Enduring the Storm: Dealing with Mental Disabilities in Oceania Juliann Anesi University of California, Los Angeles

Keywords:

ableism, mental disability, Oceania, postcolonial Sāmoa, Mad Studies, Aotearoa/New Zealand, colonial carceral structures

In late 2012, a Samoan man named Hans Dalton traveled from Aotearoa/New Zealand (hereafter Aotearoa) to Sāmoa. During his visit, on December 12, Cyclone Evan, a category three typhoon, devastating the Samoan Islands and surrounding islands in the Pacific region. The hurricane destroyed Dalton's family's home along with his medication, 1 which, according to his family members, he took for a mental disability—schizophrenia or "thought disorder." 2 After a couple of days without his medication, Dalton was vomiting and had physical outbursts. In fear for his safety, his family took him to Moto'otua, the national hospital. There, Dalton was placed under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Ian Parkin. According to reports, his behavior became more belligerent; at one point he punched through the door of the one-room Mental Health Unit. 3 Drawing on medical staff perspectives, news coverage later reported that, "There was no longer a place to keep him," and Dalton was transferred to the police station. 4 Later that evening, he was transported again, to the Tafa'igata Prison. The next day, Dalton's lifeless body was found half submerged in a 44-gallon drum of water in his cellblock.

Subsequent investigations and media coverage generated wide-ranging (and contradictory) accounts of Dalton's death. At one point, another prisoner, Jonathan Crichton, was accused but later acquitted; officials then claimed that Dalton's death was an "alleged suicide," but then they pivoted, opening a homicide investigation. 5 Dalton's body was flown back to Aotearoa, where the coroner, Dr. Peter Ryan, ruled the cause of death as drowning. 6 Despite repeated petitions from Dalton's family to produce evidence and pursue the crime of his death, neither the Aotearoa nor the Sāmoan governments have complied. Conspicuously, the Sāmoan police department, healthcare units, and prison staff have assumed no responsibility for the events that led up to his death. The family and their attorney, Olinda Woodroffe, have brought their cause to the public, demanding answers and arguing that the extant evidence shows that Dalton was beaten and forced into a water drum. 7 To date, there has been no publicly disclosed charges brought in the death of Hans Dalton and the exact details of his last hours remain unknown.

As a scholar of Indigenous and disability studies, I am haunted by Hans Dalton's death, the cloudy circumstances that ended his life as well as the interlocking forces, structures, institutions, and histories surrounding his final days. Using disability studies theory alongside a postcolonial and Indigenous lens, I will consider three interconnected themes to draw attention to overlooked meanings of this Indigenous disabled man's death: the larger context of social discourse; colonial carceral structures (specifically spotlighting psychiatric or psych institutions and prison); and continued colonialism and ableism in postcolonial Samoa. This article details how ableism functions at the intersections of imperialism and colonialism and how they co-function within a healthcare and prison system in the context of one postcolonial nation, Sāmoa. 8

Social discourse

Public discussion of Dalton's death, particularly newspaper accounts, reflect and reinforce settler colonial and ableist ideas. 9 An unsurprising pattern in news stories about Dalton is the partial erasure of his identity and heritage. In Aotearoa media sources, Dalton is identified as a "New Zealand man" or "Kiwi Hans Dalton" but not explicitly as an Indigenous person or as someone with Samoan heritage. In the Samoan media, Hans Dalton is reported as a man visiting his Samoan family members when the hurricane hit the island. The reference to his family on island is an acknowledgement by the media of his Samoan kinship and identity. 10 In 2013, I spoke with the former Head of State, Tui Atua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi, who referred to Dalton as a "Samoan guy." 11 This is unsurprising. Given his heritage and familial connections, Dalton is claimed as a member of the Samoan community. Dalton's Samoan relatives consistently underscore their relations, affirming that he belonged to them, that his identity is tied to Sāmoa and to their family. 12 In this case, Dalton is Samoan and part of the community. 13 More importantly, Indigenous communities emphasize connections with familial/clan genealogies, relations to place, and village connections to understanding one's identity. When read from this lens, the idea of upholding racial constructions according to homogenizing nation-state definitions is in contrast with such beliefs. Moreover, the casual "dismissal" of Dalton's personhood in media representation is a form of Indigenous erasure or elimination—a kind of omission that is influenced by unequal power relations in institutions. 14

