Things that RISE FROM THE GRAVE!!!! bwahahahaha

Things rising from their respective moulding, oozing graves:

1.   My halted progress on my thesis, in the form of Foucault's ghost. At the advice of my erstwhile advisor (while my actual advisor is on sabbatical), I'm delving into the French philosopher/writer to help develop a framework with which to look at my data. I'm pretty excited about it, actually . . . because I'm a nerd like that.

2.   My hopes and dreams for a successful profession as an historian, in the form of a 99 %ile GRE score. I won't lie - there's some good, old-fashioned horn-blowing happening here. I'm not saying to look for my first book in your friendly neighborhood Barnes & Noble, but there might be something with my name on it there someday. :)

Updates to come when I have more on Foucault. Happy Halloween!

A sudden forking of the proverbial road

In a conversation with a fellow student the other day, I mentioned my thesis. He said that when he had lived near Gallup in the 70s or 80s, he had heard rumors of Native American women being forcibly sterilized. He gave me the name and email of someone who might be able to give me more concrete information. As of today, I am still waiting to hear from him; hopefully he's like me and takes a while to get around to checking that horrific cesspool UNM calls an email portal.

I did some googling. At the very least, the whispers of (specifically) the Indian Health Service sterilizing Indian women without fully informed consent or under pretense of appendectomy (surprise, surprise) is at least a very strong rumor/folk legend. But perhaps there's more to it. In 1976, the General Accounting Office issued a report, requested by Sen. James Abourezk (D-SD), investigating the accusations. I am still reading through that and will post my observations soon.

It occurs to me that it's possible this could make a very interesting comparative paper. Two western states: one, fresh out of the heady days of nineteenth-century scientific discovery and caught up in the pre-WWII anti-immigration fervor, sterilizing women, in at least a legal context, for a variety of mostly ridiculous reasons and some men for criminality; the other, well past the days of the civil rights movement, everyone supposedly liberated, and the government sterilizing women for decidedly racial reasons in a shaky, extra-legal context.

Do I have time to research a whole other state? Am I just desperate for a better angle? And I'm not sure I know how write it.

*sigh*

Oh noes!

So I probably shouldn't be surprised but it is amazing how you can fill up day after day with work and then completely forget that you were committing yourself to blogging about said work.

As usual, I failed to keep up with this thing in a timely manner.

I returned from Seattle two weeks ago tomorrow (*cry!*) and I have been very busy. I haven't done a stitch of work on my thesis, unfortunately. I have been swamped with researching grad schools, organizing my application process, prewriting for my statement of purpose, beginning the fall semester, agonizing over the letters of recommendation I soon have to ask for. . . . Coincidentally, I also have a ton of design work that I committed to. *sigh*

I will be in the process of scanning in the copies I made in Seattle to email to my comrade-in-research from UW, so hopefully I will find the inspiration to detail my findings here. On a side note, it is looking increasingly impossible for me to be accepted to UW. I have never been in the top 10% of anything in my life. But I will give it the Ol' College Try and hope for the best.

I can't stand the heat in New Mexico, either.

Welcome home, Laura & Euna

I don't have much to report today, as I'm going through a lot of documents and websites and trying to make sense of my diverse threads of thought, but I do want to welcome home, with heartfelt best wishes, Laura Ling and Euna Lee from North Korea. I remained extremely worried for these women, and even more so when news coverage ceased, and I am so glad they are safe.

To those of you using Laura and Euna's release as an excuse to play politics, to sing the predictable tune of 'We Lost By Capitulating,' you should be ashamed of yourselves. These women were facing a short, miserable lifetime in a totalitarian state's labor camp. Can you honestly say that the United States is in a weaker political position than they were before? What does it matter anyway? If these women had been men and soldiers, you would have spared no expense, given up any amount of political advantage over your enemy, to bring them home. But you remain inconsistent, dishonest hypocrites when the Americans in question are female journalists for Al Gore's network. There is no torment too harsh for you.

At any rate, all the best and a warm welcome to Laura & Euna. Thesis updates soon.

Getting to the heart of legislation

Click each image to see the clipped excerpt in Google Books.

