Gender and Colonialism pt 2: Settler-Colonialism and Nuclear Family Values

collage by nicholas b jacobsen

White / U.S. / settler / Christian nuclear family values creates a continuous line of blood descendants. Someone to hand your wealth, seeded in stolen land by stolen labor, down to. 

Wolfe writes that "settler colonialism destroys to replace." Reproductive white settler families fulfill both the destroy (through  settler-violences) and replace (through  sexual reproduction) functions of settler-colonialism. 

“Women's reproductive labors-both in a literal and a social sense-were central to these processes.” - Margaret D. Jacobs 

While white women were asked to make more settlers, settlers were sterilizing Indigenous women without informed consent through the 1920s and 30s.

"(By the time) the Indigenous population had started to rebound in the 1960s, pub­lic discourse about poor Indian women having too many kids contributed to a renewed effort to sterilize Indian women. The fed gov expanded federal funding to the IHS for sterilizations in the 70s. In some Indige­nous communities, more than 50% of women of childbearing age reported having been sterilized without proper informed consent or under threat of having their children removed.” - Margaret D. Jacobs 

This is ongoing for BIPOC, poor, and disabled People with fallopian tubes. 

Euro patriarchal gender roles and their connections to property also disrupt many Indigenous lifeways--disconnecting a People from their communal land, dividing it up into property, and altering the organizational structures of Indigenous communities. 

“This process...replaces existing kinship structures with a linear (and hierarchical) view of relationships, family, and accountabilities to each other. To decimate kinship structures that (exist outside of Euro-cis-het norms) requires...a mother, who is a cis-woman; a father, who is a cis-man; and a child who is coded male or female to ensure a continuation of the gender roles assigned and the commodified reproduction of their future descendants” - Sandy O’Sullivan