Asians, Latino/as, and anyone who did not fit with the pseudo-scientifically established «superior» Nordic race. Education leaders, complaining of children of «worm-eaten stock,» established an enduring system to organize and sort students according to perceived societal worth. In exposing and addressing eugenics' place in our educational system, this book provides a groundbreaking addition to, and exceptional correction of, the history of curriculum in America.
The Molecular Vision of Life by Lily E. Kay
Publication Date: 1992
In this history of how Caltech research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation built the field of molecular biology, Kay argues that eugenics left a lasting legacy both at Caltech and in the new discipline. “Precisely because the old eugenics had lost its scientific validity,” she writes, “a space was created for a new program that promised to place the study of human heredity and behavior on rigorous grounds.… The molecular biology program… promised a surer, albeit much slower, way toward social planning based on sounder principles of eugenic selection.” (9) Her account includes a brief history of the Human Betterment Foundation and of Caltech biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan’s ambivalence toward the eugenics movement (82–85).

Find more books and ebooks on "eugenics" in our catalog.

Human Betterment Foundation

These texts include specific discussion of the Human Betterment Foundation, though most also cover other parts of the history of eugenics and genetics.

Human Betterment Foundation (1928–1942), Jill Briggs, Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2013).

This is a good, brief introduction to the work, organization, and context of the Human Betterment Foundation.

How Proponents of Forced Sterilization Convinced Everyday Californians to Support Their Cause, Rebecca Onion, Slate, May 6, 2015.

This post in Slate’s historical Vault column includes a very brief introduction to the HBF and a reproduction of their 1938 pamphlet Human Sterilization Today, an introduction to the Foundation’s work and mission in their own words.

Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6000 Operations in California, 1909–1929, E. S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe, New York: Macmillan, 1929.

Before Human Sterilization Today, Sterilization for Human Betterment was the HBF’s most visible and influential publication. It’s another, earlier, longer source for understanding them in their own words.

States of Eugenics: Institutions and the Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California, Alex Wellerstein, in Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age, edited by Sheila Jasanoff, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011, 29–58.

In this chapter, Wellerstein examines “the institutional, organizational basis of sterilization in California, tracing how the power to sterilize—and the questions of who to sterilize, why, and perhaps why not—wended their way through legal, medical, and local frameworks,” concluding that “power ended up being disproportionately concentrated in the hands of individual hospital administrators, who were often intellectually and physically quite distant from the direct influence of eugenics” (30–31). The lobbying and research of the HBF was thus “disconnected from the actual practice of sterilization” (35).

Leading the Race: Eugenics in California, 1896–1945, Joseph W. Sokolik, MA thesis, Texas State University, 2013.

This thesis includes a chapter on the HBF that appears to be strongest on the Foundation’s publications.

Eugenic Science in California: The Papers of E. S. Gosney and the Human Betterment Foundation, David A. Valone, 1993.

Archivist and historian David Valone wrote a brief history of the HBF and of how its assets, including records, came to Caltech, as part of the collection guide referenced above.

Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, second edition, Alexandra Minna Stern, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

The chapter “Instituting Eugenics in California” includes an account of the Human Betterment Foundations main activities lobbying for sterilization and researching its effects on Californians (82–83, 104–108). The following chapter, “‘I Like to Keep My Body Whole’: Reconsidering Eugenic Sterilization in California,” analyzes state sterilization records to determine the demographics of the Californians sterilized by the state—disproportionately Mexican and Mexican-American—and the nature of the consent process, in which, although the law allowed the state to sterilize people without their permission, administrators typically sought signatures of the patient’s family.

Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial, Anthony M. Platt and Cecilia E. O’Leary, Boulder: Paradigm, 2006.

In this history of the Huntington Library’s ownership of the original text of the Nuremberg Laws signed by Adolf Hitler, Platt and O’Leary include an account of the eugenic goals of HBF trustees who also sat on the boards of the Huntington and Caltech (55–71). They also include a chapter on Robert Millikan’s political beliefs, emphasizing his private views, expressed in letters, regarding race and gender (121–131).

Building a ‘Better’ Human Race: The Human Betterment Foundation and Eugenic Sterilization in California, 1909–1942, Lillian Turner-Graham, MA thesis, California State University, Northridge, 2019.

From the abstract: “An analysis of primary sources, including HBF publications as well as unpublished documents from the E. S. Gosney and Human Betterment Foundation collection in the Caltech archives,” concludes Turner-Graham, “shows that the HBF’s work was more akin to lobbying or propaganda than detached analysis of the results of California’s eugenic sterilization program.”

