Committed

Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions

Susan Burch

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469663364
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. In this accessible and innovative work, Susan Burch tells the story of the Indigenous people—families, communities, and nations, across generations to the present day—who have experienced the impact of this history.

Chapter 1: Many Stories, Many Paths

Our situation in the United States, as well as throughout the Western Hemisphere, is unique, for we are First Nations people, indigenous; we aren’t so much a political minority as we are displaced persons.

—Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo, Sioux, and Lebanese), Off the Reservation

Over the time we have been here, we have built cultural ways on and about this land. We have our own respected versions of how we came to be. These origin stories—that we emerged or fell from the sky or were brought forth—connect us to this land and establish our realities, our belief systems.

—Henrietta Mann (Northern Cheyenne)

In 2013, Bois Forte Chippewa historian Kay Davis traveled to Canton, South Dakota, to join in an honoring ceremony. Her destination was the former grounds of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. Davis brought with her a handmade map. The names of every Native nation and each of their individual members stolen away to the Indian Asylum filled the white spaces along the western and northern edges, creating a framework, archive, and collective story. Below the printed text appeared the common outlines of individual states. Colored strands stretched between the lists of affiliated Indigenous people and their reservations’ geographic locations, transmitting the stories of people taken away and those to whom they belonged.

Focusing on the institutionalized people as members of Indigenous nations, Davis’s map bore witness to the rippling, damaging impact of the Canton Asylum. At the same time, the collective names, strings, and homelands offered a counterstory, inverting settler boundaries and conquest with Indigenous centers and borders. Ancestors threaded in short and long lines to their kin, a tapestry stitched by trauma, defiance, and imagination. For Davis and others attending the ceremony, historic and contemporary threads held them to one another.¹

Bois Forte Chippewa Tribal Historian Kay Davis made this map sometime between 2010 and 2014 to emphasize kinship ties and Indigenous identities of the people stolen away to the federal institution in Canton, South Dakota. Names of Native nations and their members institutionalized at the Indian Asylum frame the left side and top. Pins and colored string connect the tribal information to geographic locations of reservations on a standard map of the continental United States. Photograph by Jill Betancourt. Courtesy of Kristi Foreman.

Finding family members and their histories has united many people at the honoring ceremony. For Kay Davis, excavation and imagination became a practice in her adolescence. She was sixteen when her mother finally admitted what others had long asserted: that she was Native American, born in an Indian Hospital to a father who was an enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa and a mother who was non-Native. Seeking to better understand her own identity and those of her Indigenous community, Davis eventually took a job in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, specializing in genealogical work.² Searching for a more complete account of her Bois Forte Band’s story ultimately drew her to the Canton Asylum. One of their members, Tom Floodwood, was forcibly taken to Canton on May 13, 1923. He died there four months later, on September 26.³ Drawing on her genealogical expertise, Davis began writing short life stories for each known person confined at the Indian Asylum. In contrast to the U.S. government documents and most historical studies about the institution, Davis organized her biographical project by Native nations. “For me, it is the people who went there and their Tribal affiliation,” she explained.⁴ Placing individuals within their Indigenous communities and emphasizing their kin connections to others, Kay Davis offered a different tale. The process, she pointed out, intentionally countered some of the corrosive effect of settler conquest.⁵ As in her own experience, much of these ancestors’ history has been lost to descendants, weakening the ties to American Indian community and identity. Conducting genealogical research and sharing her findings has nourished some of those roots. Davis’s project embodies what Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists call “re-storying”: “retelling and imagining of stories that restores and continues cultural memories.”⁶

In this 2016 soft-focus portrait of Kay Davis, the eighty-year-old historian looks thoughtfully at the camera, an art piece hanging on the wall behind her. A commitment to family and Native self-determination propelled Davis’s research on people detained at Canton Asylum. Courtesy of Kristi Foreman.

Reading Davis’s threaded map evokes re-storying. Scanning from the outer edges and across the chart, people’s histories of forced dislocations and a path to institutionalization emerge. Tracing from the various hubs outward, stories before and long after the Asylum’s establishment rise up. The beginnings and ends of the strings emphasize peoples’ relations to places, to homes, and to Indigenous worlds. Confinement and sustained exile pull at the threads, as do refusals by kin to fully let go. Uneven and incomplete, haunted and haunting questions swirl around what is remembered and imagined about the people incarcerated at Canton Asylum.

As the tribal historian’s graphic representation illustrates, there are many centers to the lived stories of institutionalization at Canton. The constellation of pins, strands, Native names, and places contain beginnings of stories that continue to unfurl to this day. European colonial conquest in the Americas since the 1500s offers another center that includes Indigenous peoples’ forced dislocations across the nineteenth century—brought about by war, hunger, profit, love, hope, epidemics, and genocide.⁷ Christian missions, boarding schools, prisons, orphanages, and insane asylums punctuate this account. Broken treaties, wardship, and other attacks on Native self-determination pierce like barbed knots at every turn.

Sharing her map with others gathered at the site of the former Asylum, Davis invited them to grapple with the impact of the disparate stories and storytellers. The histories symbolically represented in the map and in white settler progress-centered accounts of Canton Asylum are uneven in detail and power, restlessly cohabiting a world of multiple centers, nations, and consequences. Questions posed between descendants, focused exchanges, and pondering silences underscored the ramifications of the stories: Which accounts are known in fragments or wide swaths, and which ones have been stolen, lost, or hidden? Where and from whom do the details come? Re-storying fills the hours spent between Davis and people whose kin are tied to Canton Asylum. Her map is an urgent call for more stories.

