New Books In Native American Studies

In Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), historian Brianna Theobald delivers a long-overdue, comprehensive history of Native women’s reproductive health, rights, and practices. Alternating her focus between the Crow Reservation in Montana and the experiences of Native women across the United States, Theobald shows how Native women navigated and resisted colonial attempts to restrict their bodily autonomy. By extension, argues Theobald, Native women constituted a particularly resilient vanguard of cultural resistance and persistence in the face of an increasingly aggressive, ever-expanding settler colonial system. Reproduction on the Reservation draws on a diverse range of ethnographic sources, health records and correspondence from the Office of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Indian Health Service, oral and tribal histories, and secondary literature. With nuanced analysis and clear prose,