Yellowstone Topic: Forced Sterlization

Yellowstone and the File America Keeps Trying to Close

Not to fuel animosity, but to explain the pain.

Show the numbers first

Before Beth Dutton, before Jamie, before bison or boarding schools or blood samples, here is what the United States government's own auditors found and put in writing.

In 1976, the U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated the Indian Health Service. It looked at only 4 of the agency's 12 service areas — Aberdeen, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and Phoenix — over just four fiscal years, 1973 to 1976.

In that narrow slice alone, it found 3,406 sterilizations performed on Native women.

Most of the consent forms it reviewed did not meet the IHS's own informed-consent requirements. Thirty-six of the women sterilized were under 21, despite a court-ordered moratorium specifically forbidding that.

The investigators did not interview a single one of the women. They decided it "would not be productive."

Survivor accounts from the period describe how casually this happened. Women went in for something that had nothing to do with reproduction — a tonsillectomy, a burst appendix, the birth of a child — and came out permanently unable to have another one, sometimes without being told at all, sometimes handed a consent form to sign in the middle of labor or right before being wheeled into emergency surgery. One woman, admitted to an IHS hospital at 22 with a ruptured appendix, later testified that she remembers being handed a stack of forms while in extreme pain, moments before being rushed into the operating room. She didn't find out what had actually been done to her for years.

That's not an activist's estimate. That's the federal government auditing itself, publishing the number, and then declining to ask the women what had happened to them.

And it only covered a third of the country IHS served, over four years, out of a program that ran for decades. Senator James Abourezk said as much at the time: even a number that large came from an investigation that had looked at only a fraction of the whole. A separate, independent study by Dr. Connie Pinkerman-Uri, a Choctaw/Cherokee physician whose research helped trigger the federal audit in the first place, estimated that as many as one in four Native women of childbearing age had been sterilized without full consent. Her number was never confirmed by a comprehensive federal count, because that comprehensive count was never done.

What we're left with, fifty years later, is this: devastating documented proof of a widespread, government-run pattern of eugenic sterilization with broken consent procedures — and no national accounting of its true scope, because no one with the authority to finish counting ever did.

That gap matters more than it might seem to. When the historical record stays vague, people fill the silence with their own explanations for why a community is struggling — and those explanations tend to land on the community itself, not on what was done to it. Specific numbers close off that kind of guesswork. Vague history invites prejudice. Documented history explains.

What Yellowstone did well, and where it stopped

Yellowstone took a version of this history and gave it to Beth Dutton. As a teenager, pregnant by Rip and terrified of her father finding out, she turned to her older brother Jamie. Jamie took her to a reservation clinic, where staff told him an abortion there would come bundled with sterilization. He agreed, and didn't tell her. She learned only years later that she could never have children — and that her own brother had known, and hidden it, for most of her life.

That single plot point does something enormous: it makes an atrocity that has been filed away in most Americans' minds under "Indian history" — sad, distant, someone else's story — suddenly personal, bodily, and impossible to look away from. Millions of people who will never read a GAO report felt, through a character they already loved and hated in equal measure, what it might mean to have your fertility taken from you without your knowledge.

I don't think that's exploitation. I think it's one of the only ways this history was ever going to reach that many people at once.

But the show made a choice about where to put the blame, and the choice matters: it put almost all of it on Jamie.

Jamie was not an adult making an informed medical decision on his own behalf. He was a frightened, very young person — the show is genuinely vague about his exact age, and its argument is stronger for not needing a number — standing in a room where a medical institution handed him an irreversible ultimatum about someone else's body and called it a condition of care. His failure was real: he should have told Beth what he'd been told, and let her decide for herself. That failure is his.

But he didn't invent the ultimatum. He walked into a system that was already built to produce it — and he walked in as a kid who had already absorbed a childhood's worth of his own trauma inside that family, terrified of a father who treated affection as conditional and love as leverage. None of that erases what he did. But it's worth naming plainly: the moral weight of an institutional policy does not belong on a traumatized teenager who had no power in the room. Whatever blame accomplishes — and it's fair to wonder whether it accomplishes much at all — it shouldn't land on the person with the least power to have prevented any of it.

