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Bad Medicine
Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians
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Sarah A. Whitt
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Sarah A. Whitt is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Reviews
“Brilliantly conceived, deeply researched, and powerfully written, Bad Medicine is a compelling book that reveals the interconnectedness of—indeed the interdependence among—a range of institutions that contained and confined Indigenous lives in the Progressive Era as well as the networks of white racial power that buttressed and sustained this disciplinary apparatus. Sarah A. Whitt takes seemingly well-trodden stories and presents them anew by examining generative yet unexplored areas in ways that will transform our understanding of them. Bad Medicine is an incredibly important contribution.”
-- Brianna Theobald, author of Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century
-- Brianna Theobald, author of Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century
“In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt provides us with a powerful look at Native confinement, punishment, and resistance in the settler project. By examining several distinct but ideologically interrelated institutions, she reveals the connections among Indigenous incarceration, pathologization, and labor exploitation and highlights the often overlooked role of institutions in settler pursuit of Indigenous subjugation.”
-- Shannon Speed, author of Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State
-- Shannon Speed, author of Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State
"The use of primary sources, including letters, makes this book both poignant and revealing as it explores the use of institutionalization to both assimilate and discriminate with equal intensity. The text further discusses the ramifications of these tactics for current Indigenous peoples and their futures. Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals."
-- L. L. Lovern Choice
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Table of contents
vii -
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Acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. “An ordinary case of discipline” surveillance and punishment at the carlisle indian industrial school, 1879–1918
27 -
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2. “Hoe handle medicine” medicinal labor at the ford motor company and lancaster general hospital
70 -
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3. Sisters magdalene entwined histories of “reform” at good shepherd homes
109 -
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4. “Care and maintenance” s ettler ableism and land disposs ess ion at the canton asylum for insane indians, 1902–1934
139 -
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Epilogue. Indigenous futurities and the afterlives of institutionalization
184 -
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Appendix
199 -
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Notes
207 -
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Bibliography
245 -
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Index
263
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 25, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781478060253
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478060253
Keywords for this book
Native American history; Native American boarding schools; history of medicine; indigenous labor; confinement; Progressive Era US; Allotment and Assimilation Era; settler institutions; settler colonialism; Carlisle Indian Industrial School; white American deputization; Fort Motor Company; vocational training; House of the Good Shepherd; forced confinement; Canton Asylum for Insane Indians; medical confinement; land dispossession; Federal boarding school investigative initiative; Indigenous futurity
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
