The ",field_main_title:"simplest rules of motherhood: settler colonialism and the regulation of American Indian reproduction, 1910-1976

This project explores the federal government’s efforts to intervene in American Indian women’s sexual and reproductive lives from the early twentieth century through the 1970s. I argue that U.S. settler society’s evolving attempts to address “the Indian problem” required that the state discipline Indigenous women’s sexuality and regulate their reproductive practices. The study examines the Indian Service’s (later Bureau of Indian Affairs) early twentieth-century pronatal initiatives; the Bureau’s campaign against midwives and promotion of hospital childbirth; the gendered policing of venereal disease on reservations; government social workers’ solutions for solving the “problem” of Indian illegitimacy; and the politics surrounding the reproductive technologies of birth control, abortion, and sterilization. Using government records, ethnographies, oral history collections, personal narratives and life histories, and Native feminist theory, this dissertation documents a history of colonial gendered violence, as well as Indigenous women’s activism in protest of such violence and in pursuit of reproductive autonomy.