Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions by Susan Burch (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions by Susan Burch Brianna Theobald (bio) Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions by Susan Burch University of North Carolina Press, 2021 COMMITTED IS A SLIM VOLUME whose impact far surpasses its word count. On one level, Susan Burch tells a story known to historians of Native America and Indigenous studies scholars: Between 1902 and 1934, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents and other authorities arranged for the detainment of nearly four hundred Native Americans in a federal psychiatric asylum for Indians in Canton, South Dakota. In Burch's hands, however, this story reads differently. Burch decenters the institution and the individuals who ran it, instead focusing on the people who were involuntarily detained in Canton as well as their families and descendants. As the book's subtitle suggests, the history Committed tells is above all a story of kinship—how relatives cared for one another in the face of involuntary separation, how detained people enacted kinship within institutional walls, and how descendants maintained kinship obligations across generations and established new relationships in the process of honoring their ancestors' memory. Long singled out as the "only" institution of its kind, the Canton Asylum appears less exceptional in Burch's telling. When situated within the context of settler colonialism, Native American history, and individual lives, containment and institutionalization are not extraordinary but, to quote one chapter title, "Familiar." This reality is reflected in the book's structure and organization. Chapters one through four document Native individuals' and families' experiences with the Canton institution. As an institution intended to achieve the eugenic segregation of individuals deemed "defective," the Indian Asylum housed men, women, and occasionally children who were confined for reasons that extended beyond contemporary understandings of insanity. In the stories of individuals' varied paths to Canton, readers will recognize many struggles that characterized U.S.-Native relations in the early twentieth century: over sexuality, procreation, family, and conceptions of health, well-being, and healing. Similarly, the necessarily fragmented accounts of life within the institution reflect themes that also appear in scholarship on Indian boarding schools: surveillance, solitary confinement, involuntary servitude, sexualized violence, and death. Burch could perhaps make some connections between federal institutions even more explicit; an [End Page 150] endnote cites elders' recollections of having been threatened with transfer to Canton to ensure good behavior while attending boarding school. The book's final two chapters are especially original and powerful. Chapter 5 reiterates Canton's lack of singularity by tracing the trajectories of individuals' post-Canton lives—trajectories that reveal continuity with regard to confinement and institutionalization. After the death of her mother, Cora Winona Faribault, a child born at the Canton institution, lived in an orphanage, a boarding school, the homes of white families, and an institution for unwed mothers. When the Indian Asylum closed in 1934, some individuals were discharged and returned to their reservations, but most were transferred to a hospital in Washington, D.C., and some endured repeated transfers between federal institutions for the remainder of their lives. Unlike previous histories, this story does not end with the closure of a single institution; nor does it end with the deaths of those who were forced to live within that institution's walls. Chapter 6 demonstrates that the violence of incarceration echoes across generations. At the heart of this final chapter are the tribal historians and descendants who insist upon—to quote the chapter's one-word title—"Remembering," countering erasure through their presence, their stories, their artifacts, and their commemorations. This reviewer appreciates Burch's explicit engagement with the methodological and ethical questions that surround her project. Deeply rooted in both disability studies and Indigenous studies, Committed demands that scholars carefully consider which stories are told and how—and that scholars remain accountable for such decisions. The book begins with "A Note on Access," where Burch describes the steps she has taken to "cultivate access," including the use of "accessible language rather than technical terms to invite a wide range of readers" (xv). Readers may then be surprised to encounter terms like "transinstitutionalization" in the introduction, but such language is not found in the book's...