eugenics, Healing Histories Project

Healing Histories Project (HHP) stands in resistance to genocide and fascist control. Slashes in Medicaid, the defunding of disaster relief programs, increased ICE funding, the attack on public health, the US-funded assault on Palestine, the increased militarization of local police in US cities like Los Angeles, Washington DC & Baltimore, and the commitment to take protected lands, many which are currently protected by indigenous people, into new mining and forestry contracts are just one small part of the violence that we currently face.

A hand holds a white sign with black and red letters. It says: Health Care Not Wealth Care, Save Medicare and Medicaid — Photo credit: vivalapenler

In all these things, we at HHP recognize them for what they are: eugenics. From the inception of the concept by Francis Galton in 1883—a man who sought to stop reproduction by “feebleminded” people- to a 2025 “natal conference” organized by Population Wellbeing Initiative openly promoting pronatalism*, population control and the superiority of the white race in Austin TX—we situate recent events along the long line of attempts to wipe away the memory and history of marginalized communities. That is the logic of eugenics: to remove the literal genetic traits of plants and people. Eugenics seeks to disappear and/or deny the rights of anyone who is seen as burdensome or not ‘useful’ under capitalism, including: immigrant & refugee communities; people living with physical, emotional, developmental and neurodivergent disabilities; People of Color and Indigenous communities; and Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans & Non Binary communities.

Several people hold the Mexican flag above a freeway filled with police vehicles and line of law enforcement officers on June 2025 in L.A. in protest of the rampant disappearance of immigrant and refugee communities by ICE. — Photo Credit: Lindsey Rivera/Stocksy

We honor the recent 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, standing with movement organizations in the South, as we collectively look back and name the eugenic violence of the U.S. government in the aftermath of this storm. We must remember the criminalizing and killing of southern Black and Brown, disabled, immigrant and refugee, elderly, youth and working class families left behind while merely trying to survive. At that time, the state apparatus of eugenics looked like the Representative John LaBruzzo in 2008 proposing a sterilization program in New Orleans because he believed the storm –as other right wingers did– was a crisis of over population rather than a lack of government infrastructure and federal emergency preparedness. Now eugenics looks like the rampant disappearance of immigrant and refugee communities by ICE; or the recent dismantling of infrastructures like FEMA and EPA which is the only albeit fragile attempt by the state to ensure any post-storm/natural disaster response. We see this proposal and others as war crimes on poor Black, Indigenous, migrant and refugee, disabled, queer and trans communities in this country. We remember Hurricane Katrina not as a “natural” disaster, but as a national disaster of displacement, eugenic violence, policing, erasure, racism, classism and state control of care. We are in solidarity with all those who survived Hurricane Katrina and fought back —and with the many survivors of the storms that have followed.

Our role at HHP is to create a space for health practitioners, community organizers, researchers, and everyone in between to interrupt the logic of eugenics within the system that claims to provide care. We name this system the Medical Industrial Complex, or, the MIC. We situate ourselves grappling with the contradiction of the care systems in the United States which on one hand act as safety nets, and on the other, extend the harms and abuses of the carceral system in a multitude of ways.

In 2025, we are once again experiencing a fragmentation of the collective narrative of both care & control. One way HHP has built resistance for over 15 years is through a public living breathing timeline that is collecting memories & stories of care as well as control. We see the timeline as a direct resistance tool building our arsenal of collective remembering. This is anti-eugenics work. When navigating the timeline, you can select filters for disability justice, fatphobia, and more. We do not see these as data points or objects. Instead, each story on the timeline is a memory point of our people, collectives, and communities. Alongside stories of harm, we include the myriad acts of resistance, care and repair. From the first 2005 articulation and praxis of the disability justice movement to Carnegie Mellon’s public apology in 2020 on their role in the eugenics movement – we understand that with each act of harm, erasure & violence, there are also people rising up, creating care systems & of course resisting.

