Emma Arnice Gregory (1867-1912) was my great-great grandmother. One hundred years after her death, I found myself at the Hiawatha Golf Club in Canton, South Dakota to attend the recently revitalized memorial ceremony in honor of those that had died at the former Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal institution created for the incarceration of Indigenous people. 1 The graveyard where Emma Gregory is buried sits adjacent to Hole 5. 2

My visit to Canton was sparked by Harold Iron Shield (Sioux) and Pemina Yellow Bird (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), whose work I had stumbled onto while conducting my family's genealogy. 3 I was researching my great-great grandmother's life, compelled to experience with my own senses the location of her exile from both my family and her community. What became clear from the extant sources was that allotment and legal and medical judgements of incompetency—policies and practices based on settler colonial and ableist ideas—stripped her of agency and directly harmed her personhood. The process of erasure inherent in settler colonialism and buttressed by ableism played out in specific and material ways in Emma Gregory's life, including through land dispossession, loss of self-determination over her household and finances, confinement and exile, and institutionally-induced illness.

"No. 1 is incompetent" 4

This phrase appears on Emma Gregory's October 1899 Dawes Enrollment Card. Generated by the Kellyville, Indian Territory, field office of the Department of the Interior's Dawes Commission, the enrollment card was intended to identify members of the Creek Nation for them to receive individualized land parcels. "Incompetent" in this context was pervasive rather than exceptional. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 portioned out reservation lands as a means to dismantle Indigenous self-determination and to expropriate natural resources. 5 Communal lands protected by treaties with the federal government were assigned as private plots to enrolled tribal citizens. The process placed many Native American allotees into the category "incompetent," reflecting the perception that most were legally incapable of stewarding their parcel. The US government designated itself as trustee, empowering its representatives to make decisions about allotments until its Native owners were deemed "competent" to assume authority and responsibility. Communal land ownership was splintered with the intention of suppressing or breaking Indigenous material networks.

As historian Janet McDonnell has contended, the settler label of legal competence measured the extent to which Indians were deemed capable of self-support and independence, with the "assumption that Indians could and should become self-supporting, independent members of mainstream white society." 6 Gregory was especially vulnerable to being designated as legally incompetent because she did not conform to settler ideals in multiple ways. Unlike her younger brother James (who identified as white in Census rolls and whose spouse was white), Emma had married someone who, like her, identified as mixed race—a part-Cherokee man from Illinois. By 1899, the couple had parted ways, meaning that the 31-year-old mother no longer had a husband cohabitating with her and providing support. To sustain herself and her family Gregory lived with her mother and younger sisters. 7 In addition to cross-generational childrearing and mutual aid—facets of Creek life that settler authorities targeted—Emma Gregory likely was not literate in written English and may have challenged other gendered and caste expectations. 8

By design, the allotment process pitted family members against each other, promoting greed over interdependence and intergenerational collective care. When Emma Gregory went to the regional office of the Dawes Commission in October 1899, the Bureau of Indian Affairs designated her younger brother, James Self (1871-1945), as her trustee. Self then had authority over Emma's daily life, including her residence and activities and that of her son, Audie Lee. Self also would have overseen Gregory's finances, in particular her tribal payments, allotment land, and any profit from the sale or transfer of her designated parcel. Emma Gregory would never regain full agency over her affairs during her life. 9

The arrangement of legal guardianship between Gregory and Self had incredibly high stakes, specifically as his fortune rose while hers declined. Between 1900 and 1920, Self underwent a series of significant changes in his profession and class. On the day he accompanied Gregory to the Dawes field office in October 1899, he was a farmer who owned his own home. Two years later, on March 27, 1902, Self—legally acting as Gregory's trustee—applied for an allotment homestead. 10 It is unclear whether his sister was even present at the field office in Kellyville, Indian Territory, during this appointment. Self was designated as legal representative for several of his family members, including Emma and her son. 11 James Self apparently kept the property for himself and his descendants. A decade later, he appears in archival sources as a retail grocer, working for a wage, his house mortgaged. By 1920, he was an oil producer with employees and owned his home. 12 James Self's life modeled a trajectory of success in the booming settler colonial economy of early 20th century energy production at the same time Gregory's experiences embody the tenuous status of an "incompetent" person during the allotment era.

Medical incompetency and institutionalization

In August 1905 James Self had Emma Gregory committed to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. 13 The process would not have been difficult. At the time, no standard federal proceedings for institutionalizing Native wards of the government existed. Determinations of competency occurred at the local level, often defaulting to the word of a reservation superintendent or white neighbor. Or, in the case of Emma Gregory, her kin and her legal trustee. 14 The BIA typically did not question commitment requests, focusing instead on processing payments to psychiatric facilities—often from a person's allotment funds. Records show that extended family took in Gregory's son. Self kept control of his sister's finances and land, apparently integrating them into his own. 15 Physically exiled from her kin and home, Gregory could not counter the decisions her brother and the BIA made on her behalf.

