Leahy, Todd E. (Author)
Oklahoma State University
Moses, L. G.
Edition Details: Advisor: Moses, L. G.
Physical Details: 240 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation examines the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, South Dakota; the only federally operated mental institution specifically designed for Native Americans. The asylum was founded on the traditions of reform politics and scientific understanding of the "Indian Problem" during the late nineteenth century. As part of the larger push for Indian assimilation, the United States government appropriated funds for the construction of the asylum in 1899. The asylum was designed to serve the dual purposes of improving the general health of the Indian communities by either treating the afflicted or permanently removing him or her to a protective environment. The practice of psychiatric medicine at the turn of the twentieth century reflected the assimilationist desire of the Indian Service and focused on curing mental disorders by instilling their patients with normal behavior patterns as Euroamericans defined them. From its beginning, the Canton Asylum faced many challenges. Dominated by bureaucratic infighting, limited resources, cultural misunderstandings, untrained or ill-equipped staff, the asylum was doomed. Policymakers were never clear as to whether the asylum operated under the guidelines of the various Indian boarding schools or whether it constituted an independent agency. The Canton Asylum was intended to embody the principles of healing, in the wake of bureaucratic indecision, the asylum evolved into an institution of social control. Numerous investigations proved the Canton Asylum was a nightmare for the inmates and as a result, the experiment in the scientific control of Indians failed and was officially closed by order of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier in 1934. The sources utilized in this dissertation consisted of the administrative records of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians from 1899 to 1934. Also consulted were the available records of the various inmates of the asylum. Many of the individual records were missing, but those available shed valuable light on the way of life inside the walls of the asylum. Secondary sources established a basic timeline in the development of psychiatry and general Indian policy. The intention of utilizing such a wide array of sources was to place the asylum into a larger national and international context, rather than studying the institution as an aberration in the theater of American Indian policy.
...MoreDescription On the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, South Dakota. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/10 (2006): 630686. UMI pub. no. 3189229.
Similar Citations
Article
McCarthy, Angela;
(2012)
Connections and Divergences: Lunatic Asylums in New Zealand and the Homelands before 1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001200710/)
Book
Melling, Joseph;
Forsythe, Bill;
(2006)
The Politics of Madness: The State, Insanity and Society in England, 1845--1914
(/isis/citation/CBB000774000/)
Article
Pietikainen, Petteri;
(2009)
Strengthening the Will: Public Clinics for the Nervously Ill in Sweden in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000932790/)
Article
Thomas Müller;
Bernd Reichelt;
(2019)
The ‘Poitrot Report’, 1945: the first public document on Nazi euthanasia
(/isis/citation/CBB341702782/)
Thesis
Rico Kleinstein Chenyek;
(2018)
Mediating Alterity: Transitive Indianness in U.S. Non-Normative Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB414549435/)
Book
Susan Burch;
(2021)
Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions
(/isis/citation/CBB616372955/)
Thesis
Marinski, Deborah R.;
(2006)
Unfortunate Minds: Mental Insanity in Ohio, 1883--1909
(/isis/citation/CBB001561679/)
Article
Heather Murray;
(2022)
Diagnosing the “master mechanism of the universe” in interwar and war-era America
(/isis/citation/CBB559207371/)
Thesis
Amanda Lynn Brewer;
(2022)
Care and Therapy: Food and the Institutionalized Mentally Ill in the Long Progressive Era
(/isis/citation/CBB541821695/)
Article
Segrest, Mab;
(2014)
Exalted on the Ward: “Mary Roberts,” the Georgia State Sanitarium, and the Psychiatric “Speciality” of Race
(/isis/citation/CBB001201824/)
Article
Gambino, Matthew;
(2008)
“These strangers within our gates”: Race, Psychiatry and Mental Illness among Black Americans at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., 1900--40
(/isis/citation/CBB000950375/)
Article
Pols, Hans;
(2012)
The Psychiatrist as Administrator: The Career of W. F. Theunissen in the Dutch East Indies
(/isis/citation/CBB001200716/)
Book
Dale, Pamela;
Melling, Joseph;
(2006)
Mental Illness and Learning Disability since 1850: Finding a Place for Mental Disorder in the United Kingdom
(/isis/citation/CBB000774001/)
Article
Burgmair, Wolfgang;
Weber, Matthias M.;
(2008)
Die bayerische Irrenreform von 1851---Ein Instrument der administrativen Modernisierung unter König Max II. von Bayern
(/isis/citation/CBB001021490/)
Article
Paul Kelton;
(2022)
The End of Smallpox for Indigenous Peoples in the United States, 1898–1903: An Unnoticed Finale
(/isis/citation/CBB671093615/)
Article
Williams, Elizabeth A.;
(2008)
Gags, Funnels and Tubes: Forced Feeding of the Insane and of Suffragettes
(/isis/citation/CBB000932168/)
Article
Daniel Argo;
Vladislav Fainstein;
Edgar Jones;
Moshe Z Abramowitz;
(2020)
Patients behind the front lines: the exchange of mentally-ill patients in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War
(/isis/citation/CBB475892665/)
Article
Summers, Martin;
(2010)
“Suitable Care of the African When Afflicted With Insanity”: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective
(/isis/citation/CBB001020993/)
Article
Getz, Lynne M.;
(2009)
“A Strong Man of Large Human Sympathy”: Dr. Patrick L. Murphy and the Challenges of Nineteenth-Century Asylum Psychiatry in North Carolina
(/isis/citation/CBB001030783/)
Article
Wulf, Stefan;
Schmiedebach, Heinz-Peter;
(2008)
“Die sprachliche Verständigung ist selbstverständlich recht schwierig.” Die “geisteskranken Rückwanderer” aus Amerika in der Hamburger Irrenanstalt Friedrichsberg 1909
(/isis/citation/CBB001220566/)
Be the first to comment!