Reservations

Abstract

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.