"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 thusexposes 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"--
In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination. In so doing, Whitt centers the experiences of Indigenous youth and adults alike at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive Era facilities. She demonstrates that in the administration of these institutions, which involved moving Indigenous people from one location to another, everyday white Americans became deputized as agents of the settler order. Bringing together Native American history, settler colonial studies, and the history of medicine, Whitt breaks new ground by showing how the confinement of Indigenous people across interlocking institutional sites helped concretize networks of white racial power—a regime that Native nations and communities continue to negotiate and actively resist today.
Sarah A. Whitt exposes how nineteenth- and twentieth-century Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions—the asylum, factory, and hospital—worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination.