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One white string in Kay Davis’s creation arcs outward from the reservation in Sisseton, South Dakota.⁸ According to descendants of Elizabeth Faribault, multiple removals simultaneously mark ruptures and starting points in their family history. As one relative explained, Elizabeth’s parents were members of the Sisseton (“people of the marsh”) and Wahpeton (“people of Lake Traverse”) Band of Dakota Nation.⁹ For generations, their home had been in what today is Minnesota. Born in 1882, Elizabeth was the firstborn child of Zihkanakoyake (also called Henry Alexis in U.S. documents) and Manzakoyakesuim (also known as Mary Alexis).¹⁰ Like many Dakota people in the late nineteenth century, Zihkanakoyake and Manzakoyakesuim crossed Minnesota and South and North Dakota as part of an exodus forced by the U.S. government. Wars and treaties contributed to further splintering. Some of Elizabeth’s extended Alexis family fled to Canada; those who returned had to relocate to reservations in South and North Dakota. Zihkanakoyake and Manzakoyakesuim were among those who were displaced to Spirit Lake. Later, Manzakyakesium moved with her children to Lake Traverse.¹¹

Little is known about Elizabeth’s early years. She clearly grew up among other Dakota people, absorbing daily lessons from elders and other kin. Her immediate relatives communicated exclusively in the Dakota language and appear to have held tightly to Sisseton-Wahpeton lifeways. Her family’s aversion to Euro-American cultural assimilation was typical. The local U.S. Indian agent in the late 1870s, J. G. Hamilton, for example, had expressed alarm by how tenaciously women maintained Dakota culture and identity.¹² In this context, one can imagine some of the contours of daily life: helping and arguing with younger siblings; learning to cook, sew, garden; spending time with elders and with peers; listening to stories; yearning, struggling, belonging, and coming of age.¹³ The children of Zihkanakoyake and Manzakoyakesuim almost certainly were known by Dakota names, which meant that Elizabeth had multiple names across her childhood and young adulthood. These ways of identifying Elizabeth and her siblings were never recorded or preserved by U.S. officials.¹⁴

At the turn of the twentieth century, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth was listed in U.S. rolls as the wife of Jesse Faribault, a member of a prominent Sisseton family. Like many relatives in his generation, Jesse spent most of his life on the Sisseton Reservation, often working as a farm laborer. Both Jesse and Elizabeth came of age at a time of considerable transformation among the Sisseton Band. Increasing land thefts by white settlers, unsuccessful military and political battles with the U.S. government, and the cumulative effect of disease, starvation, and displacement exacted heavy tolls on Dakota people.

The first reservation partitioned under the General Allotment Act of 1867, Lake Traverse (Sisseton)—where the Faribaults lived—was known for its resistance to U.S. assimilation.¹⁵ Missionaries and educational reformers had campaigned since the 1870s to place American Indian children in schools away from their home communities as an intentional effort to eradicate Native cultures.¹⁶ Defying the mounting pressure to submit to boarding schools, Sisseton relatives often kept children, especially girls, at home.¹⁷ Neither Jesse nor Elizabeth had attended boarding or day schools, although most of their younger siblings had. U.S. census rolls and anecdotal evidence suggest that the couple primarily spoke Dakota. Tied closely to their Sisseton community, the Faribaults would not have needed to learn much written or spoken English.¹⁸

In the first fifteen years of marriage, Elizabeth and Jesse had six children, two of whom died in infancy.¹⁹ The couple lived in a three-bedroom home on the Sisseton Reservation. During the day, Elizabeth managed the house and mothered their young children. Meantime, Jesse worked their fields, described by one observer as “one of the nicest forty acres of wheat this part of the country and a nice garden, consisting of corn, potatoes, beans and other garden truck too many to mention.”²⁰

The Faribaults lived in a world where the battles between Sisseton members and the U.S. government could swiftly shift from national to personal, distant to everyday, quiet to loud. In the 1880s, the U.S. government began criminalizing features of American Indian cultures.²¹ By 1913, the United States, through its Indian agent at Sisseton, abolished the tribal government.²² The BIA superintendent there, Eugene D. Mossman, sought to limit dancing, communalism, and other distinctive qualities of Dakota life.²³ Tensions had long simmered between BIA agents and Sisseton members. Contests over authority, citizenship, and land sometimes erupted into open conflict. For example, in 1914, representatives of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Bands went to Washington, D.C., to challenge U.S. theft of their land and treaty violations.²⁴

Archival documents detail that Elizabeth Faribault also directly challenged BIA representatives, engaging in yelling matches and disrupting their work on the reservation. The clerk in charge asserted that Faribault’s pattern of behavior indicated mental disorder; the only solution, he insisted, was to remove her to a government medical facility. Describing the larger battles over sovereignty between American Indians and white settlers in the twentieth century as “a quieter kind” than the bloody wars decades earlier, Ojibwe anthropologist and novelist David Treuer identified new weapons in the U.S. arsenal: “Instead of guns the combatants carried petitions; instead of scalps, people held aloft legal briefs.”²⁵ One should add pathological diagnoses and treatments to this inventory.

When reservation and school doctors, Asylum superintendents, and rank-and-file BIA agents claimed that Elizabeth Faribault and others were insane an...