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 is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Bad Medicine 1 1. "An Ordinary Case of Discipline": Surveillance and Punishment at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918 27 2. "Hoe Handle Medicine": Medicinal Labor at the Ford Motor Company and Lancaster General Hospital 70 3. Sisters Magdalene: Entwined Histories of "Reform" at Good Shepherd Homes 109 4. "Care and Maintenance": Settler Ableism and Land Dispossession at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, 1902-1934 139 Epilogue: Indigenous Futurities and the Afterlives of Institutionalization 184 Appendix 199 Notes 207 Bibliography 245 Index 263
"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) "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)
