Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians [Hardcover]

InBad 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.USSarah 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.Sarah A. Whitt is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine.“Brilliantly conceived, deeply researched, and powerfully written,Bad Medicineis 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 understandils›