The term 'Eugenics' was apparently coined in the late 1800s from Darwin's
cousin, Sir Francis Galton - literally meaning 'well-born' or 'good breeding.'
Canada partnered with Anglican, Catholic, United, and Presbyterian churches to
establish a total of 132 publicly funded residential schools.  
Alberta introduced the 'Sexual Sterilization Act' which allowed the
state to surgically sterilize people with mental defectives. 
The mortality rate was between 35 and 60 percent in western Canadian residential schools. 
With the incorporation of the Sexual Sterilization Act the Canadian government
was able to effectively kill the Indian and the child and also kill any
chance of a child in the Indian. 
Stephen Harper refuses to launch a national inquiry into this atrocity. 
What the anxiety was, was about mixed descent. 
This need to assimilate, to control marriage between light-skinned
aboriginal people and, you know, they should marry 'white people' and eventually
the race will be bred out of them, the full-blood aboriginal people will just
simply die out. The way that it was articulated was that
aboriginal people of mixed descent combine
the worst aspects of each race.
Eugenics discourse certainly laid the foundation for much of
our oppression and colonization and the legitimization 
of the colonialism that we continue to experience.
Main-street people are not aware of this document and this reality.
Okay, so, "every male Penobscot fifty pounds (50£), over the age of twelve,
"for every scalp of a male Penobscot above the age
"brought in as evidence of their being killed, forty pounds (40£)."
It's really stunning to think, okay that was 1755
and the first time any analysis of this document was done by a Wabanaki person
was in 2010 when I wrote my dissertation. 
This document has never been eradicated or apologized for.
So the tribal chiefs in that area have brought this to the British government 
and requested an eradication of it and there has been no response. 
So we know that those early feminists were farmers, people like Emily Murphy, Violet McNaughton, 
Nellie McClung. All these women linked poverty and reproduction explicitly with notions of 
feeble-mindedness, and eugenics became an important and significant part of their campaign to increase the political power for women. 
Fellow 'famous-fiver' Irene Parlby made a special plea to women, she said, "As women,
"as mothers of the race, we should be considering this subject very seriously indeed, we should have every sympathy
"for those who are so unhappy as to have brought defective children into the world, though perhaps
"through no fault of their own, except that of marrying into an unwholesome stock."
So these two women, Parlby and McNaughton, I think are two of the most prominent Canadian feminists in their generation and their
hysterectomies rendered them childless at a time when feminism and motherhood went hand in hand. So today 
on Persons Day, as we reflect on the early feminist achievements and how we should celebrate them with the 
appropriate level of complications, I hope that we can also include this in our thinking about
how we should categorize these feminists. 
And my topic is the blurred line between contraceptive and Eugenic sterilization.
Who has the right to be a mother or to choose to not be a mother?
The Court issued a sweeping a decision that ironically, I would argue, reinforced
two of the most fundamental tenets of eugenics: reproduction
is the defining aspect of a woman's life, and people with intellectual 
disabilities are all the same - incapable of making their own decisions
about reproduction and incapable of speaking on their own behalf. 
As the play opens, mankind emerges as the conquerer of the world,
overtly confident in the ability to subdue the forces of nature, 
claiming that he has achieved complete dominance over the world. Devastated
womankind realizes she has ignored her racial responsibilities as well. 
By relinquishing the duties of womanhood for self-pleasure, she has 
endangered her race. As the play ends, mankind and womankind
pledge their future to bringing up a race physically perfect and mentally enlightened. 
"This book changed my life," she posted on GoodReads. It told you how to
do, you know, a birthing pack, how to sterilize your instruments, how to deliver a breached birth, 
how to stop a hemorrhage, things like that. 
Santana did not realize it at the time of her purchase but this little manual would become
crucial to her and her community of Gaskin followers in the near future. And their confidence
and ability resulted in the birthing movement that gained worldwide attention
as well as birth outcomes that continue to be cited as evidence
that home-births offered a safe, more humane, and effective alternative to the hospital. 
And if people want to have them in the hospital, or a birth centre, or at home, I think it should be their choice. 
Well, one of the things we've really wanted to do is we've wanted to kind of emphasize that it's
compatible or it's optimized for all sorts of different devices. It's like a shallow 
design philosophy in which people can access things and a lot of different things
really quickly. So within one or two clicks people can get all sorts of different content.
And then it loads up 'Eugenics,' um, so I'm going to go back to 'Feminism.'
It's really interactive so you can sort of pull it around and it like animates. 
We've tried to aim towards a graded audience using the active voice and past tense. 
When you would click on that it would full-screen out to this. 
And basically my goal in this discovery object was to get
into the interviews in a really, kind of, straight and simple, straightforward way. 
The work I've been doing is in what I call the political ontology of childhood and
how that connects up to understandings of community and adult identity citizenship. 
So what I argue is that the value of childhood innocence, which is given so much privilege
in our culture, is also constitutively precarious.  
And all children inevitably are set up to fail this idea of childhood innocence 
because as they've come to negotiate their maturation as adolescents 
there's this intense amount of negative attention that accrues to them.
Childhood innocence is really modeled on a very privileged understanding of the child.
So, a middle-class child, a middle-class white child, in a Western context. 
In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report on the removal of aboriginal children from their families
and communities, "Bringing Them Home," was tabled in Australia's federal 
parliament and thereby submitted for inclusion into mainstream understandings
of Australian nationhood. 
Its stated objectives also included personal healing for survivors on the
basis that disclosure would provide them a sense of release and acceptance by the
majority community. They emphasized a pain of loss that was easily
relatable for any reader. It is no ordinary report. Much of its subject matter
is so personal and intimate that ordinarily it would not be discussed. 
In the absence of political goodwill, the life histories contained in "Bringing
Them Home" would delegitimize denigrated and subordinated
to the written accounts of the administrators of child removal policies who were presented as 
having acted morally according to the values of the day. Arguably it was the concern
generated by the"Bringing Them Home" report, and the conservative political reaction to it, 
that energized public support, for the northern territory intervention. 
