Care and maintenance. In the grammatical hierarchy of language used to refer to the American Indian people confined at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, S.D., the phrase looms large. It appears in hundreds of official documents with alarming regularity—alarming given the staff's rampant abuse and neglect of those held against their will. "Enclosed please find list of patients at the Asylum…who have paid for their Care and Maintenance…" reads one example. 2 From 1902-1934, when Canton was closed, over 350 Indigenous women, men, and children from more than 50 tribal nations were forcibly confined to this institution, which was the first and only federal asylum in the U.S. intended exclusively for American Indian people. In an era that saw the proliferation of hospitals and reform facilities, U.S. officials rationalized Canton's existence by contriving a need for a distinct space that would administer to non-citizen tribal members. 3 Beyond the forced confinement of American Indian people for indefinite periods, however, Canton Superintendents Oscar S. Gifford (1902-1908) and his successor, Harry Hummer (1908-1933), facilitated the expropriation of Indigenous land on a small-scale, case-by-case basis. 4 This fact underscores the specificity of Indigenous peoples' experiences of institutionalization as well as disability under settler colonialism, and further complicates assertions that disability can be fruitfully compared to race or ethnicity. 5

Reading across the grain of archival materials, this article contributes to a growing body of literature about Indigenous institutionalization at Canton. In centering instances of Indigenous land dispossession, I show that disability is an important master category in the U.S. settler colonial project of Indigenous elimination that is often overlooked in studies of institutionalization. Existing literature about Canton describes conditions at the facility, and is critical of power dynamics that conditioned the lives of the American Indian people who negotiated abuse and neglect at the hands of employees there. 6 This work also analyzes the intergenerational effects of Indigenous confinement at Canton. Susan Burch's recent study, Committed, places Native peoples' testimonies centrally in her examination of Canton's violent history of Indigenous institutionalization, while human rights activist Pemina Yellow Bird (Three Affiliated Tribes) refers to the destruction wrought by Canton staff as "horrors [that] cannot be erased." 7

Building on these works, I contribute another view of the facility as a settler institution that facilitated the expropriation of Indigenous lands, which demonstrates the importance of social categories of difference, normalcy, dependence, and disability for analyses of settler colonialism. While disability scholars have demonstrated how race and disability "constitute one another through social, political, economic, and cultural practices that have kept seemingly different groups of people in strikingly similar marginalized positions," analyzing the meanings attached to categories of difference such as age, gender, and somatic, physical, or psychological variation through the lens of Indigenous experience reveals the mutual entanglement of disability with U.S. settler colonialism, and its dual aims of Indigenous elimination and land expropriation. 8

The Irreconcilable 'Other': Indigeneity, Disability, and Cultural 'Difference'

The Canton Asylum was founded during an era in which the U.S. government sought to forcibly assimilate Indian people and dispossess tribal nations of their landholdings through a process known as allotment. With the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act, surveyors enumerated Indigenous heads-of-household, recorded their names and "degree of Indian blood" upon allotment rolls, and assigned them approximately 160 acres of land for their families to live upon and cultivate. 9 "Surplus" land was thrown open to white settlement. 10 The Dawes Act stipulated that the U.S. government would hold allotted lands in trust for a period of twenty-five years, after which time the allotted individual would be awarded a fee-simple patent, enabling them to sell or lease their lands. 11 According to historian Katherine Ellinghaus, from 1887 until 1934, the year Commissioner John Collier conducted an inquiry into the consequences of allotment, over 90 million acres of Indigenous lands had been lost. 12

Alongside allotment, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) also mandated the forced assimilation of Indian people via boarding schools created expressly for this purpose. 13 The first and perhaps most infamous of these institutions was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. 14 As boarding school historians have amply demonstrated, Carlisle and the dozens of other off-reservation, federally-funded boarding institutions patterned after this flagship facility were designed to divest Indian children of their traditional lifeways in a violent process of knowledge destruction and cultural genocide. 15 K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Mvskoke), Brenda Child (Ojibwe), and other Indigenous historians have examined how the disciplinary regimens of indoctrination and punishment at federal boarding schools were also profoundly gendered, reflecting the mutual entanglement of settler colonialism with heteropatriarchy. 16 Together, allotment and assimilation via indoctrination comprised the twin engines of an ostensibly "benevolent" era of OIA policy that stretched from 1879 to 1934, when allotment-era policies were repealed and the Indian "New Deal" was passed under Commissioner Collier. 17 Hupa scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy asserts that violence was integral to the success of these and other post-invasion policies, as the settler society used force to establish the U.S. nation-state, its Western epistemologies, and its settler-citizens as dominant. 18