Yellowstone dramatized the specific mechanism — an explicit "abortion requires sterilization" rule stated to one boy in one room — and that dramatization shouldn't be mistaken for a documentary reconstruction of how real IHS clinics operated. The real history, per the GAO's own findings, was messier and in some ways worse: not a single stated rule, but a pattern of pressure, incomplete consent forms, physicians who said they didn't understand the regulations even after being sent them three separate times, and women who often weren't given any version of the choice Jamie was handed at all. Some signed consent forms while in active labor or heavily medicated. Some went in for an appendectomy and came out permanently unable to have children, having never been told sterilization was part of the plan.

So the more accurate — and more damning — version of the story isn't that Native women got the same terrible choice Jamie got. It's that most of them didn't get a choice at all.

That's where I wish the show had eventually let Beth's story go: not away from Jamie, but past him. Imagine her learning that the private wound she'd spent her adult life treating as a singular betrayal by her brother was one instance of a documented federal pattern that touched thousands of women who were given far less warning than she was. Imagine Jamie finally saying, I was wrong not to tell you — but I didn't invent what they were doing to people like you. That doesn't erase what he did. It puts it in proportion, and it turns Beth's rage from something aimed at the person nearest to her into something aimed at the system that put him there.

Who gets to tell this story

One criticism of Yellowstone I've never found convincing is that it was wrong to route this history through a white character at all.

I understand the instinct behind it. Native history has been spoken over, distorted, and mined for other people's storytelling for a very long time, and Native writers, historians, and consultants should be central to how it gets told. But there's a real difference between speaking over someone and simply declining to speak about what happened to them at all — and the second one hasn't served anyone well either. Most of American history involving Native nations has been filed into a separate emotional compartment: acknowledged as terrible, then closed, the way slavery sometimes gets closed, the way people say "that's just how it was" about a place and consider the subject finished. That sentence sounds historical. Mostly it functions as permission not to feel anything.

Giving this history to a character millions of viewers already had feelings about broke that compartmentalization, at least for a moment. A white viewer watching Beth realize what had been taken from her and thinking, if that were done to me, it would end me — that's not appropriation. That's the beginning of empathy, and empathy isn't a fixed resource that runs out when it's extended across group lines.

The answer to bad or shallow storytelling isn't fewer people willing to tell the story. It's better storytelling: bring in Native historians and consultants, cast Native actors, give Native characters interior lives instead of symbolic ones, listen when communities say something's been gotten wrong — and then tell it, repeatedly, from as many honest angles as will reach people. The alternative is the thing America has already been doing for a long time: not talking about it. There shouldn't be hatred in the retelling, especially in something meant in reverence to the people it happened to. The point was never to make anyone feel like the villain of their own ancestry. The point is to make sure the record doesn't stay closed.

This did not happen in eight years, and it did not stay in the past

The 1970s dates in the GAO report make it tempting to treat this as a contained scandal with a beginning, an end, and a decade attached. It wasn't.

American eugenic sterilization law dates back to 1909, when the first state programs began. The last documented, confirmed case in the United States happened in 2010. That's a 101-year span — not a decade, not an "IHS scandal" with a start and end date, but a continuous American institution that outlived multiple generations of the women it was practiced on.

California alone sterilized more than 20,000 people under its own state eugenics laws in the first half of the twentieth century. When the state finally built a modern compensation program for survivors, it had to define two separate eligible groups — because the practice hadn't ended when the old eugenics laws were repealed in 1979. The same program recognizes people involuntarily sterilized inside California's prison system decades later, with the last confirmed case as recent as 2010.

And "last documented case" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. Documented means there was paperwork, and paperwork is exactly what went missing across this entire history — consent forms that were never filled out correctly, records that were "lost," physicians who told federal investigators they simply hadn't understood the regulations they'd been sent three separate times. When California survivors later tried to file for compensation, many were turned away not because their claims weren't credible, but because the state's own institutions had failed to keep the records that would prove what had been done to them. A missing form isn't proof nothing happened. It's what happens when the people doing something don't want it followed. Every case we can put a date on is a case where, for once, the paperwork survived. Nobody knows how many didn't.

That's not ancient history. That's within a lot of living memory.

