Bad Medicine

Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians

Sarah A. Whitt

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781478031260, 9781478028048
• eBook ISBN: 9781478060253
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bad Medicine
• 1. “An Ordinary Case of Discipline”: Surveillance and Punishment at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918
• 2. “Hoe Handle Medicine”: Medicinal Labor at the Ford Motor Company and Lancaster General Hospital
• 3. Sisters Magdalene: Entwined Histories of “Reform” at Good Shepherd Homes
• 4. “Care and Maintenance”: Settler Ableism and Land Dispossession at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, 1902–1934
• Epilogue: Indigenous Futurities and the Afterlives of Institutionalization
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index