A “Most Remarkable Trait”: “Flathead” Skulls, Indigenous Pathologization, and Transinstitutionalization (2024)
Trevor Engel (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 39
Pages: 117-134
In the nineteenth century and beyond, Euro-American medical and scientific professionals tried repeatedly to describe the flattened skulls of the Chinookan-speaking people, both living and dead, as pathological. In scientific, medical, and popular presses, professionals pointed to the alleged barbarism, lack of intelligence, savagery, and primitivism of the Chinookans to justify the collection of their skulls and pathologize their cultural practices. Through settler-ableism, the flattened skulls seemed to represent not only the disablement of Native Americans as a group but also the influence of faulty heredity, harmful bodily modifications, and deformed but “normal” physiognomy responsible for the “flattening.” Scientists, craniologists, phrenologists, and doctors debated endlessly about the flattened skulls, with a fundamental pathologization authorizing, as this article argues, the transinstitutionalization of the Chinookan-speaking people across institutions for the dead as well as the living.
...MoreArticle Mara Mills; Jaipreet Virdi; Sarah F. Rose (2024) Disability, Epistemology, Sciencing. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24).
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