And the file is still, literally, open. In February 2026, New Mexico authorized its Indian Affairs Department and Commission on the Status of Women to investigate forced and coerced sterilization of Indigenous women and other women of color within the state — a first for any state legislature. The measure's own text references coerced sterilizations at IHS facilities reported as recently as 2018. Findings are due to the governor and legislature by the end of 2027. Because the federal government has no legal obligation to hand over its own records to a state inquiry, investigators are relying heavily on survivor testimony rather than internal IHS files — which tells you something on its own about how thin the paper trail was ever allowed to become.

In 2009, the United States did formally apologize to Native peoples for "years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants." It's worth knowing that happened. It's also worth knowing how: the apology was folded into a defense appropriations bill, and the same text specified that nothing in it authorized or supported any legal claim against the government. An acknowledgment, with a clause attached making sure the acknowledgment couldn't cost anything. That combination is a big part of why so few Americans even know the apology exists.

None of this should read as a demand that anyone alive today carry guilt for decisions made in a hospital room fifty years before they were born. It's the opposite kind of argument: specific documented conduct by specific institutions, followed by specific, traceable failures of accountability. Not "American history is racist." The policies these documents describe were racially discriminatory and eugenic in design, and the data is what lets you say so without asking anyone to simply trust a moral characterization.

Disease was devastating. It wasn't the only thing that happened.

Most people learn a version of this sentence in school: as many as 90 percent of Indigenous people in the Americas died from diseases introduced after European contact. There's real truth under that number — smallpox, measles, and other unfamiliar pathogens caused catastrophic, genuinely accidental mortality in populations with no prior exposure.

But that sentence, told on its own, quietly does something history shouldn't do: it turns a human catastrophe into something closer to a natural disaster. Disease has no intent. A virus doesn't want anyone's land. Smallpox can't order a removal, and measles can't decide that a people's fertility is a public expense worth eliminating.

Historians increasingly push back on treating disease as a cause that operated independently of everything else that was happening. Populations driven from their homelands, cut off from familiar food sources, crowded into unfamiliar settlements, or marched hundreds of miles under armed guard were dramatically more vulnerable to the diseases that swept through them — and the removals, the sieges, the destroyed food supplies were not accidents. On the forced removals of the 1830s alone, thousands died from a combination of disease, starvation, and exposure that can't be cleanly separated into a single cause. "Disease" was often the word written down. It was rarely the whole story.

Two things can be true without canceling each other out: disease killed enormous numbers of people, and deliberate human choices made survival dramatically harder for the people disease didn't kill outright. Letting the first fact stand in for the whole history is what allows the second one to disappear.

The buffalo: a strategy, not an accident of overhunting

There's no clearer example of intent than what happened to the bison.

In the early 1800s, tens of millions of bison moved across the Great Plains. By the close of the nineteenth century, only a remnant population remained. Commercial hide markets and the expanding railroads drove enormous amounts of that killing — but U.S. military leadership understood, and said plainly at the time, that destroying the herds was also one of the fastest ways to force Plains nations onto reservations without having to defeat them militarily, region by region. The National Park Service's own history describes the Army's campaign in the same terms: taking away the primary food source as a means of controlling the people who depended on it.

There are photographs from the period of men standing, visibly proud, in front of mountains of bison skulls stacked taller than they are. It's hard to look at that image and call what happened a byproduct of the frontier economy.

The bison wasn't just meat. It was clothing, shelter material, tools, trade goods, and the economic foundation under entire Plains societies. Removing it wasn't equivalent to removing one food source among many — it was closer to simultaneously destroying a people's supermarkets, farms, factories, and largest employer, then asking why they couldn't simply adapt. What the destruction of the herds did to the land itself, and what it means that the same land was then farmed in ways that helped produce the Dust Bowl within a few generations, is a bigger story than fits here — one worth its own telling. But the point that belongs in this one is simpler: the buffalo weren't killed off by accident. Military leadership said plainly, at the time, that destroying the herds was a faster way to force Plains nations onto reservations than fighting them directly. That's not a side effect. That's a policy, stated in its own words.

The wilderness wasn't wild

One of the most consequential mistakes European settlers made was assuming that if they couldn't recognize a system as agriculture, no agriculture was happening.