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, Stefan Kühl, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

The Human Betterment Foundation was one of many American organizations which provided inspiration for Nazi Germany’s genocidal laws and institutions. Kühl briefly discusses the HBF’s influence (42–44, 57–58), and writes that the HBF’s book Sterilization for Human Betterment was “an essential basis for the development of the German sterilization law.”

Eugenic sterilization in California

This section consists of other works in the history of eugenic sterilization in California, all by members of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which don’t deal with the HBF. The Lab is an interdisciplinary research team using methods from the social science, humanities, and public health to study the history of sterilization in the United States. Their research initially focused on California, and has now expanded to include Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina.

Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization: Resisting Reproductive Injustice in California, 1920–1950, Natalie Lira and Alexandra Minna Stern, Aztlán 39, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 9–34.

“Mexican-origin patients were pathologized as mentally defective and overly fecund in order to justify sterilization,” write Lira and Stern. “However, these patients and their families challenged California’s eugenic laws and forced sterilization, and their struggles for reproductive rights are an important facet of the pursuit of racial and reproductive justice by Chicaga/o communities.”

Disproportionate Sterilization of Latinos Under California’s Eugenic Sterilization Program, 1920–1945, Nicole L. Novak, Natalie Lira, Kate E. O’Connor, Siobán D. Harlow, Sharon L. R. Kardia, and Alexandra Minna Stern, American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 5 (May 2018): 611–613.

“We used data from 17,362 forms recommending institutionalized patients for sterilization between 1920 and 1945,” write the authors. “Eugenic sterilization laws were disproportionately applied to Latina/o patients, particularly Latina women and girls. Understanding historical injustices in public health can inform contemporary public health practice.”

California’s Sterilization Survivors: An Estimate and Call for Redress, Alexandra Minna Stern, Nicole L. Novak, Natalie Lira, Kate O’Connor, Siobán Harlow, and Sharon Kardia, American Journal of Public Health 107, no. 1 (January 2017): 50–54.

“From 1919 to 1952,” write the authors, “approximately 20,000 individuals were sterilized in California’s state institutions on the basis of eugenic laws that sought to control the reproductive capacity of people labeled unfit and defective. Using data from more than 19,000 sterilization recommendations processed by state institutions over this 33-year period, we provide the most accurate estimate of living sterilization survivors. As of 2016, we estimate that as many as 831 individuals, with an average age of 87.9 years, are alive. We suggest that California emulate North Carolina and Virginia, states that maintained similar sterilization programs and recently have approved monetary compensation for victims.”

Indigenous Peoples

The California Institute of Technology sits in the traditional territory and homeland of the Gabrielino Tongva people. The Gabrielino Tongva people are a state-recognized tribe and are working toward federal recognition. Tongva people still live in the Los Angeles area but are now a minority group on their own land. We are settlers and guests on this land, a land which had and continues to have significant connection to the Gabrielino Tongva tribe. The indigenous people of Los Angeles are still here despite ethnic cleansing, forcible removal, unrecognized sovereignty, and outright denial of their existence.

Caltech’s use of land is not limited to its Pasadena campus. Caltech conducts research around the world in facilities situated in traditional territories of indigenous people.

You can learn more about the traditional territory you are in at Native Land Digital. Learn more about creating a land acknowledgement here: Land Acknowledgement: You're on California Indian Land, Now What?

Land acknowledgements are just a first step in the healing process. The objective for many indigenous groups is restitution by returning land to indigenous political and economic control, also called “Land Back.” Learn more about Land Back at landback.org.

