By Michael Bielawski

Two UVM grad students are disputing the widely held notion that Vermont during the early 20th century targeted native Americans with a eugenics-related sterilization policy.

“This analysis also finds no evidence that Native Americans—specifically Abenaki people—were targeted by this law or were disproportionately institutionalized at this time,” their report in UVM History Review concludes.

The study looks specifically into “eugenical sexual sterilization operations codified in Vermont’s 1931 law” which was called the “Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization.”

It says 252 sterilizations were documented between 1931 and 1952, but this data “has never been closely assessed.”

The executive editors are Ian Price and Jocelyn Rockhold. Price is a second-year graduate student in UVM’s Department of History’s Master of Arts program, studying “modern German history with a focus on colonialism and memory.” Rockhold is also a second-year graduate student and her interests include “modern Britain, film censorship, and permissive society.”

They examine available data regarding who those sterilized were, with a focus on sterilization certificates submitted to the state. Conclusions include that a large percentage were poor and/or institutionalized white people, mostly women. About two-thirds were institutionalized and two-thirds were female.

It states “Nearly all had been essentially classified as disabled in contemporaneous terms. Within the cohort of forty-four people examined more closely, additional patterns emerged, including: young men involved in crime, middle-aged women with over five children, and women charged with ‘morality crimes.’”

It adds, “Lastly, poverty appears to be the most frequently shared trait among these people sterilized under this law.”

Only recently have these certificates become public.

“Access to these certificates has only recently been made available through the Vermont State Archives & Records Administration (as of 2021), and this paper is the first to begin analyzing patterns within this data,” it states.

The study explains how it came to be widely believed that Native Americans including Abenaki members were targeted.

“Previous academic scholarship on the Vermont eugenics movement does not attempt to address the specifics of who was sterilized. Kevin Dann, who wrote the first piece on the subject, speculated without citation that ‘gypsies’ and ‘Abenaki’ may have been the targets,” it states.

Such thought prompted the Vermont State Legislature to issue a public apology for the program in 2021.

“While eugenics practices and policies are no longer in existence, the impact and legacy deeply remains today,” House Speaker Jill Krowinski, a Democrat from Burlington said. “For those that were directly impacted or their descendants, and for all of the communities involved, we cannot undo the trauma that this moment has caused, but we can start by formally acknowledging this dark period in our state’s history.”

The resolution mentions the Abenaki tribe by name, identifying them as a victim of this program.

“Whereas, in 1925, University of Vermont zoology professor Henry F. Perkins established the discredited Eugenics Survey of Vermont to measure evidence of alleged delinquency, dependency, and mental defectiveness, and this survey targeted members of Abenaki bands, Vermonters of mixed racial or French-Canadian heritage, the poor, and persons with disabilities …”

Boston Congress of Public Health Review (BCPHR) pubished a piece in 2021 suggesting that eugenics lives on in other forms including experimental vaccines distributed disproportionately to the vulnerable.

“Casual, unregulated vaccine testing on the captive and vulnerable continued apace throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Various flu vaccines were given without consent on developmentally disabled by Jonas Salk and the U.S. Army during the 1940s. Likewise, a completely unregulated potential hepatitis vaccine was tested on developmentally disabled children at Willowbrook State Home in the 1950’s. All of these experiments, and many others, were done in the name of ‘public health.’”

The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle