Beyond Boarding Schools: Histories of Native American Institutions and Social Services in the United States

Carla Joinson's Vanished in Hiawatha: The Story of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians and Julie L. Reed's Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare, 1800–1907, shed new light on policies, services, and institutions designed to provide for the social welfare of American Indians. The past three decades have brought a proliferation of studies on indigenous students in federal Indian boarding schools. As Joinson and Reed reveal, however, Native Americans' experiences with institutions and social policies go far beyond the federal boarding-school experience, yet they have received little treatment from scholars. Together, these studies not only reveal the complicated and shockingly disparate forms of social policies implemented in indigenous communities during the nineteenth century, they also provide a foundation for reconsidering the role of marginalized peoples and social welfare more broadly in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

In Vanished in Hiawatha, Joinson provides a compelling examination of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, located in Canton, South Dakota. As the only federal asylum for Native Americans, Canton operated from 1903 to 1933, during the height of the assimilation era in American Indian federal policy. This context is key to Joinson's thesis, which states, "the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians could only have existed in the particular time and policy period in which it did, and the very conditions that allowed its creation also doomed it to failure" (p. 6). She maintains that earlier policies bent on removal and extermination left no room for welfare programs for Native Americans. Likewise, later reform initiatives and self-determination policies of the twentieth century proved antithetical to the type of care provided at Canton. During the assimilation period, however, when federal institutions for Native Americans became widespread, an insane asylum proved to be an extension of the federal government's paternalistic policies toward its wards.

Adequate care and treatment, however, did not prove to be the norm at the Canton Asylum. Instead, patterns of mistreatment, abuse, incompetent administration, and inadequate treatment plagued the facility during the three decades it remained in operation. Although standardized and professionalized psychiatric care was still a relatively new field at the time, Joinson recounts numerous troubling incidents that cannot be attributed to that alone. Investigations during the 1920s proved that less than half the patients had little or no sign of mental illness. Instead, individuals who proved inconvenient, troublesome, or incapable of caring for themselves were admitted to Canton. Inside the facility, the so-called patients' troubles were compounded as they spent the majority of their time in isolation and padlocked in their rooms. Many did not speak English and could not communicate with the doctors and administrators on staff, which raised serious questions about the efficacy of both diagnoses and treatment. For instance, Emma Amyotte fell victim to a stroke in 1923 and was sent to Canton by federal officials. The local hospital where she had been diagnosed, however, had found her to be of sound physical and mental health. They provided documentation to Canton and explained there was no need to institutionalize her. Nevertheless, Amyotte remained locked in Canton for the next decade.

Disturbing and gripping narratives of patient experiences like Emma Amoytte's are woven through the volume and prove to be a strength of the work. Despite poor record-keeping over Canton's thirty-year run, an investigation performed by Dr. Samuel Silk, the director of St. Elizabeth's—the nation's preeminent mental health facility in 1929—revealed the neglect and abuse rampant at Canton. Although it is still difficult to glean what patients might have been thinking and feeling inside Canton, Joinson has carefully mined the records and the Silk Report to construct what...