Article ID: CBB560352909

Reservations (2022)

unapi

The lab/field binary obscures a coherent structure that grounds both types of sites: settler colonialism. In the United States, settler colonialism has depended on property relations based on dispossession and white supremacist logics that have supported and been supported by sciences in a range of sites. The case of the National Institutes of Health on the reservation(s) registers the experiences of a college student who was alternately a “human subject” of lab-based medical research and a white-settler science technician for human-subjects field research on a Native reservation in the early 1960s—as well as a “human subject” of this historical research. This case documents how settler scientists in the postwar period used the term “reservation” to refer both to the land on which laboratories sat and to the Native Land on which they carried out field research. In doing so, the essay explores how anthropology and medicine have been mutually constituted; how scientific pursuits, whether in the lab or in the field, depend on settler occupation; and yet how responsibility to account for past and ongoing dispossession has largely fallen on the history of the field sciences—even as anti-colonial laboratories are transforming science in the present day.

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Associated with

Article Cameron Brinitzer; Etienne Benson (2022) Introduction: What Is a Field? Transformations in Fields, Fieldwork, and Field Sciences since the Mid-Twentieth Century. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 108-113). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB560352909/

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Authors & Contributors
Stark, Laura
Baumeister, David
Hay, Travis
Emanuel, Ryan E.
Eichler, Lauren
Lanzarotta, Tess
Concepts
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
American Indians; Native Americans; First Nations of the Americas
Laboratories
Field work
Human experimentation
Agriculture
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
Modern
Medieval
20th century, early
Places
United States
South Carolina (U.S.)
Western states (U.S.)
Hawaii (U.S.)
China
Canada
Institutions
National Institute of Health (U.S.)
Project Sealab
Skylab Program
United States. Office of Naval Research
United States Navy
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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