In contrast to the erasure of his Indigenous identity, newspapers in both Aotearoa and Sāmoa repeatedly emphasized mental illness and health care in their accounts of Dalton. For example, articles commonly called him "mentally ill," having a "thought disorder," or "a 38-year-old psychiatric patient;" many depicted his state of mind as "distressed after losing his medication," and suggested he was dangerous, which then warranted his placement in prison. 15 In this context, Western biomedicine and ableist values eclipse the Samoan man's identity and lived story. In addition to dehumanizing Hans Dalton, the dominant, pathologized depictions of the man fit the broader pattern of settler colonialism's eradication of Indigenous people. At a very basic level, Hans Dalton is depicted in media sources as disposable, his personhood effaced by pervasive—and unchecked—negative assumptions about disabled, chronically ill, and Mad people. 16

Close attention to public discourse surrounding Hans Dalton's death reveals that ableism and settler colonialism buttress one another. Normalized and justified across all the accounts was the assumption that doctors and police needed to confine and surveil Dalton, that psychological and physical removal was the only and reasonable solution to the "problem" he posed. 17 None of the newspaper accounts offer a critique of systemic and structural violence Dalton experienced, or question the negligence by the hospital and police units. Ultimately, the media seems to imply that mental illness caused Dalton's death.

Dalton's mother, Mrs. Wilson, offers a strong counterstory to the dominant media depictions. When asked what her son was like as a person, she replied, "He was a gentle and sensitive person with the most beautiful soul." 18 Emphasizing the family's affection for him and positive qualities challenges the newspapers' pathologized and racist representations. For Mrs. Wilson, Samoan values of alofa, or love and relationality provide the central lens through which to view her son. Her public stance resists Western biomedical and ableist stereotypes by affirming Dalton's personhood and belonging rather than prioritizing a Western medical diagnosis or institutional viewpoint. 19

As disability studies scholars Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic have noted, social discourse reflects directly how societies view disability and Indigeneity. Institutions, particularly carceral structures, extend this insight, providing material responses to particular people within settler contexts. 20

Colonial Carceral Structures

When the cyclone destroyed Dalton's family's home, Hans's family sought support from the local hospital to provide him with needed medications. The staff observed his distress through a pathological lens, determining that he needed to be confined in the mental health unit. In this heightened space of surveillance and control, his subsequent outbursts sparked increased intervention: he was transferred to a police station, and then to a prison. These trans-institutional spaces share a long history of colonial racial ordering and stereotypes that emphasizes a logic of containment and carceral institutions. Under imperial control of Germany (1900-1914) and New Zealand (1914-1962) administrations, health care and prison facilities were established in Sāmoa. Scholars Susan Burch, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Ruth Gilmore and others have detailed the historic overlap between disability-related facilities and prisons and the common patterns of trapping and shuttling people within and between them. 21 For example, state residential schools, asylums, and psychiatric wards have been spaces that "dealt" and "warehoused" people and disabled people in Sāmoa and many other nations; the same and similar facilities also detained nondisabled Indigenous people in the name of "civility" and acculturation. 22

In Dalton's case, the health care service he sought did not assist with his medication refill. Rather, the events that took place in the hospital and prison asserted forceful forms of punitive measures aimed at dominating him and controlling his adverse behavior so as to maintain so-called civil order, harmony, and safety. The bruises, severe head injuries, lacerations, and trauma to his body tells a story of violence and punishment, especially, for those with mental disabilities in settler-created institutions.

Continued Colonialism and Ableism in Postcolonial Sāmoa

Dalton's tragic story occurs 50 years after Sāmoa ceased to be a colony. One of the first Pacific islands to decolonize from New Zealand, Sāmoa has been administered by local and Indigenous government since 1962. 23 While sovereignty is an important achievement, the fundamental colonial structures and ableist frameworks remain firmly rooted in the community. In other words, health care and public safety are now Indigenized in that they are overseen by the Sāmoan government. In reality, they continue to reflect and reinforce colonial values and practices. As Hans Dalton experienced it, psych units and prisons control and oppress Native dissent or rebellion. 24 His death in a prison is a reminder of historical forms of incarceration and institutionalization of marginalized groups that maintain colonial dominance even in postcolonial settings. As feminist critical race scholar Sherene Razack reminds us, "while colonialism often remains a shadowy event in inquiries and royal commissions, official accounts generally stop short of acknowledging the virulence and persistence of racism. Instead, they reiterate that somehow indifference prevails among the police and the health professions." 25

Conclusion

Dalton's story embodies Sāmoa's failure to fully decolonize or to effectively analyze, understand, and address the unequal relations of power in care institutions and state prisons. In a context of incomplete decolonization, tragic incidents like Han Dalton's death yield familiar and haunting results: efforts by those in power to contain and maintain hierarchies and to erase those targeted by its structures.

