Committed Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions

• Main Author: Burch, Susan (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina Press 2021
• Series: Critical Indigeneities
• Subjects: History of the Americas; Indigenous peoples; Disability: social aspects; Settler ableism; Canton Asylum; Native kinship; psychiatric institutionalization; critical disability studies; Native American Indigenous Studies; Native self-determination; St. Elizabeths Hospital (DC); settler colonialism; 20th century social history; Native ancestors; political-relational theory of disability; medical model of disability; transinstitutionalization; mad in America; Hiawatha Asylum; Canton, South Dakota; Bureau of Indian Affairs; cemeteries; carceral studies; sanism; decolonization; eugenics; cross-generational trauma; Mad studies; Native storytelling; history of medicine; history; incarceration; Western medicine; slow violence; Narcotic Farms; South Dakota; Elizabeth Faribault; Harry R. Hummer; Cora Winona Faribault; Lizzie Red Owl; J. Kay Davis; Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate; Menominee Nation; Prairie Band Potawatomi
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people-families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day-who have experienced the impact of this history. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them. Committed expands the boundaries of Native American history, disability studies, and U.S. social and cultural history generally.