Situated along this historical continuum, Canton's 1902 founding marked the Indigenous psyche as another violent battleground in the settler society's fight for total dominance over U.S. tribes. Turn of the century debates about Indigenous deficiency register what historian Lorenzo Veracini describes as the "unresolved tension[s] between sameness and difference" inherent to settler colonial dynamics. 19 As politicians, physicians, reformers, and everyday American citizens spun narratives about Indigenous people as intellectually, physically, and spiritually inferior to white Americans, these discourses positioned Indian people as irreconcilably different and rendered them vulnerable to diagnoses of "insanity" and forced confinement alike. 20 Similarly, Indigenous peoples' legal status as dependent wards of the U.S. government led many U.S. officials and white American citizens to presume that Indian people were incapable of transacting their own affairs, a marker of childlike dependence defined in opposition to the conditions of American individualism and adulthood. 21 As disability scholar Licia Carlson writes, the justifications for institutionalizing disabled people in this era included four basic premises: that disability should be defined as an individual pathology in need of management; that paternal authority should be exercised over disabled people unable to make decisions for themselves; that disabled individuals warrant treatment in special facilities; and that their lives are better managed by experts granted higher authority than the disabled individuals themselves. 22

Similar guiding principles rationalized the institutionalization of Indigenous people at Canton, but with one critical distinction: by defining Indigenous people as mentally disabled and institutionalizing them, U.S. officials and white American citizens stood to gain Indigenous land and resources. Anti-Indian discrimination prevented Indian people from accessing equal protection under U.S. law, and in some cases, U.S. courts appointed legal guardians to act in the interest of the Indian people declared incompetent. Moreover, unequal power dynamics between white Americans and Indian people were paradoxically described in benevolent terms, and regarded as such in everyday conversations. In many instances, Canton records reveal that those confined to the institution were in need of medical care or were perceived, often by the reservation agent, to be a burden upon their communities. But Canton records also document how Western legal structures of sanity, competence, and wardship were used by the powerful to dispossess landowning Indian women and men, and to enable U.S. officials, boarding school superintendents, reservation agents, guardians, and in some instances, family members, to incarcerate Indian people at the facility. These patterns lay bare the settler colonial logic, or "settler grammar," to borrow from Mexican/Tigua scholar Dolores Calderon, that undergirds practices at Canton, as well as Hummer's false promises of offering "care and maintenance" to the Indian people confined there. 23 This settler grammar was not merely linguistic, although it was also that, but had material consequences: as Burch points out, Hummer and other U.S. officials pathologized Indian peoples' nonstandard use of English in correspondence, citing this as evidence of continued insanity that necessitated ongoing confinement at the facility, often indefinitely. 24

Unlike the general population, Indigenous people were more likely to be institutionalized by strangers than they were likely to be confined by close kin and relatives. 25 Indeed, the circumstances of Canton's 1902 founding reveal that the institution's very existence was the result of white interference into Indigenous lives: in May 1897, the U.S. Indian Agent at the Cheyenne River Agency wrote South Dakota Senator Richard Pettigrew that he had been using the reservation guardhouse to hold the "demented Indians" under his jurisdiction, which inspired Pettigrew to introduce legislation for an Indian-only asylum. 26 As Canton researchers Todd Leahy, Carla Joinson, and Diane Putney have variously noted in their works, state hospitals refused to accept Indian and Black women and men into their facilities, citing overcrowding in order to disguise anti-Indian prejudice and the widespread conviction that the administration of Indian affairs was a federal rather than state issue. 27

Given these realities, Pettigrew's proposal appealed to reform-minded citizens and Indian Service officials alike, who saw the opportunity to extend their campaign of racial "uplift" into the psyches of Indian people. 28 According to a survey conducted by Pettigrew and concluded in September 1897, fifty-nine "insane" Indians resided upon twenty-one Indian reservations, and according to U.S. officials, of those fifty-nine, twenty-six required confinement. Though this small number seemed to contradict Pettigrew's insistence that Indian people required a psychiatric facility all their own, the survey results eventually justified a separate institution for Indian people in the eyes of Congress and appropriations were made for Canton's construction. 29