Decolonizing approaches must focus on the history, colonial processes, ideologies and institutional practices that construct the relations of power between Indigenous people and capitalist nation-states. Institutional interventions imposed by imperial powers and maintained in the name of postcolonial sovereignty continue to harm Indigenous and disabled communities. Indeed, the harms can be compounded because members of these overlapping groups often do not conform to colonizing practices.

Dalton's premature death is a call to scholars and activists alike to challenge normative structures and to critically think about the ways colonization continues to be ever present and in all-encompassing today in and beyond Sāmoa. The relationships between mental disabilities and Indigenous communities are underrepresented in both disability studies and Native American and Indigenous studies scholarship. More Indigenized and anti-ableist research is needed, as are more coalitions between disability and Indigenous activists. Across all of this knowledge-making and world-building, focusing on those most impacted—Indigenous disabled, chronically ill, and Mad people—and centering their needs will be needed to disrupt normative colonial structures of care. 26

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to the reviewers for their constructive feedback. I am grateful for the following colleagues who helped me think through earlier drafts of this article: Beth Marchant's GS 201 class at UCLA (Fall 2020 quarter); Alfred P. Flores; Cathy Kreche; Brandon Reilly; and Joyce Pualani Warren. Finally, thank you to the journal editors, Susan Burch, Ella Callow, and Juliet Larkin-Gilmore, for the opportunity to share my work.

