Disorderly Pasts: Kinship, Diagnoses, and Remembering in American Indian-U.S. Histories

Abstract

Disorderly Pasts" centers on life stories from South Dakota's Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric hospital for American Indians. Between 1902 and 1933, the Asylum detained nearly four hundred Indigenous men, women, and children from more than fifty Native nations. Focusing especially on the experiences of Menominee people collectively stolen from their homes in Wisconsin to Canton in November 1917, this article exposes contested understandings of kin, diagnoses, and remembering. Complex relationships between the three concepts also emerge: medical diagnoses were used to undermine Indigenous kinship, and they complicate remembering. At the same time, remembering-recalling and repopulating the past-offers a way to challenge pathological diagnoses and affirm Native selfdetermination. Motivated by disorder, the desire to "disrupt the systematic functioning or neat arrangement of" historical work, this project unsettles the projected objectivity and commonsense logic of U.S. medical diagnoses and institutionalization. It brings to light the violent entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, ableism, and patriarchy and their impact on Native sovereignty, Indigenous kinship, and remembering. Collaborating with relatives of those incarcerated at Canton, and drawing on decolonizing and disability studies methodologies, this work seeks to generate meaningful historical knowledge and new theoretical strategies and perspectives.

Sites of conscience redressing disability institutional violence

“…Linking to earlier observations about the Australian context, one intersecting dynamic is settler colonial violence: medicalised disability knowledge, interventions and systems that sustain dispossession, displacement and elimination of First Nations people (as discussed by Avery (2018), Chapman (2014), and Burch (2016); see also resonances with scholarship on settler colonial violence in relation to racialised incarceration (Perera and Pugliese, undated)). Structural violence is another dynamic, referring to the organisation of systems and space through Disability Institutions that creates conditions wherein disabled people are deemed of less social value and denied opportunities to flourish (or even live) (Steele, 2020: 84-93).…”

“…Drawing on threads from Goffman and Foucault, critical disability scholars in North America have proposed that institutionalisation, coercion and control of disabled people can be understood in terms of an ‘institutional archipelago’ – a network of ‘diverse services and spaces' that includes Disability Institutions as defined in this article, as well as progressive ‘alternatives' to these such as group homes and community mental health treatment (Chapman, Carey & Ben-Moshe, 2014: 14). The archipelago is situated in interlocking systems of oppression and is undergird by persistent ableist, eugenics and settler colonial logics positioning disabled people as abnormal, sub-human and violable (Chapman, 2014; Chapman, Carey & Ben-Moshe, 2014). Over their lives individuals move between ‘islands' in the archipelago and over time the ‘islands' themselves evolve, recalibrating in response to crisis and progressive social shifts alike.…”

The Fantasy of Anorexia: Historical Entanglements of Evolutionary Thought, Food Restriction, and Curative Imaginaries

“…Following disability scholar and activist Eli Clare, diagnosis enmeshes with processes of treatment, cure, management, rehabilitation, and prevention, shaping "the ideology of cure" centered on elimination and control, with the goal of defining the normal and abnormal to secure "heterosexuality, whiteness, and wealth" (2017,70,74). For the US expansionist project in particular, diagnosis was used as a tool of anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness to capture land and labor, simultaneously rupturing nonsettler foodways and kinship structures, creating ongoing and systemic debilitation (Baynton 2001;Burch 2016;Deerinwater 2021;McKinley and Jernigan 2023;Whitt 2021).…”

Introduction to Special Issue: Psychiatry as Social Medicine

“…In recent decades, historians of psychiatry have examined in greater detail the contestation of diagnostic and therapeutic categories inside and outside of institutions of mental health, by a wide variety of actors outside of the medical profession (Grob 1991 ; Eghigian 2011 ). These textured accounts of the social worlds contained within the history of psychiatry and the mind sciences pay closer attention to the intersections of gender, class, and race (Burch 2016 ; Hirshbein 2009 ; Lunbeck 1994 ; Metzl 2009 ), using methodologies drawn not only from social and cultural history (Pietikainen 2007 ) but also broader analytics drawn from environmental studies, disability studies, and postcolonial studies (Doroshow, et al 2019 ). As the field of psychiatry has become increasingly biologicized in the late 20 th and early twenty-first centuries, these social histories have worked to complicate the universalism of biomedical categories, and to emphasize how diagnostic and therapeutic practices are also shaped by those who live within these categories and navigate these institutions as nurses, patients, and family members (Braslow 1997 ; Sadowsky 2017 ; Harrington 2019 ; Smith 2020 ).…”