For American Indians, racial prejudice and the lack of diagnostic criteria used by U.S. officials who wished to assess the "sanity" of Indian people presented a specific set of vulnerabilities. As Rana Hogarth, Martin Summers, and Wendy Gonaver have examined, anti-Black racism in Western medical practices contributed to high rates of morbidity and mortality, and impeded Black Americans' ability to access medical treatment. 30 In the context of U.S. federal Indian policies aimed at the "civilization" of Indian people and subjugation of their polities, white Americans championed the notion that Western methods were vastly superior to Indigenous ways of healing and traditional forms of medicine. In an affirmation of this belief, reformers derogated the continuance of ancestral traditions as evidence of Indian peoples' stubborn heathenism and savagery, often likening these practices to forms of madness, illness, or uncleanliness. 31 At Carlisle, for example, institutional publications warned against the destructive influence of Indigenous custom, frequently using satire and parable as their weapons of choice. In the late 1880s, politicians, Indian agents, and news publications circulated news of the Ghost Dance "hysteria" spreading across the plains, and warned white Americans to prepare for a massive Indian uprising. 32 These dynamics played out at Canton as well, as Office of Indian Affairs officials and asylum employees used their racial power and privilege to portray their work as "uplifting" labor on behalf of an inferior race.

Forced Confinement at Canton: Disability, Vulnerability, and Eugenics

In 1920, Hummer sought to enlarge his sphere of influence over Indian people, and began a campaign to purchase additional land that would increase Canton's holding capacity. In order to demonstrate a need for this expansion to Congress, he mailed surveys to Indian agents across the country to inquire into the number of "insane" living under each jurisdiction, and the responses poured in. Ora Padgett, superintendent of the Pipestone Indian School, replied that he was currently unaware of any "Indians of unsound minds," but promised "If at any time in the future it would be necessary to send any one to your institute who are mentally incompetent I will take the matter up with you by letter." As a seeming afterthought, he closed, "Do you ever take in children of school age, boys or girls, that are feeble minded?" 33 As legal historian Paul Lombardo notes, "feeblemindedness" was increasingly used as a catch-all layman's diagnosis that reflected, in particular, white American anxieties about maintaining the established social order. 34 In Canton records, vague, second-hand reports of "feeblemindedness" frequently accompanied this diagnosis, making it capacious enough to refer to a wide array of behaviors perceived as aberrant. 35 Padgett's use of this diagnosis captures his willingness to legitimize the disappearance of Indian children on medical grounds, and so their transfer could be made without parental consent. In the context of the U.S.'s forced removal of Indigenous children from their nations, this practice of transinstitutionalization, or the movement of an individual from one institutional context to another, reveals how the U.S. government granted white institutional officials punitive authority over Indian people that was exercised and transferred between settler facilities. 36

In the era of forced boarding school attendance, Indian youth were among those most vulnerable to removal from their nations, but U.S. officials could also institutionalize adults with relative ease. Sometimes, Indian people whose actions were perceived as threatening to U.S. officials were targeted for removal, and gendered distinctions prevailed in perceptions of "troublesome" behavior: unmarried, elderly, and sexually active single women, as well as men who were frequently arrested for drunkenness or fighting, all were at increased risk. 37 On numerous occasions, Hummer facilitated the confinement of "defective" Indian women of reproductive age in order to prevent them from having children who would, as many eugenicists asserted, inherit the "undesirable" traits of their mothers. 38 On March 11, 1918, for example, agency physician H.C. Meek wrote to the Superintendent of the Tongue River Agency, John A. Buntin, in regard to the potential confinement of a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Josephine S. He explained, "This woman is a hopeless imbecile, and shows a defective Physical development…She has had several children all born out of wedlock. These children are all dead with the exception of one and according to statements made to me they have all of them been defective either mentally or physically." He concluded his callous "medical" opinion by stating: "I suggest that an effort be made to isolate this woman in order to prevent the birth of any more defective children, as well as [sic] to protect the morals of the community in which she lives." "P.S.— " he scribbled at the bottom of the page, "This woman is also a deaf mute." 39