Endnotes

  1. Samoa Observer, February 10, 2014, retrieved on August 22, 2014; Kolotita Talatalaga, "Boxing Day tragedy at Tafa'igata," Samoa Observer, January 3, 2013, 1.
    Return to Text
  2. Talatalaga, "Boxing Day tragedy at Tafa'igata," 1.
    Return to Text
  3. On April 7, 1971, the Prime Minister Tupua Tamasese Lealofi VI officially opened a "WS$5,000 inpatient Mental Health Unit at the Apia General Hospital. It was the first such unit in the South Pacific (except for the more advanced countries like Australia and New Zealand)." According to the article, after one and half years of operation it has seen such immense growth that mental health planners are advocating for more intensive attention to mental health problems in (Western) Samoa. Samoa Times, February 17, 1972 (vol. x, 1), 1
    Return to Text
  4. Talatalaga, "Boxing Day Tragedy," 4.
    Return to Text
  5. Administrator, Samoa Observer, "Court Gives its Reasons," February 9, 2014, Retrieved February 11, 2014; Talatalaga, "Boxing Day tragedy at Tafa'igata," 1.
    Return to Text
  6. Aotearoa is the Māori name for the small groups of islands known as New Zealand. It means "land of the long white cloud." For this paper, I use "Aotearoa/New Zealand" to acknowledge the Māori people and Indigenous communities long struggle to hold on to their language and cultural practices. For more details, check Pihama, Leonie, "Mana Wahine: Decolonising Gender in Aotearoa," Australian Feminist Studies (2021): 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1902270; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2021). https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350225282; Hayley Cavino, "Holding space: Centering mana wāhine ethics in historical trauma research," HE RAU MURIMURI AROHA (2019): 50.
    Return to Text
  7. "Lawyer argues evidence points to Hans Dalton being beaten and forced into a water drum," NZ Herald, August 4, 2019, Retrieved on March 20, 2020. On December 13, 2018, Woodroffe confirmed she was representing the family in civil proceedings in Samoa and said despite filing the paperwork some years ago, she was yet to receive a date for the hearing. Also, in 2018, the Samoan government offered to settle the case, by paying the sum of 100,000 tala/ NZ$53,407 to the Dalton family. It is uncertain if the family took the settlement.
    Return to Text
  8. From 1900-1914, Sāmoa was under the German administration, and from 1914-1962 under New Zealand's administration. Helen Meekosha, "Decolonising disability: Thinking and acting globally," Disability & Society 26, no. 6 (2011): 667-682. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2011.602860; Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic. "Disability and colonialism:(dis) encounters and anxious intersectionalities," Social Identities 21, no. 1 (2015): 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2014.995394; Huhana Hickey and D. L. Wilson, "Whānau hauā: Reframing disability from an Indigenous perspective," Mai Journal 6, no. 1 (2017): 82-94. https://doi.org/10.20507/MAIJournal.2017.6.1.7
    Return to Text
  9. Jill McCracken, "Street sex work: Re/constructing discourse from margin to center," Community Literacy Journal 4, no. 2 (2010). https://doi.org/10.25148/CLJ.4.2.009438
    Return to Text
  10. Lanuola Tusani Tupufia - Ah Tong, "Lawyer Pursues Justice for Hans Dalton," Samoa Observer, November 13, 2019, available online at <https://www.samoaobserver.ws/category/samoa/52870>.
    Return to Text
  11. Personal Community with author, Tui Atua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi, January 13, 2013.
    Return to Text
  12. "Death Notice and Guest Book for Hans Dalton," NZ Herald, nd, available online at <https://notices.nzherald.co.nz/obituaries/nzherald-nz/obituary-preview.aspx?n=hans-christopher-dalton&pid=161981365>, retrieved April 28, 2021. Han's mother, Christine Bowker Wilson, is identified as an Anglo New Zealander. In Dalton's death notice, his father is listed as Daniel (Tanielu) Puaaelo Dalton. The colloquial term afakasi or half-caste is often used to describe a person of European and Samoan heritage. It can also be used negatively to demarcate supposedly who is "authentic," or read as "fully" belonging in the community. For more details on racial categories and how Pasifika communities (Pacific Islanders) negotiate them, refer to Damon Salesa, "Samoa's half-castes and some frontiers of comparison," In Haunted by Empire: Haunted by Empire, edited by Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 71-93; Malama Meleisea and Penelope Schoeffel, "Germany in Samoa: Before and After Colonisation," The Cultural Legacy of German Colonial Rule (2017): 143. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110525625-008; Alice Te Punga Somerville, "Waharoa: Maori-Pakeha Writing in Aotearoa/New Zealand," "Mixed race literature (2002): 200-23; Albert Wendt, "Afterword: Tatauing the post-colonial body," In Inside out: Literature, cultural politics, and identity in the new Pacific (1999): 399-412; Selina Tusitala Marsh, "Afakasi pours herself afa cuppa coffee," Niu voices: Contemporary Pacific fiction 1 (2006).
    Return to Text
  13. I do not know how Dalton would identify himself, so his identity is only based on the information presented in the sources accessed here.
    Return to Text
  14. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, "A Structure, Not an Event': Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity," Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016): 5-1. https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.7 Kauanui takes up indigeneity as a category of analysis that is not one and the same as the study of indigenous peoples.
    Return to Text
  15. "Lawyer argues evidence points to Hans Dalton being beaten and forced into a water drum," NZ Herald, August 4, 2019, Retrieved on March 20, 2020. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=hans+dalton+samoa; 1 NEWS, September 28, 2018, available online at <https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/family-kiwi-man-killed-in-samoan-prison-holding-hope-justice-six-years-death>; Samoan Observer, February 10, 2014, retrieved on August 22, 2014; Talatalaga, "Boxing Day tragedy at Tafa'igata," 1; Mebahel Raguel, "Doesn't this Remind Us of Hans Dalton and Perry Tuilaepa? " Letter to the Editor, Samoa Observer, nd, Retrieved on June 18, 2021, https://www.samoaobserver.ws/category/letters/37158