A screenshot shows a website Stories of Care and Control: A Timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex (mictimelince.com). White text on a green retangle shape with rounded edges says: 2006 A group of disabled Activists of Color create the framework of Disability Justice. The website is a timeline highlighting the history and resistance to the Medical Industrial Complex. — mictimeline.com

HHP is made up of people with a range of experiences and approaches to intervene on the MIC. We carry that same commitment to how and when we partner. In particular, our commitment is to catalyze others doing resistance work within the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). One way HHP has built this power is by creating an Organizing Institute on the MIC. We build annual cohorts of individual healing/health practitioners from across geographical regions with the goal of strategizing on interventions together– from fighting austerity measures like Medicaid cuts, or finding subtle ways in which eugenics has woven itself into our medical practices; practices such as racial bias, isolation amongst providers due to rank, and more. Within the cohort, we learn from others in the network and root each intervention within a theory of change; incorporating deep understandings of land, work, bodies and spirit into each step which we take.

In these times of heightened fear, tremendous violence and repression, we believe that the most important sites of resilience and care are family, community, and kin networks that are grounded in culture, memory, dignity and consent. We fight for structures and robust systems that can support our people and take care of our communities. So whether you’re a practitioner within a clinic, whether you’re someone who is holding the contradiction of the working within the MIC, or you’re someone who is showing up for your kin in all types of solidarity work– providing food, knowing your rights resources, or any other thing in between– your work is integral.

We know it has been said many times and it is always true. We need each other. Our hope is that HHP’s work can be a support to weaving the strategies of collective care and liberation across our communities and the struggles against eugenics. And it is for this reason that we affirm what we have always known; our bodies are not disposable; our lands and seeds are not expendable; and our memories & lives will not be erased.

*pronatalism: The advocacy of reproduction and birth rates being high & promoting it as a way to measure an individual’s value & contribution

This chart (created by Laura Ulrich) was last updated July 22 and only shows the federally recognized schools in Canada and not the schools in the US. At the time we are writing this, over 2,000 children’s bodies have been found on the grounds of residential and boarding schools in Canada and the US. By the time you read this, there will be more. Many more.

Before we move into this piece, we wanted to pause here and honor, along with you, the lives of those children. Every Native/First Nations person you know or have read about is either a survivor of these schools, or the child or the grandchild of a survivor. Every single one. By 1926, 83% of Native children were attending boarding schools in the US. The schools began to formally close in the 1960s and early 1970s. This is not history. This is our lifetime, your lifetime. The two of us writing this piece were alive as the boarding schools began to close. Children taken away, stolen, from families, from culture, from tribe and kin. Children who were stolen and disappeared. Their bodies are being reclaimed and honored. Before moving on to the rest of this piece, pause here. Pause. May we never treat the stories of these children as only information but instead, remember them throughout this conversation as living vibrant beings, as our relatives.

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According to the Boarding School Healing Project, beginning with the Indian Civilization Act Fund of March 3, 1819 and the Peace Policy of 1869, the United States, in concert with and at the urging of several denominations of the Christian Church, adopted an Indian Boarding School Policy. This policy intended to wage cultural genocide through the removal and reprogramming of American Indian and Alaska Native children to systemically continue the destruction of Native cultures and communities. Residential schools in Canada began at around the same time, with the first established in 1830 in Ontario by the Anglican Church. The stated purpose of these schools was simple: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Attendance was mandatory. No one knows exactly how many children were forcibly or sometimes voluntarily removed from their homes, their families, their tribes, their communities. The rules were strict: no expression of any aspect of tribal culture and identity. This means not speaking your own language including using your own name. It includes not going back home during holidays or when someone you love has died or because you were tired and sad and just wanted to be home again. The curriculum of the schools focused on Christian indoctrination, on reading, writing and speaking English, on something called citizenship training which included learning (and assimilating into) the American political system, Greek and Roman histories of democracy; American farming techniques and the importance of striving to own private property, and Christian monogamous family structures including gender and sexual behavior. Falling within all of these were forced teachings on Euro-Christian ideas of self-control, self-denial, discipline, and order. Children were forced to cut their hair, to wear school uniforms, to learn how to cook and eat European/white foods and to use European/white eating and cooking protocols. School by school, there were hundreds of other protocols, all designed to force Native children to “be civilized.”

