Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians
In her new book, Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians (Duke University Press), UC Irvine global and international studies assistant professor
Sarah Whitt exposes the interconnected network of settler-operated institutions behind
U.S. Native American boarding schools, asylums, factories, and hospitals during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using institutional ledgers, photographs,
letters of correspondence, and other archival documents, her work purposely centers
the voices and experiences of the Indigenous people who endured these systems of power
and examines the relevance of their histories today. Below, Whitt discusses the connections
she discovered and the importance of work that illuminates the breadth and depth of
institutional intervention into the lives of Native people in the Progressive era
and beyond.
Q: In Bad Medicine, you show how institutions like the Carlisle Indian School, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company factories, and religious-run facilities such as the House of the Good Shepherd weren’t isolated sites, but part of a larger network. What led you to trace these connections across such different types of institutions, and what does this reveal about how settler colonial power operated?
A: When I began conducting research for Bad Medicine, I was heavily invested and interested in archival materials relating to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, an off-reservation institution that is frequently regarded as the most infamous and archetypal Native American boarding school in the United States. Carlisle looms large in boarding school historiography; it was founded in 1879, and served as a model for other federally-funded, off-reservation boarding schools that would proliferate at the turn of the twentieth century. We know quite a bit about Carlisle—it’s been the subject of a robust body of scholarship. The institution kept detailed and copious records, and alumni, survivors, and descendants of those who spent time at Carlisle have shared their experiences and memories in oral histories recorded for posterity. Anyone who has ever conducted research about Carlisle—or who had a relative attend—knows how fascinating boarding school enrollees’ experiences were, and how painful and complicated they could be. Letters of correspondence between institutional officials and between Indigenous enrollees and loved ones back home paint vivid portraits of everyday life at Carlisle—but archival records also contain numerous references to other places outside of Carlisle’s grounds where enrollees were sent, often for vocational training, or alternatively, for punishment.
So in many ways, the institutional interconnections discussed in the book announced themselves during my research; my role was to take notice and make sense of those references. During earlier stages of research and later stages of conceptualization for the book, I realized that there was another kind of “boarding school” story emerging—one that didn’t exclusively take place at Carlisle, but which involved Indigenous people who were ostensibly enrolled at Carlisle or other boarding schools and under the authority of other institutional regimes—at the so-called Canton Asylum for Insane Indians or the Ford Motor Company, for example.
What I mean by that is that many of Carlisle’s “students” spent time elsewhere under the authority of other institutional officials, even while they were evidently “away at school”—and I was interested in tracing the significance of that pattern, and in telling those stories through the eyes of the Native people who experienced institutional transfer, which was often coerced. What I found was that many of their experiences controvert dominant understandings of “the boarding school system” in the US, and expand what is known about the experiences and even identities of those we might typically think of when we think of Indigenous boarding school enrollees. For one, I found that Carlisle’s institutional demographic in the years before its 1918 closure were on average much older than the children or youth that have often been the subject of boarding school scholarship—they were eighteen or nineteen years old, or young adults in their early or mid-twenties, or even their thirties. These Native women and men had important experiences that expand collective understandings of Indigenous experiences across settler institutions, as they forged romances at boarding school, pursued labor opportunities at the Ford Factory or in nurse training programs, experienced heightened forms of discipline and punishment in these environments, and challenged punitive institutionalized regimes in subtle, and not-so-subtle ways.
Q: Why do you think Bad Medicine is particularly timely right now?
A: There are many reasons why the stories that unfold in Bad Medicine are timely. Native nations continue to feel the effects of the “boarding school era” and continue to fight for truth, justice, and healing on behalf of boarding school survivors, and their communities. Additionally, with the 2021 implementation of the Native American Boarding School Investigative Initiative under former US Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, boarding schools and related institutions have garnered the renewed attention of the general public, especially in the past few years.
But, it is important to note that the issues reflected in Bad Medicine—which include a long and complex history of Indigenous institutionalization—have always been relevant, or timely, in Indigenous communities. Native people have never stopped fighting for their rights to self-determination, and never stopped fighting on behalf of future generations.
Further, the legacies of the Progressive-era institutions examined in the book are far-reaching for Indigenous communities—and others. The policies and practices implemented in spaces like boarding schools, hospitals, asylums, and other facilities that targeted Native people at the turn of the twentieth century provided the foundation for the patterns of forced confinement and incarceration that we see today. Native people are today incarcerated at a dramatically higher rate than most other populations—a phenomenon that can be traced back to the earliest years of colonial incursion. While Bad Medicine does not stretch as far back as the early modern era of American history, it does address the conditions of possibility for our contemporary moment and how Native people have envisioned the future of their nations. If there is one big, broad takeaway from the book, my hope is that it underscores how past struggles inform the present and future. It is also my hope that the institutional interconnections revealed in the book effectively affirm knowledges and experiences that are well-known in many Indigenous communities, but which might not have been documented in any formal capacity. In my consultations with Indigenous community interlocutors, the lack of robust documentation was a theme that often came up; my aim was to help amend those gaps.
Q: Much of Bad Medicine centers the voices and experiences of Indigenous people. What challenges did you face in accessing or interpreting these perspectives, and how did you approach telling these stories with care?