    Return to Text
  16. Sherman Fox Sean Kicummah Teuton, "Disability in Indigenous North America: In Memory of William Sherman Fox," In The World of Indigenous North America (New York: Routledge, 2014), 595-620; Jessica Louise Cowing, "Settler States of Ability: Assimilation, Incarceration, and Native Women's Crip Interventions," (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 2020); Jen Deerinwater, "Alaskan Grown: A Rating Guide for Ecotourism in the Land of Midnight Sun," (PhD diss., Simmons College, 2008); Hickey and Wilson, "Whānau hauā," 82-94; Lex McDonald and Rasela Tufue-Dolgoy, "Moving forwards, sideways or backwards? Inclusive education in Samoa," International Journal of Disability, Development and Education 60, no. 3 (2013): 270-284. https://doi.org/10.1080/1034912X.2013.812187; Elyn R. Saks, The center cannot hold: My journey through madness (New York: Hachette, 2007); Phil Smith, Writhing Writing: Moving towards a Mad Poetics (Fort Worth, TX: Autonomous Press, 2018).
    Return to Text
  17. Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240; Adria L. Imada, "A Decolonial Disability Studies?," Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5984 Imada argues that "the colonized were always already figured and constituted as disabled, whether because of their perceived unproductivity as laborers; embodied racial-sexual differences; "unchaste" proclivities of their women; susceptibility to moral contagion and infectious diseases; or inability to learn. In the undulating colonial hall of mirrors, the inversion of these qualities — too much learnedness and the adoption of European manners, for example — could mean colonized people had failed to maintain the vigor of their "race."
    Return to Text
  18. Talatalaga, "Boxing Day tragedy at Tafa'igata," 4.
    Return to Text
  19. Mrs. Wilson's position is an example of what Alison Kafer calls a political-relational theory of disability, showing that dynamic factors, including context and one's proximity to disability, influences meanings of disability. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
    Return to Text
  20. Karen Soldatic and Shaun Grech, eds., Disability and Colonialism:(dis) encounters and Anxious Intersectionalities (New York: Routledge, 2016).
    Return to Text
  21. Susan Burch, "'Dislocated Histories': The Canton Asylum for Insane Indians," Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2, no. 2 (2014): 141-162. https://doi.org/10.5406/womgenfamcol.2.2.0141; Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, eds., Disability incarcerated: Imprisonment and disability in the United States and Canada (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388476; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Angela Davis and Gina Dent, "Prison as a border: A conversation on gender, globalization, and punishment," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 4 (2001): 1235-1241. https://doi.org/10.1086/495654 ; Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of inmates: Conquest, rebellion, and the rise of human caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2017). https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631189.001.0001; Dylan Rodríguez, "Inhabiting the Impasse Racial/Racial-Colonial Power, Genocide Poetics, and the Logic of Evisceration," Social Text 33, no. 3 (124) (2015): 19-44. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3125689
    Return to Text
  22. Maile Renee Arvin, Possessing Polynesians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Liat Ben-Moshe, "Why prisons are not 'the new asylums,'" Punishment & Society 19, no. 3 (2017): 272-289. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474517704852; Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2021); Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816680474.001.0001; Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2016). https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469627595.001.0001; Huhana Hickey, "Replacing Medical and Social Models of Disability by a Communities-based Model of Equal Access for People of Differing Abilities: A Maori Perspective," He Puna Korero: Journal of Maori and Pacific Development 7, no. 1 (2006): 35-47; Zosha Stuckey, A Rhetoric of Remnants: Idiots, Half-wits, and Other State-sponsored Inventions (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014); Steven J. Taylor, Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009).
    Return to Text
  23. The German colonial administration ruled from 1900 to 1914; New Zealand ruled from 1914 to 1961 under five different military administrators. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, military forces occupied Western Sà„moa and instituted a military administration. Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop, Gender, Culture and Tourism Development in Western Samoa (New York: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1994). The western Samoan islands are comprised of two main islands, Savai'i, and Upolu, as well as smaller islands Apolima, Manono, and numerous uninhabited islands. Malama Meleisea, Penelope Meleisea, and Ellie Meleisea, eds., Samoa's Journey 1962-2012: Aspects of History (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington Press, 2012).
    Return to Text
  24. It also matches broader patterns of institutional erasure. As Sherene Razack demonstrates, deaths in custody are common; families and friends often do not ever learn why their loved ones have died and who is responsible for their deaths. For example, Sherene Razack, Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), xii.
    Return to Text
  25. Razack, Dying from Improvement, 31.
    Return to Text
  26. Minerva Rivas Velarde, "Indigenous Perspectives of Disability," Disability Studies Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2018). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v38i4.6114
    Return to Text
Return to Top of Page