Recent online reflections from elders in conversation with Remembering the Children, a project focused on unearthing the truth behind the Rapid City Indian School, remembered the many children who died because they grew ill from diseases they had no natural immunity for or who were killed as a result of beatings and abuse or who tried to run away and were hit by trains or violent weather. They shared stories of children who died because they were starving from the lack of food and, in trying to cook for themselves, died from stoves exploding or water pots boiling over; their small child bodies not able to lift a pan of boiling water safely

Eugenics emerged as a “scientific” belief system alongside the growing popularity of the theory of evolution. Eugenics is based on the idea that if you can control reproduction in order to increase the number of positive factors in a population you can then decrease the negative. Everything about ideas of positive versus negative were – and are – embedded with racism and xenophobia, ableism gender essentialism, Christian supremacy, and more. “Positive” means as-close-as-possible to a Christian, able-bodied, thin, white, male, straight ideal. Eugenics practices include forced sterilization or the prevention of some bodies from reproducing, the institutionalization of categories of people to prevent them from “mingling” with the general population such as through psychiatric institutions and prisons, medical experimentation focused on changing aspects of a person’s physical, mental or emotional state of being to align with the “ideal” standard (often done without consent), and more.

The majority of people targeted by state-sanctioned eugenics practices include those living with a range of types of disabilities, those perceived to be queer or sexually promiscuous or in bodies that do not meet the standard, people of color, indigenous people, Black people, poor people, people living with addictions, and people perceived to exhibit “criminal” behavior. These standards of what is “positive” and what is “negative” came to Turtle Island (North America) along with the settlers. Some of the earliest laws in the British colonies focused on capital offenses, or those acts seen to disrupt the Puritan social order. These early colonial laws included sex crimes, adultry, drunken-ness, sodomy and buggery, criminal behavor, illiteray, “heathenism” and “mental unfitness.” While posing as science, eugenics frameworks were focused primarily on forcing people and communities to fit these early Puritan ideals.

The creation of boarding schools was and is an example of this same strategy. In this case, taking children and force-teaching them to become individuals who are different and separated from their histories, their cultures, their families and communities. Boarding school policies are all about asserting an “ideal” way of being human and, literally, attempting to kill the Indian to save the man. What was hailed as attending to life as sacred in the Christian framework expressed a violent contradiction as children, once they were considered ready, were often stolen and adopted into white families without any chance to return home and without any communication with their families and kin about their final whereabouts. For many families, for many kin, the discovery of the bodies of those children who were buried with ceremony or care at boarding school campuses is the first time finding out if their children are dead or had been adopted out into the white world. As western medical science progressed, it expanded its strategy to continue the destruction of indigenous culture and community: in the 1960s and 70s the United States Indian Health Service forcibly sterilized thousands of Native women.

For over 500 years, medicine as a tool of colonization, of violence, has emerged alongside, and sometimes overtaking, the truth of care work. The language of the schools used the language of health and wellness to justify their existence. This thinking is part of what shaped the white Christian saviorism that these schools depended on:

The work of the school, then, is to build up from the beginning “the whole child,” to expiate the sins of the past by heroic work in the present. Free gymnastic exercises and breathing exercises, introduced into the classroom work, would be very helpful to these students to relieve the tortured muscles unaccustomed to long sitting, to expand the poorly developed chests and to form a habit of quick obedience. From a teacher’s standpoint it might seem a doubtful expenditure of time to introduce a ten minute exercise between recitations, but the drill would be very beneficial, and progressively so, as the students advanced in years, and became able to take more complicated exercises. This would, in a measure, take the place of a military drill, where that is impractical, though I believe that something like a military inspection is always possible and always healthful and should be recommended both for MORAL AND PHYSICAL REASONS.

Martha Waldron, “The Indian in Relation to Health,” read at the Convention of Indian Educational Associations, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1896.

.It was not until 1978 with the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act that Native American parents gained the legal right to deny their children’s placement in off-reservation schools.

How old are you? How old are your parents, your grandparents? Who of your people were children in 1978? Who were already adults? None of this is just information. We want to pause here, again, to remember and hold those who did not survive these things, those who did survive this, and their descendants. And to listen as they continue to fight back, to mourn and to remember.

Tag: eugenics

Healing Histories Project’s Reflection on the Current Moment

Refusing to forget the children