Indigenous reproduction was punished and suppressed at Canton, a place where eugenicist fantasies could be exercised in the name of Indigenous "uplift." As Meek's letter demonstrates, disabled Indian women were regarded as sources of social degeneration who could rightfully be confined or even forcibly sterilized, as would happen with increasing frequency in the coming decades in the United States. 40 In 1933, a psychiatrist at the St. Elizabeths asylum in Washington, D.C. was tapped to investigate malpractice at Canton. During this investigation, Hummer confessed that he kept confined Indian people who "'could take care of themselves,'" guided by the belief that "'they should only be discharged after they were sterilized, and as he did not have any means of doing this, there was nothing left but to keep them there. 41 Elsewhere, Yellow Bird has suggested that Hummer intentionally kept unsterilized Indigenous people confined at Canton indefinitely, waiting for them to die. 42 These realities amend previous analyses of Canton as a place where "patients" resided, and instead demonstrate the role the facility played as a violent settler space where Indigenous lives were intentionally destroyed. 43

Court-Ordered Guardianship and "Legalized" Land Theft

The prospect of acquiring wealth and vast tracts of land also motivated white citizens and other interested parties to initiate the commitment of an Indigenous person to Canton, and in some cases, the U.S. legal system facilitated these confinements. In 1907, for instance, the U.S. Court in Indian Territory appointed an unnamed legal guardian to an allotted Quapaw man named Robert Thompson who was committed to Canton for an unknown crime, where he would remain for the next sixteen years. According to one letter, 240 acres of Thompson's land had been leased out for agricultural, business, and mining purposes. 44 This letter also revealed that Thompson was a citizen of Oklahoma, as the state considered the Quapaws who resided at the Quapaw Indian Agency in 1921. However, this same letter also revealed that Thompson was simultaneously a ward of the U.S. government, which likely means that he had been declared "incompetent" in a U.S. court of law and therefore deemed incapable of fully assuming the self-sufficiency associated with the responsibilities of American citizenship. 45

Other details about the circumstances of Thompson's confinement appear in a well-known 1924 report entitled "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery." Co-authored by Dakota activist and scholar Gertrude Bonnin, Charles H. Fabens, and Matthew K. Sniffen of the Indian Rights Association, the report revealed that the discovery of oil on Indian land and designations of "incompetency" often went hand in hand. 46 As Bonnin, Fabens, and Sniffen put it, "in many of the [Eastern Oklahoma] Counties the Indians are virtually at the mercy of groups that include the county judges, guardians, attorneys, bankers, merchants—not even overlooking the undertaker—all regarding the Indian estates as legitimate game." 47 Of Thompson, the co-authors made the following report:

Robert Thompson, an incompetent restricted Quapaw Indian, about fifty years old. He was sent to an Insane Asylum. When the present guardian took charge of this estate, a little over two years ago, $24,000 was receipted for. The Liberty Bonds and all securities have been disposed of, and the balance now on hand (November, 1913) amounted to $54.40. 48

According to Canton records managed by Hummer, Thompson's oil-bearing allotment had been leased out for business purposes, garnering $28,758.41 ($433,850.50 in 2020 USD) from mining royalties and $1000.00 for agricultural lease rentals annually. 49 This huge income is a far cry from the $54.40 the 1924 report cited as the amount then at Thompson's disposal, and while this discrepancy may be an error in accounting, it is also possible that the disparity reflects Bonnin et al.'s observation that guardians allotted their wards wholly inadequate monthly allowances, while siphoning off large sums for themselves. 50 Thompson's confinement at Canton would have made it impossible for him to defend himself against the actions of his court-appointed guardian, an experience that aligns with Tom Shakespeare's observation that social attitudes and institutions can constitute socially "disabling barriers." 51 For American Indian peoples who have historically struggled against the U.S. government's abrogation of its treaty responsibilities, legislation designed to diminish tribal sovereignty, and in some cases, lack of federal recognition as distinct Indigenous communities, the U.S. legal system constitutes one such source of social incapacitation, or debility. 52

Canton records are rife with similar examples of Indian people held against their will and without access to any recourse, legal or otherwise. Backed by the county courts, U.S. officials often initiated Indigenous confinement. But archival records also document how non-existent commitment procedures enabled exploitative family members to maneuver around the courts and confine their kin to the facility. 53 Many of these commitments were initiated in the name of care. In 1906, for example, Emily Waite (Chickasaw) was sent to Canton under suspicious circumstances at the behest of her sisters Irene Kerr and Sarah Lasater (neé Waite), as a transfer from the State Sanitarium in Norman, Indian Territory. 54 As Irene explained in a letter to Indian Agent Dana Kelsey, she and her siblings were seeking a "comfortable home" for their sister Emily, who required care that they ostensibly could not provide themselves. 55 Although Emily was a member of the prominent Waite family (her brother Fred Tecumseh Waite was a notorious outlaw who traveled with Billy the Kidd) and Canton was intended as a facility for destitute non-citizen Indian people, her siblings were able to convince Agent Kelsey to approve her removal to Canton without ever bringing her "case" before a U.S. court of law to be formally adjudicated. 56