Kat Anderson's Tending the Wild documents in detail how thoroughly Native Californians actively managed the landscapes settlers later described as untouched wilderness — through intentional burning, pruning, coppicing for basketry materials, selective harvesting, seed scattering, and careful timing of disturbance, all producing abundance that looked, to unfamiliar eyes, like nature simply doing its own thing. It wasn't fenced fields and monocrops, so it wasn't recognized as management at all. Once the people doing that work were removed, the landscape didn't revert to some prior "natural" state — it became something new, shaped by the absence of the people who had been shaping it all along.

Fire is the clearest case. Cultural burning by California tribes wasn't a crude precaution against wildfire; it was precise, seasonal stewardship that encouraged specific food plants, improved habitat, and kept fuel loads from building into the catastrophic fires we now associate with a "natural" California summer. American policy suppressed that practice for the better part of a century under the blanket idea that fire was simply bad. Decades of that suppression contributed directly to the fuel accumulation now driving the state's worst modern wildfires — and land agencies are now, slowly, relearning and reintroducing the same cultural burning practices they once outlawed.

The Amazon offers a version of the same reversal at a much larger scale. Archaeology has demolished the old image of a pristine, empty rainforest: researchers have documented extensive earthworks, domesticated plant species, and patches of terra preta — unusually fertile, human-created soil that can persist for centuries in an environment where cleared land normally loses fertility fast. Substantial parts of what looked like untouched wilderness were, at some point, tended.

The comparison was never civilized agriculture versus nothing. It was one working system replacing another — usually without the replacing culture bothering to understand what it was replacing before declaring itself superior. Sometimes, generations later, we find ourselves spending enormous public money trying to relearn exactly what was destroyed.

The Havasupai: what happens when the food system itself is taken away

If you want to see the whole arc — land, food, health, and consent — compressed into one tribe's history, the Havasupai are as clear a case as exists.

For centuries, the Havasupai lived a seasonal cycle inside and around the Grand Canyon: farming corn, beans, and melons on the canyon floor near Havasu Creek in spring and summer, then moving up to the plateau in fall and winter to hunt, gather, and range as far as present-day Williams and Flagstaff. In 1882, the federal government confined them to a reservation of roughly 519 acres — a single square mile — at the bottom of the canyon, cutting off more than 90 percent of their traditional land. Ranchers and, later, the National Park Service pushed them off the remaining plateau grounds entirely through the early twentieth century. It wasn't until 1975 that Congress returned roughly 185,000 acres — a partial correction, nearly a century late.

By the time tribal leaders approached Arizona State University researchers around 1990 hoping to understand a diabetes crisis affecting more than half of Havasupai adults, the seasonal, varied food system that had sustained the tribe for centuries had been replaced, over generations, by farming on a canyon floor too small to support it, wage labor, and eventual dependence on the same commodity food supply available to the rest of the country — a food system already well documented to drive metabolic disease broadly, and one that lands hardest on communities with the least land and the least access to anything else.

The tribe consented to blood being drawn for diabetes research, and only that. It later came out that the same samples had been used, without their knowledge or permission, in unrelated research on schizophrenia, population migration, and inbreeding — subjects the tribe hadn't authorized and some of which directly contradicted their own origin traditions. The resulting lawsuit ended in a 2010 settlement: financial compensation, the return of the remaining samples, and some new investment in tribal health and education.

Genetics can absolutely affect diabetes susceptibility — that's not in dispute. But researchers were never going to responsibly investigate genetic susceptibility while treating a century of land confinement, lost hunting and gathering grounds, and enforced dependence on commodity food as background noise. The right question was never genes or environment. It's genes inside an environment that had been radically, deliberately altered — and modern tribal health programs increasingly treat restoring traditional foods, gardening, hunting, and movement as part of the actual medicine, alongside anything found in a genome.

The assault wasn't only on bodies

There's a reason "cultural genocide" isn't a rhetorical flourish tacked onto the physical harms — it names a separate target: continuity itself.

