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.

Sarah A. Whitt is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Bad Medicine  1
1. “An Ordinary Case of Discipline”: Surveillance and Punishment at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918  27
2. “Hoe Handle Medicine”: Medicinal Labor at the Ford Motor Company and Lancaster General Hospital  70
3. Sisters Magdalene: Entwined Histories of “Reform” at Good Shepherd Homes  109
4.  “Care and Maintenance”: Settler Ableism and Land Dispossession at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, 1902–1934  139
Epilogue: Indigenous Futurities and the Afterlives of Institutionalization  184
Appendix  199
Notes  207
Bibliography  245
Index  263