Native American DNA by Kim TallBear
Publication Date: 2013
Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes. In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful--and problematic--scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the "markers" that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them. TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today's science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: "in our blood" is giving way to "in our DNA." This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously--and permanently--undermined.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Publication Date: 2013
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Indigenous Statistics by Maggie Walter; Chris Andersen
Call Number: GN380 .W35 2013
ISBN: 9781611322927
Publication Date: 2013
In the first book ever published on Indigenous quantitative methodologies, Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen open up a major new approach to research across the disciplines and applied fields. While qualitative methods have been rigorously critiqued and reformulated, the population statistics relied on by virtually all research on Indigenous peoples continue to be taken for granted as straightforward, transparent numbers. This book dismantles that persistent positivism with a forceful critique, then fills the void with a new paradigm for Indigenous quantitative methods, using concrete examples of research projects from First World Indigenous peoples in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Concise and accessible, it is an ideal supplementary text as well as a core component of the methodological toolkit for anyone conducting Indigenous research or using Indigenous population statistics.
Notable Native People by Adrienne Keene; Ciara Sana (Illustrator)
Call Number: E89 .K44 2021
Publication Date: 2021
An accessible and educational illustrated book profiling 50 notable American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people, from NBA star Kyrie Irving of the Standing Rock Lakota to Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation Celebrate the lives, stories, and contributions of Indigenous artists, activists, scientists, athletes, and other changemakers in this beautifully illustrated collection. From luminaries of the past, like nineteenth-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis-the first Black and Native American female artist to achieve international fame-to contemporary figures like linguist jessie little doe baird, who revived the Wampanoag language, Notable Native People highlights the vital impact Indigenous dreamers and leaders have made on the world. This powerful and informative collection also offers accessible primers on important Indigenous issues, from the legacy of colonialism and cultural appropriation to food sovereignty, land and water rights, and more. An indispensable read for people of all backgrounds seeking to learn about Native American heritage, histories, and cultures, Notable Native People will educate and inspire readers of all ages.
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Call Number: E76.8 .D86 2014
Publication Date: 2014
New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
We Are the Land by Damon B. Akins; William J. Bauer
Call Number: E78.C15 A487 2021
Publication Date: 2021
"A Native American rejoinder to Richard White and Jesse Amble White's California Exposures."--Kirkus Reviews Rewriting the history of California as Indigenous. Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood--paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today's casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.
Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson
Call Number: E78.C15 A676 2005
Publication Date: 2005
A complex look at California Native ecological practices as a model for environmental sustainability and conservation. John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today--that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this groundbreaking book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Marvelously detailed and beautifully written, Tending the Wild is an unparalleled examination of Native American knowledge and uses of California's natural resources that reshapes our understanding of native cultures and shows how we might begin to use their knowledge in our own conservation efforts. M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans who recall what their grandparents told them about how and when areas were burned, which plants were eaten and which were used for basketry, and how plants were tended. The complex picture that emerges from this and other historical source material dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in anthropological and historical literature. We come to see California's indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.
Iwígara by Enrique Salmón
Call Number: GN476.73 .S345 2020
Publication Date: 2020
Tap into thousands of years of plant knowledge The belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the same breath--known in the Rarámuri tribe as iwígara--has resulted in a treasury of knowledge about the natural world, passed down for millennia by native cultures. Ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón builds on this concept of connection and highlights 80 plants revered by North America's indigenous peoples. Salmón teaches us the ways plants are used as food and medicine, the details of their identification and harvest, their important health benefits, plus their role in traditional stories and myths. Discover in these pages how the timeless wisdom of iwígara can enhance your own kinship with the natural world.
California Through Native Eyes by William J. Bauer, Jr.
Call Number: E78.C15 B3225 2016
Publication Date: 2016
Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and conveniently skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Noticeably absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on the land long before European settlers arrived. Historian William Bauer seeks to correct that oversight through an innovative approach that tells California history strictly through Native perspectives. Using oral histories of Concow, Pomo, and Paiute workers, taken as part of a New Deal federal works project, Bauer reveals how Native peoples have experienced and interpreted the history of the land we now call California. Combining these oral histories with creation myths and other oral traditions, he demonstrates the importance of sacred landscapes and animals and other nonhuman actors to the formation of place and identity. He also examines tribal stories of ancestors who prophesied the coming of white settlers and uses their recollections of the California Indian Wars to push back against popular narratives that seek to downplay Native resistance. The result both challenges the "California story" and enriches it with new voices and important points of view, serving as a model for understanding Native historical perspectives in other regions.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge by Melissa K. Nelson (Editor); Daniel Shilling (Editor)