The Canton Indian Asylum where Emma Gregory was detained had been confining Indigenous people since its opening in 1902. By the time the asylum was forcibly closed in 1934, it had incarcerated almost four hundred Indigenous people from over fifty nations. 16 Gregory was one of five Creek Nation members held in the locked wards. At the time of Emma Gregory's commitment, Western medical justifications for designating a person incompetent varied widely. In the context of battles over sovereignty, the category of medical incompetency built on and reinforced settler, ableist beliefs that Indigenous people and cultures were already inherently unfit. 17

The ranging diagnoses and medical rhetoric applied to Emma Gregory and many others commonly say more about those imposing labels and justifications than those targeted. We have no direct testimony from the 38-year-old about her institutionalization. According to monthly updates staff generated, her alleged symptoms reflect an antagonistic stance. According to attendants, she was at times "profane" and suffered "delusions of persecution." 18 At other moments she appeared "manageable." Emma Gregory's "delusions of persecution," when viewed through a medical pathology lens, were supported by the labels already assigned her: incompetent, insane, and institutionalized. These labels and the associated "treatment" in actuality harmed my Creek ancestor, undermining her self-determination and access to Indigenous resources that could have supported her well-being. She literally had no recourse to leave or to protect herself from the harmful conditions inside the locked wards.

It is unclear what initially prompted Superintendent Harry Hummer in 1909 to further isolate Emma Gregory in a dark room on the northern end of the asylum. It is conceivable that she showed signs of illness; the move could also have been retribution for perceived or actual resistant behavior. 19 My great great-grandmother was kept in this solitary confinement room for three years. Like many others detained at Canton, she contracted a lethal case of tuberculosis as a result of her institutionalization. 20 Abusive practices, including unsanitary conditions, sustained solitary confinement, and neglect caused Emma Gregory's death in March 1912.

Erasures

Labels of incompetency connected to allotment and to psychiatric institutionalization were important mechanisms in the broader settler effort to erase Native people and cultures. Legal incompetency made it possible to separate Indigenous people from their individual and collective land holdings, creating conditions for exploitation, poverty, and erasure. Leveraging ableism and settler colonialism, authorities applied Western medical labels of incompetency to Emma Gregory and other Native people, justifying their exile and confinement in settler-run facilities. The whole process—of diagnosis, "treatment," and oversight—contributed to concrete conditions of genocidal violence. Institutionalization at Canton Asylum was another form of erasure for Indigenous people during the allotment era.

At the same time this medicalized maneuver targeted Native people, it advantaged settlers. For example, the Canton Asylum financially benefitted mostly Non-Native staff and the town, the BIA, and the field of psychiatry. Institutionalization—the process and practices—and the institution (Canton Asylum) systematically and literally kept Native people from their land and from their kin, perpetuating trauma that crosses generations. 21

While researching Emma Gregory's life, I encountered this erasure not as a theoretical concept but as a concrete reality. For example, the historical record reflected and reinforced her absence: misspellings in the US Census complicated searches. The declaration of incompetence on her allotment records raised questions without easy answers: about what incompetence actually meant in her circumstance, and for her personally. Opaque and contradictory information in her medical records similarly shadowed rather than shed light on her story. And incorrect online family history materials proliferate on platforms like Ancestry.com, distorting Gregory's biographical details—including her commitment to the Canton Asylum. 22

Erasure has immediate and material ramifications within families too. As historian Henry Louis Gates has argued, a lack of information or absence in a family's oral history often hides specific and impactful traumatic episodes. 23 There was a total silence within my family about my great-great grandmother, reflecting the trauma of her institutionalization. 24 I had not heard of her before I started my genealogical research in 2006. My elders buried her story to shield me from a painful absence, one they had lived with for their entire lives. Emma Gregory's present absence in my family history traveled across generations into my lived history and identity.

Survivance

Indigenous erasure exists in tension with survivance. 25 Survivance is a transformational dynamic. It situates Native lives and cultures on a spectrum, anchored on one pole by tragedy or genocide and, on the other pole, by personal and cultural florescence. My family's survivance was forged in experiences common among Native North Americans. Chapters in my family's history include multiple removals, including the journey to Indian Territory during the Trail of Tears; allotment and land dispossession among several branches of my family tree under the Dawes Act; and state abuse and medical neglect, including a pervasive lack of medical care as well as institutionalization at Canton. Transgenerational repetitions of institutionalization, poverty, removals, violence, and settler ableist medical labels have negatively impacted my life and many of my relatives. The necessary work of continuing is supported by my connections to land, myth, stories, history, ancestors, and the groundswell of Indigenous sovereignty. Threads of resistance bind me to my great-great-grandmother's story, compelling me on in its repeated telling. By claiming her story, especially and not despite its themes of personal tragedy and societal betrayal, I am able to create a future for myself on my own terms, as well as alchemize the intergenerational trauma of the past into knowledge and strength.

There are no easy answers to the questions and connections brought forth in this essay. Interlocking issues and stories of weaponized Western medicine, settler colonialism, and also survivance undergird Emma Gregory's lived history, reminding us that people and their relations inhabit the center of disability and Native history. The reach of these issues spill into our present-day, adding urgency to the research needed to address them.