Bad medicine : settler colonialism and the institutionalization of American Indians
Sarah A. Whitt (Author)
"'Bad Medicine' examines interconnected histories of American Indian punishment, pathologization, and labor exploitation at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, the House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive-era facilities. Sarah A. Whitt reveals how settler institutions deputized white American citizens as the disciplinary agents of Indian people, and how Indian people uniquely experienced institutionalization as a tool of US settler colonialism. 'Bad Medicine' finds that Indian adults eighteen years of age and older were a significant proportion, and from 1912 to 1918 the majority, of Carlisle's institutional demographic. In focusing on this overlooked cohort of adult enrollees, the book demonstrates that attempts to control, subordinate, and punish Indian women and men occurred across institutions that coexisted in the so-called 'Assimilation' Era (1879-1934). Bad Medicine's attention to the non-educational experiences of adult Indian people thus exposes sites of Indian-white conflict that were as integral to the maintenance of settler power as was the indoctrination and theft of Indian children. In examining punitive connections between ostensibly distinct facilities, 'Bad Medicine' demonstrates their interchangeable and interlocking nature, and argues that the practice of confining Indian people helped concretize networks of white racial power."-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2025
Duke University Press, Durham, 2025