The 1909 law:

From Remington's Compiled Statutes of Washington Annotated, 1922

And from Harry H. Laughlin's 1922 summary of U.S. eugenical legislation:

and

I've got a lot of things in the hopper, buddy.

Amidst the accelerating graduate school anxiety ('I have to apply by when?' 'Schools in Canada cost how much?' 'It doesn't bode well for me that UW can afford to be so picky'), I'm on the hunt for a couple of key issues for my thesis. Well, one key issue and one somewhat irksome detail - the latter being the illustrious Dr. D.A. Nicholson of Seattle, who shows up in a lot of sterilization and parole reports, as well as being the doctor who examined Frances Farmer before she was a patient at Western State Hospital in the 1940s; and the former being appendectomies being performed (or allegedly performed) during salpingectomies. This last issue caught my attention precisely because Doris Buck, Carrie Buck's sister, was sterilized without her knowledge during a supposed appendectomy. It was decades before she was told why she could never conceive a child. (Carrie Buck pictured at left)

A cursory search of the intertubes leads me to believe that, while sometimes the two procedures are performed concurrently in severe cases, it doesn't seem to me to be a normal procedure. As the appendix is very close to the right Fallopian tube, it appears that there are problems with one can affect the other (inflammation, masses), but I found nothing that stated that it was a procedure common enough that it would have been performed on at least three women at one hospital in less than a month. At any rate, I've written to Dave's mom to get an educated opinion.

This appendectomy/salpingectomy action is very important, as it could be the foundation for my argument. As of now, I don't really have much to report on - my thesis would merely be a summation of legislation and surgeries that were performed in accordance with that legislation. It may be interesting, but it's not a thesis. *sigh*

I'm not saying that I wish that at least three women, and likely many more, were sterilized under pretense of appendectomy. These women had enough to deal with as detailed in their patient records, and uninformed sterilization is a horrific tragedy triggering a lifetime of heartache. But if the evidence leads me to the conclusion that hospitals in Washington - as well as other in Virginia and other states - were sterilizing women without informed consent, it would be not only a better thesis but a story from history that I would be humbled to tell.

On Wednesday: We are making another trip to the Bellingham archives. Keep your lookin' balls locked on this picture box for more info on what we find and have already found.

Heat waves and redaction

As Seattle continued to bake in even hotter temperatures amid the very un-New Mexican humidity, I ventured north to Bellingham with my local advisor to brave resistant archivists and to scour boxes of documents. We were told that everything that was related to Washington sterilization was contained in one folder, consisting of about 100 photocopies. We already had in our possession all of these documents and had also found other boxes listed online at the Washington State Archives website. Resistant as he was, he also dug out the boxes we requested without complaint.

We spent seven hours flipping through folders. I started with patient inquiries (sad, longing letters from friends and family looking for lost loved ones), progressed through receipts for potatoes, eggs, cheese, and 'agate' buttons, and finished on parole reports seemingly unrelated to any of the patients in the lengthy sterilization reports found in two other boxes. Oh yes, that's right - we found about eighty reports, including family histories, of patients who had been presented to the Institutional Board of Health for sterilization.


Our noble archivist made copies diligently, if somewhat disgruntledly, and just as diligently redacted the names and case numbers from the copies. (Don't tell the Archives - you can still just read most of the names below the black marker!) They have no reason to worry - we have a purely academic interest with no intention of hurting anyone and will be using pseudonyms. But medical privacy laws are as immutable as the virtuous archivist. He did his job; I will do, well, whatever my 'job' seems to be at the moment.

Archival hunting

So tomorrow is my first big trip to the archives in Bellingham. My guide is a UW professor who has extensive experience studying this topic. Fortunately or unfortunately (I can't tell) we have to spend a lot of time finding documents that she already has copied and in her possession, since the person who dug most of them out did not cite their source. We are not even entirely sure in which archive they reside. A research assistant in Bellingham says he doesn't think that they have them up there, so I'm crossing my fingers that I'm not getting up at six in the morning for nothing.

Today I downloaded NoteBook and began the task of outlining my thesis so that I can see where the gaps in my research are. I also need to organize all of my .pdf files so that I know what I have and what I still need to read.

Other than that, little progress has been made. I'm hoping for some good advancement this week so that I can contact my advisor at UNM and impress him with some good news!