A century ago, Yale professor Irving Fisher founded the American Eugenics Society (AES), headquartered on the New Haven Green. In Yale’s own labs, libraries, and seminar rooms, professors and administrators advocated for the national eugenics movement, debating on how to “breed” the most “fit” and “desirable” human beings. As self-acclimated researchers on the cutting edge of their field, they infiltrated state legislatures in Connecticut and beyond.
Though now we see the AES and other eugenics movements as racism manifested in pseudo-science, this is and will always be part of our institutional memory—a shadow from a hundred years ago that still threatens the public’s trust in true science today. At Yale, the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale (AECY) is working to grapple with our scarred history, while scholars are investigating how eugenics still echoes in research that goes on today. A team of scientists from the University of Colorado Anschutz and University of Southern California (USC) are examining the overlooked connection between the specific history of eugenics and Indigenous people.
In 1883, the term “eugenics” was coined, but its practices have spanned a much longer history. Eugenics is derived from the Greek word eugenes: good birth. In Plato’s writing, he considered improving human society through selective breeding. In twentieth-century America, those ideas were explored from a biological perspective. At the time eugenics was considered a cutting-edge application of the field of genetics.
Scientists conducted now-debunked experiments that postulated about a correlation between intelligence and skull size, known as craniometry. Published and once well-regarded papers proposed the merits of a racial hierarchy. The research used biology and statistics to claim that social status and intelligence were heritable and that human races were taxonomically different. At the time, intelligence was seen as something inherently genetic. Thus, it was something that could be determined if individuals controlled who was allowed to reproduce with whom
Dozens of groups were targets of analysis in eugenics studies, including the urban poor, ethnic and religious minorities, criminals, and Indigenous communities. For Indigenous communities in particular, eugenics was tied to the ideas of “Manifest Destiny,” in which European American colonial expansion was a divine right, and hence Indigenous removal was inevitable.
Across Canada and the United States, policy changes legalized the forcible removal of Indigenous people. In Canada, the Gradual Civilization Act laws bartered voting privileges and land if Indigenous people renounced their tribal status. In her research, Jazlyn Mooney, principal investigator at USC and herself a descendant of the Navajo Nation, champions the idea that eugenics was another tool to justify ethnic cleansing. For example, throughout the twentieth century, twenty-five percent-to fifty percent of Indigenous women of childbearing age were sterilized, unknowingly and forcibly, under the guise of family planning by the Indian Health Service (IHS). Family planning was rooted in eugenics, and it was federally funded.
“The idea [of eugenics] is purely colonial,” Mooney said. “There’s a large body of research that has shown that the way that colonial people treated Indigenous people was indeed a genocide. Eugenics says you can get rid of these people over time. You can breed it [their culture] out of them.”
During the 1970s, the United States adopted new regulations requiring informed and voluntary consent for sterilizations, and Canada repealed legislation that legalized forced sterilizations. Even after these reforms curtailed overtly coercive programs, the continued emergence of reports of sterilizations carried out without meaningful informed consent during prior decades suggests that the memory of eugenics has not fully disappeared.
Though eugenics was once widely supported by academic elites, there were still many who publicly criticized it, questioning its scientific legitimacy. However, in the mid-twentieth century, even more people were concerned over the rapidly growing population. Tactics to control population growth gained popularity, and popular eugenics shifted its focus from sterilization to reproductive choice. Birth control became both a fight for women’s autonomy and control over the next generation.
This brought about the rise of genetic clinics and genetic counseling. By synthesizing family history, genetics, risks, and wants, genetic counselors could guide families’ reproductive decision-making. Today this is compounded with technologies such as genetic therapies. Currently, some companies are advocating for a genetically-engineered era with babies free of human disease. As technological capabilities expand, they raise complex questions about autonomy, disability, equity, and the line between preventing suffering and selecting “desirable” traits.
Even the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), celebrated in modern genetics for diversifying the human genomic database, has roots in eugenics ideologies. While governments were actively funding eugenics-based initiatives, research institutions were attempting to gather “pure” samples for the HGDP. The project also failed to consider the value of genetic materials to Indigenous communities. Explained by Hopi geneticist, Frank Dukepoo, Indigenous communities opposed the commercial use of genetic samples as they do not support life being bought, sold, or owned.
Over the years, eugenics has also fueled the misuse of Indigenous samples in science. In the 1980s, the First Nations Nuu-chah-nulth people provided nearly nine hundred samples for a rheumatoid arthritis study. However, without their permission, these blood vials were taken as samples for further research by primary investigator Richard Ward at Oxford University and collaborating institutions. When the blood, considered deeply personal and sacred to the Nuu-chah-nulth people, was finally returned in 2004, the community was still not informed of the research results that came from their blood.
In another incident in the 1990s, John Martin, an Arizona State University professor, took samples from the Havasupai Tribe under the pretense of a type 2 diabetes study. Later, Therese Markow, a zoology professor, found these samples were used to study the Tribe’s origin story, schizophrenia, alcoholism, and more. While violating the Tribe’s right to consent and perpetuating harmful stereotypes through targeted research topics, the results of the research erroneously presented the Tribe’s history and values.
Eugenics has also served as the foundation for blood quantum—the idea that an individual’s tribal citizenship is dependent on their ancestry and the tribal citizenship status of their parents. Blood quantum has served to legalize Native identities, affecting the birthright of the Indigenous community and determining whether they have the right to certain lands.
Miigis Curley (YC ’28) speaks on the pressures the made-up concept of blood quantum has had on her. By federal law, she is considered one-fourth Navajo Nation, one-fourth Walpole Island, and one-fourth Batchewana First Nations. While blood quantum requirements vary between tribes and are often ill-defined, in the tribes Curley is a part of, individuals must be at least one-fourth.
Curley explains that blood quantum has not only affected her own Native identity but will also affect that of her children. For her children to legally have one of her three tribal citizenships, her partner must be someone with citizenship. Blood quantum purposefully ignores a cultural claim to identity and the reality that individuals receive a random assortment of DNA from their ancestors. The goal of blood quantum and eugenics has always been to minimize Indigenous identities.
As we look towards the future of research, scientists must be conscious of the historical and modern issues eugenics pseudoscience has created. Mooney notes it’s the responsibility of future researchers to become educated on the socio-implications of how past research was received or on whom it was wrongfully done on. In this way, we strive to bridge the broken trust between science and the people.
“I think now there’s a lot of mistrust in scientists,” Mooney said. “The hard part is also that we have to fight against research that we’ve already debunked twenty times. If we’ve debunked this twenty times, I don’t know what more you want me to do. I think that causes a lot of people to just be like ‘I give up,’ but you can’t give up. You have to listen and engage. And it’s really difficult to do at times, but we have to keep trying.”