Additional correspondence about Emily reveals that the Waites owned vast tracts of land—land coveted by her younger sister Sarah and her white husband Milas Lasater, whose political ambitions were renowned among the Chickasaws. Another letter, authored by Emily's sister Irene, shows that Emily had previously separated her tract from the rest of the Waite estate and set off on elaborate travels in Europe—behavior that vexed Emily's siblings and led to her forced confinement at Canton. Eventually, Milas Lasaster was granted legal guardianship over Emily, and he and his wife Sarah would gain control over the entire Waite estate, including Emily's separated landholdings. Shortly after Oklahoma was admitted to statehood, Milas and Sarah donated land from the original Waite plantation for the development of a state-run epileptic hospital. 57 Emily, however, would live out her remaining years at the Canton facility, where she would die in 1929. Heart failure was listed as her cause of death. 58 Although Emily came from a family of means, was a landholder, and was also highly educated, these relative privileges could not offset her brother-in-law's ultimate authority or her vulnerability within a society that defined her as dependent, as incompetent, and above all else—as Indian. Under the skewed logic of settler colonialism, as Emily's experiences attest, acts of violence toward Indian people could be disguised and legitimized as acts of care. 59

Conclusion

The Canton Asylum, its employees, and its settler paradigms of insanity, competence, and wardship facilitated Indigenous land theft on a small-scale, case-by-case basis. Records relating to Indian people forcibly confined to this facility reflect a disregard for Indigenous life, disguised by false promises of "care and maintenance" in institutional correspondence. Deconstructing the double entendre of racialized discourse reveals the quotidian violence embedded in the coded rhetoric of white supremacy: "care and maintenance" signals that white supremacy is at work, and we see the powerful effects of these discursive strategies play out in settler institutions like this South Dakota facility. Dozens of Indigenous women and men were disappeared to Canton and left there to die—an explicit form of Indigenous elimination authorized by the U.S. officials responsible for the incarceration of Indian people in this space of chaos, social death, and homicide. Yet, Canton facilitated more than Indigenous suffering; it also eased the transfer of Indigenous territory to white ownership as Indian people were removed physically, spiritually, and legally from the land and its protection. In this context, medical violence towards Indigenous people was always settler colonial violence. The use of this institution by boarding school superintendents, legal guardians, and other interested parties for the purpose of Indigenous disappearance further illuminates punitive connections between American institutions that existed, ostensibly, for the "benefit" of Indian people. As the foot soldiers of this settler project, Harry Hummer and his cadre of institutional employees abused, neglected, and disappeared Indigenous women, men, and children until 1934 when the facility was closed, and those held there were returned to their nations or transferred to St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C.

Canton's legacy did not end with its forced closure. Indigenous peoples continue to feel the effects of this institution and continue on the path toward communal healing. As Burch documents in her work with the descendants of those institutionalized at Canton, remembrance has taken many forms: From 1987-2007, Lakota activist Harold Iron Shield facilitated ceremonies at Canton to honor communities impacted by institutionalization at the facility; creative works such as quilt-making, geospatial mapping, praying, drumming, genealogical research and archival investigation constitute other sources of healing as tribal peoples bear witness to the harms wrought by the facility. 60 "Many descendants," Burch reflects, "have shared the reality of living with unanswered and unanswerable questions, and, even so, they have continued seeking." 61 As an act of Native self-determination in the face of collective trauma, human rights activist Pemina Yellow Bird also stresses the importance of storytelling: "'We must then tell our stories of loss of violation, of what happened to us, and we must at long last grieve those things; we must determine how the past informs us, is part of who we are, and how it walks with us every day of our lives as Native people.'" 62 In honor of the many tribal nations impacted by the unconscionable practices of this settler institution, I offer these words as an act of bearing witness to this history in the spirit of solidarity, truth-telling, and radical care.