Between and Across Institutions: Multiple Removals, Settler Colonialism, and Histories of the West

Abstract

In the early 2000s, Faith O’Neil (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) sought answers about what had happened to her family members incarcerated at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians—a federal facility opened in South Dakota in1902 and overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Around the same time, I sought answers in the National Archives, trying to understand lived histories in Canton’s locked wards. As I researched and started writing a book about people on the inside of Canton and their kin outside of it, I collaborated with tribal historians and activists. When I began contacting descendants to offer digital copies of archived sources about their kin, Faith O’Neil answered my letter. O’Neil’s decision to share her own historical sources and family memories with me, and our joint research efforts while I completed my book project, set in motion a different approach to interpreting institutions and Western history.1 (1) According to Faith O’Neil, her mother Cora Winona Faribault was born on September 28, 1926, at the Canton Asylum. Faith’s grandmother, Elizabeth Alexis Faribault (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota), had been detained at the Indian Asylum since 1915. For years she was forced to work in asylum superintendent Harry Hummer’s bungalow—right up until she gave birth to Cora Winona. Shortly after delivering the child, Dr. Hummer informed concerned administrators at the Bureau of Indian Affairs that Faribault’s inherent defectiveness caused the unexpected pregnancy. Hummer—the same person who exploited Faribault’s coerced work—assured the BIA that Faribault was well cared for at the institution. He further argued that it was in her best interest to remain there. The commissioner concurred. Mother and child would be kept together in locked wards for several more years.2 (2)