The federal government's own Indian boarding school investigation — three years of review across roughly 103 million pages of records — has identified 417 boarding school institutions across 37 states or territories operating between 1819 and 1969, confirmed at least 973 children died while attending them, and located at least 74 marked or unmarked burial sites at 65 school locations. About half of those schools were run by religious institutions. The Interior Department describes the system plainly as a deliberate policy of forced assimilation, and its own report notes those numbers are certainly incomplete — later independent reporting has already found additional deaths and burial sites the federal count missed.

Those numbers can't measure what the system was actually built to do, and it's worth being plain about what that was. The architect of the boarding-school model, Richard Henry Pratt, described the mission to Congress in words that have survived exactly as he said them: to "kill the Indian" and "save the man." That was never a slip of the tongue or an unfortunate historical footnote — it was the stated design. Cut the hair. Replace the name. Forbid the language. Suppress the religion and the ceremony. Separate the child from the parent for years at a stretch. Teach the child that everything their family represented was something shameful to be escaped. About half of the 417 documented schools were run by religious institutions, operating in partnership with the federal government toward the same declared end. This was never a project carried out by one rogue agency or one bad-faith denomination. It was church and state, together, pursuing an explicitly stated goal: erase the Indian in the Native.

Taylor Sheridan — the same writer-director behind Yellowstone — took this on more directly in 1923, where a Catholic-run boarding school storyline shows religious authority used explicitly as an instrument against Native girls: their language, their culture, their autonomy, all framed by the institution as being for their own good. That's one of the more frightening shapes power can take — when domination persuades itself it's mercy. It's worth being precise here too: this was institutional religious authority being used as a weapon, not "Christianity" as a monolith condemning itself; plenty of people operating inside and outside those systems opposed what was happening to children in them. But the people who deserve the blame in this history were never the powerless kids caught inside it — Native or otherwise. They were the institutions, civil and religious, that wrote the policy down and called it civilization.

And still — this is the part that matters most — none of it succeeded at what it was built to do. Native languages are being taught again by people whose grandparents were punished for speaking them. Cultural burning is being restored by the same agencies that once outlawed it. Traditional foods are being replanted. Tribes are recovering ancestral land. Governments that spent a century insisting these cultures needed to disappear are now consulting the descendants of those cultures about how to manage land and fire and food the way they always knew how. The honest way to say it isn't that people's spirits were broken. It's that the attempt was made, repeatedly, deliberately, by government and religious authority working in tandem — and it didn't win.

Not to fuel animosity, but to explain the pain

None of this is an argument for hating anyone alive today, and it isn't an argument that every hardship in a Native community now traces back to a single historical cause. People retain agency. Communities have their own internal struggles that have nothing to do with any of this. History explains conditions; it doesn't excuse or determine every individual choice made inside them.

But history does accumulate, the same way property and health and knowledge accumulate across generations — and pretending everyone starts each new generation at an identical line, simply because they were born after the relevant law was repealed, isn't neutrality. It's its own kind of forgetting.

That's the whole reason the data matters more than the moral framing. "Racist policy" is a claim someone can argue with. Three thousand four hundred and six documented sterilizations in four regions over four years, most consent forms non-compliant, thirty-six patients under a legal moratorium age, zero women interviewed — that's not an argument. That's a record. It lets the harm speak for itself, without asking anyone to take a stranger's word for how bad it was.

Yellowstone got close to that record and then stopped a step short, letting one boy carry the weight of an institution he didn't build. I don't think that's a reason to resent the show — millions of people, myself included in spirit, know this history exists at all because a television drama decided to put it in front of them, took its own storytelling license doing it, and didn't have to. That's worth something. It's also worth finishing the thought the show started: follow the pain back past the person standing closest to you, to the policy that put him there. Ask who wrote the consent form, who audited it, who was supposed to enforce it, and what happened when they didn't.

New Mexico is doing exactly that right now, in real time, with a deadline of December 2027 and no guarantee the federal government will even open its files to help. The investigation isn't a metaphor for an open question. It's an open case.

"That's just how it was" is the totally wrong way to look at it, and it is false. That way of dealing with it is not good, and it was not like that always- there were thousands of years of life and love before 90% were wiped out in the early US history, and possibly half of remaining fertile women neutralized in the last 100 years. It may have been a blip in the past, but it does not have to be the end of the story. To grieve, to heal, we must not just hide from the past or place it in a closed folder. We have to pay attention to the ripples today.