A: I made a very conscious decision to center Indigenous perspectives whenever possible. It is often the case that Indigenous perspectives are few and far between in archival materials, and in many instances, that was true of the many collections of materials I engaged during research for the book. There are obvious reasons for this relative paucity of Indigenous perspectives: institutional officials in spaces like the Canton Asylum, for example, actively sought to curtail the ability of Indigenous people to communicate their experiences—with one another, and with their loved ones and others outside of the facility. Further, because US officials at the turn of the twentieth century regarded the Indigenous people confined to Canton as unwell—mentally, physically, behaviorally, or otherwise—those officials were generally not interested in the perspectives of the Indigenous women, men, and children held at the institution. In fact, this is an instance in which we can see the ways in which the process of forcible institutionalization produces ideological and material tautologies: there were over 350 Indigenous people from dozens of Native nations forcibly committed to that facility on the dubious grounds of incompetence or “feeblemindedness,” and once there, the very fact of their confinement facilitated the erosion of their human rights, and the theft of their resources.
As I mentioned earlier, the practices and protocols of Progressive-era institutions left powerful lasting legacies in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike. Frequently, those legacies are reflected in the ways that archival materials are curated, organized, preserved—and reinforced by whose perspective predominates in the historical record. When I was writing the fourth chapter of Bad Medicine, which is centrally concerned with how confinement at Canton furthered the piecemeal, extralegal expropriation of Indigenous land and resources, I was extremely aware and conscientious of the one-sidedness of the historical record as represented in archival materials about the facility. The Canton files are robust. The majority are housed at the National Archives, and they contain hundreds and hundreds of documents: institutional ledgers, photographs, letters of correspondence, and more. Of particular interest to me were the letters of correspondence—some of which were written by the Indigenous people held at the facility and intended for loved ones back home. Those materials, however, were comparatively few and far between; letters of correspondence between US officials overwhelm that particular collection. In order to counter the erasure of Indigenous voices and perspectives in that archive, I thus made a conscious decision to incorporate excerpts from letters and other materials authored by those institutionalized at Canton as italicized interludes throughout the chapter. I did so as a form of witnessing the harms wrought at that facility under the auspices of “care”; those interludes constitute moments that visually disrupt the flow of the chapter, and explicitly call upon the reader to engage and sit with the voices, and experiences, of institutionalized people.
Q: The book reveals how ordinary white Americans were often complicit and deputized in maintaining these systems. Why did you think this intervention was important, and how does it expand narratives about institutional “reform” during the Progressive Era?
A: Many of the bureaucratic institutional “systems” implemented in the Progressive era were enacted, supported, extended, and maintained by everyday people. Much of the foundational scholarship on boarding school experiences and other histories of confinement emphasize those who, in their capacity as officials—as jail wardens, or US officials, or field matrons, or boarding school superintendents—furthered the stated objectives of the US government with respect to the “management” of Native American populations. Equally as important, however, was the involvement of those who did not act in an official capacity, but who secured power for themselves and sometimes others by weaponizing relative privileges—class, racial, gendered, or otherwise. For Native people who lived at the turn of the twentieth century, and who navigated increasingly sophisticated systems of oppression, land dispossession, and the erosion or criminalization of their worldviews through federal policies that targeted their lifeways, settler colonial power was often amorphous; “faceless.” That is, the identities of those who held and exercised power over Native people ranged from US officials and reservation agents to married, American women who employed Indigenous domestic servants in their households. Of course, not all those who held power held it in the same way, nor were they able to exercise it equally. But this shifting, “faceless” nature of power is important, because it disguised the ways in which individual American citizens often stood to profit from their informal involvement in “Indian affairs”—and how power over Native people could be transferred and traded laterally among individual American citizens, depending on the context and circumstance. Reform was thus not solely the domain of the philanthropist or US official; and “reform” was often used as a synonym for more sinister activities.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from Bad Medicine?
A: There are a few things that I hope readers gain from engagement with the text. The first, of course, is that I hope the book underscores how Native people found many ways to resist punitive institutionalized regimes and to survive and secure better futures for themselves and their loved ones—sometimes against all odds. Institutionalization continues to impact Native people today, and this fact illustrates the ongoing relevance of such stories. In engaging the book, academic audiences are most likely to expand their understanding of the breadth and depth of institutional intervention into the lives of Native people in the Progressive era and beyond, and how the history of native American boarding schools dovetails with other histories typically viewed as discrete—labor history, the history of medicine, or the global impact of the Magdalene Laundries, as a few examples. For a more general audience, I think many readers will be surprised to learn about the scope of Native experiences of institutionalization at the turn of the twentieth century, and how Indigenous history is central to topics generally regarded exclusively as American history or studies. Bad Medicine also points to additional questions that fall outside the scope of the book, and to many new avenues of inquiry—in Indigenous studies and history, in the history of medicine, in the study of institutionalization and its consequences, and in carceral studies, as well. Most importantly, though, I wrote the book for Indigenous people impacted by institutionalization and for their descendants, relatives, and communities; I hope that this work contributes to ongoing efforts to reclaim a complex history, and to expand what is known about the Indigenous past in service of the future.