Abstract
This paper draws on literary scholar Susan Ryan’s work to show how Americans worked out national as well as racial identities through benevolent activity, including forms of reformative incarceration. Reformers operated as true citizens by sustaining themselves and providing for others. Recipients, on the other hand, functioned as people in need. Ryan argues that benevolent activists ascribed need to entire groups of people. As a result, “the categories of blackness, Indianness, and Irishness…came to signify need itself.” Elite Americans thereby “raced” need, assigning essential difference to populations they sought to relieve. Ryan’s work on racialized need can help us understand the connections between Christianity, race, and mass incarceration. I explore how one nineteenth-century military prison—and the disciplinary institutions later modeled on it—was created in direct response to presumed (and raced) need among Native Americans. I also consider how Christian reformers obscured and concealed the racialized nature of this institution—and how, in that avoidance, they came to sanctify mass incarceration for racial minorities. Finally, I look at two incarcerated Native artists’ drawings to show how people caught up in racialized renderings of their need have something else to say about who they are and what prison is.
Highlights
In 1875, two Kiowa men, Chêthāidè (White Horse) and Zótâm (Driftwood), found themselves ̄more than a thousand miles from home and locked indefinitely inside a military prison.Their circumstances stood in stark contrast to their earlier life
Christian reformers in the country, he was a military man at heart. Because he worked with army colleagues who called for the extermination of Native people, Pratt had no need to avoid reference to the role force and coercion played in his prison experiment
The leading citizens who built and ministered within New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts prisons engaged in a host of other reforming activities, creating what scholars have often called the Benevolent Empire (Cayton 2010)
Summary
In 1875, two Kiowa men, Chêthāidè (White Horse) and Zótâm (Driftwood), found themselves. Christian reformers in the country, he was a military man at heart Because he worked with army colleagues who called for the extermination of Native people, Pratt had no need to avoid reference to the role force and coercion played in his prison experiment. He acknowledged it during his time running Fort Marion and later when he reflected back on it for his memoir (Pratt 2003). Similar to Fort Marion, Pratt required his students to undergo cultural transformation: American clothes, haircuts, labor and English-speaking When children resisted this regime, they faced corporal punishment (Adams 1995)
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