Colonizers who seek to settle a new world must first and continually manage the pre-existing inhabitants, addressing multiple forms of resistance and the stubborn persistence of sheer existence.

~ Reproductive Justice: The politics of healthcare for Native American women

Interesting to see this statement in a book about medicine and reproductive justice but there it is, because in the US and Canada medical care is a commodity rather than a right. Even in Canada with state run health care, it is a commodity .. just one that the gov't provides

Access is highly unequal, as vaccination roll outs in both countries has demonstrated, with the inequities mapping unsurprisingly on other inequities like poverty and food insecurity and inadequate housing and all those other ways that basic needs are commodities.

Access to medical care, for Native people, was always contingent on compliance with what the State wanted. Give up land, stay confined to land and you'll get the medical care and vaccines you need and if you refuse then you'll die and the state gets the land anyway.

Native people have high mortality rates. Canadian vaccine rollouts are related to age, to life expectancy. While Canadians were vaccinating their 80+ age group, Indigenous people were vaccinating their 55+ age group. Because that reflects our life expectancy.

Gurr, the author of Reproductive Justice, writes about prenatal care as a way of monitoring pregnant bodies. There is little evidence btw that prenatal care does what it claims to do. Racial disparities in health outcomes persist and these outcomes are more readily

connected with other inequities like poverty, inadequate housing, inadequate health care in general, food insecurity, unsafe water, all those other things.

And prenatal care is linked to child welfare in ugly ways. Because Saving The Children does not mean saving mothers.

The new thing appears to be preconception care which is mind blowing. Since prenatal care doesn't provide the expected medical outcomes the solution is to start sooner. To see teenage girls as inevitable moms and start prenatal care before they've even gotten pregnant.

Which is mind bogglingly patriarchal. It sounds nice, saving babies always sounds nice, but what possibilities emerge when we talk about good health in general? Doesn't that also save babies?

But the only good Indian is a dead Indian and babies can be adopted.