Call Number: GN476.7 .T73 2018
Publication Date: 2018
This book examines the importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and how it can provide models for a time-tested form of sustainability needed in the world today. The essays, written by a team of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, explore TEK through compelling cases of environmental sustainability from multiple tribal and geographic locations in North America and beyond. Addressing the philosophical issues concerning indigenous and ecological knowledge production and maintenance, they focus on how environmental values and ethics are applied to the uses of land.Grounded in an understanding of the profound relationship between biological and cultural diversity, this book defines, interrogates, and problematizes, the many definitions of traditional ecological knowledge and sustainability. It includes a holistic and broad disciplinary approach to sustainability, including language, art, and ceremony, as critical ways to maintain healthy human-environment relations.
We Are Not a Vanishing People by Thomas Constantine Maroukis
Call Number: E75 .M36 2021
Publication Date: 2021
In 1911, a group of Native American intellectuals and activists joined together to establish the Society of American Indians (SAI), an organization by Indians for Indians. It was the first such nationwide organization dedicated to reform. They used a strategy of protest and activism that carried into the rest of the twentieth century. Some of the most prominent members included Charles A. Eastman (Dakota), Arthur Parker (Seneca), Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai), Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux), and Sherman Coolidge (Peoria). They fought for U.S. citizenship and quality education. They believed these tools would allow Indigenous people to function in the modern world without surrendering one's identity. They believed this could be accomplished by removing government controls over Indian life. Historian Thomas Constantine Maroukis discusses the goals, strategies, successes, and failures of the Indigenous intellectuals who came together to form the SAI. They engaged in lobbying, producing publications, informing the media, hundreds of speaking engagements, and annual conferences to argue for reform. Unfortunately, the forces of this era were against reforming federal policies: The group faced racism, a steady stream of negative stereotyping as a so-called vanishing race, and an indifferent federal bureaucracy. They were also beset by internal struggles, which weakened the organization. This work sheds new light on the origins of modern protest in the twentieth century, and it shows how the intellectuals and activists associated with the SAI were able to bring Indian issues before the American public, challenging stereotypes and the "vanishing people" trope. Maroukis argues that that the SAI was not an assimilationist organization; they were political activists trying to free Indians from government wardship while maintaining their cultural heritage.
Stringing Rosaries by Denise Lajimodiere; Suzzanne Kelley (Series edited by); Jamie Trosen (Cover Design by); Michael Yellow Bird (Series edited by)
Call Number: E97.5 .L35 2019
Publication Date: 2019
Denise K. Lajimodiere's interest in American Indian boarding school survivors' stories evolved from recording her father and other family members speaking of their experiences. Her research helped her gain insight, a deeper understanding of her parents, and how and why she and her siblings were parented in the way they were. That insight led her to an emotional ceremony of forgiveness, described in the last chapter of Stringing Rosaries. The journey to record survivors' stories led her through the Dakotas and Minnesota and into the personal and private space of boarding school survivors. While there, she heard stories that they had never shared before. She came to an understanding of new terms: historical and intergenerational trauma, soul wound. She is haunted by the resounding silence of abuses that happened at boarding schools across the United States. She wants these survivors' stories told uninterrupted, so that each survivor tells their own story in their own words. The youngest survivor interviewed was fifty years old, and the oldest was eighty-nine. In the tradition of her Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, she offered them tobacco and gifts. She told them her parents' and grandparents' boarding school stories and that she is considered an intergenerational, someone who didn't go to boarding school but was a survivor of boarding school survivors. The journey was emotionally exhausting. Often, after hearing their stories she had to sit in her car for a long while, sobbing, waiting to compose herself for the long drive back across the plains.Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors has been recognized with multiple awards.o One of three finalists for the 2020 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prizeo 2020 Independent Press Awards, Distinguished Favorite in Cultural and Social Issueso 2020 Independent Publishers Awards (IPPY Awards) Bronze Medal for Multicultural Nonfictiono 2020 Independent Book Publishers Association-Benjamin Franklin Award, Silver Medalist in the Multicultural categoryo 2019 Midwest Book Awards, Gold Medal in the Regional History categoryo 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Finalist, Historyo 2019 Midwest Book Awards, Silver Medal for Cover Design

MMIWG stands for "missing and murdered indigenous women and girls". Indigenous women in the United States are more likely to experience sexual violence, abuse, or be murdered than women of other races and ethnicities:

Murder is the third-leading cause of death among American Indian/Alaska Native women (source).
The risk of rape or sexual assault is 2.5 times higher for Native women than the rest of the country (source).
Statistics from a survey of 148 Native women in Seattle, Washington (source)
- 94% had been raped or coerced in their lifetime
- 42% of victims of rape or coercion attempted suicide in their lifetime
- 53% lacked permanent housing
- 34% binge drank on a weekly or daily basis after they were initially attacked
- Only 8% of cases of a rape victim’s first attack ended in a conviction
- 86% reported being affected by historical trauma
A survey of 71 cities across the United States found the follow number of MMIWG cases (source)
- 506 MMIWG cases were identified across 71 selected urban cities (128 missing, 280 murdered, 98 unknown)
- 29 was the median age of MMIWG victims
- 153 cases were identified that did not exist in law enforcement records

Learn more about this crisis:

"Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls" report from the Urban Indian Health Institute
National Institute of Justice resources on Tribal Crime and Justice
In 2021 the U.S. Department of the Interior created a Missing and Murdered Unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to specifically address the crisis