A Disability History of the United States (19 page)

The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians is an example that is both devastatingly singular and commonplace. Hiawatha operated from 1903 to 1933. It may have begun with humanitarian goals, but even that is questionable. Because tribal peoples were under federal authorities, state institutions had no legal obligation to accept indigenous peoples deemed insane. For South Dakota senator Richard Pettigrew, it was a prime opportunity to bring in money and jobs to Canton, South Dakota. Between its founding and closure in 1933, more than three hundred indigenous people from at least fifty-three different tribes were sent to Hiawatha. It was one of only two federal insane asylums. While the majority of people were from the Great Plains and Midwest nations of the Lakota Sioux, the Dakota Sioux, the Chippewa and Menominee, some individuals arrived in Canton to find that no one spoke the language of their home.

Commitment to the Hiawatha asylum involved virtually no legal safeguards. Reservation superintendents, white agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), could confine someone to Hiawatha, and often included boarding school superintendents in their decision making. Parents who opposed sending their children to boarding schools, individuals who resisted assimilation, those who argued with BIA agents, those too rowdy or bothersome, or those who steadfastly practiced indigenous religions, could be and often were committed to Hiawatha. Standards of insanity, normality, and health literally foreign to indigenous nations were imposed upon them, sometimes quite violently.

Dr. Harry Hummer, the second director of Hiawatha, believed that levels of “insanity among the Indians” were rising. The arrival of civilized peoples and practices in North America, he believed, were simply too much for those immersed in Native cultures to handle. He also argued that “full-bloods” were more likely to be insane than those with some European heritage. It angered him that Hiawatha residents were “suspicious” of him, stating that they were “much more reticent” than white insane peoples. “Reticence, suspiciousness, superstitions” combined with “the fact that oftentimes our only medium of conversation is the sign language, which with us is very crude,” he complained, made diagnosis difficult.
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Contemporary indigenous activist and elder Pemina Yellow Bird records that Hummer forbade Native dances and music, even to mourn the dead. Hiawatha staff commonly cut inmates’ hair or shaved it off entirely. Boarding school officials also adopted this practice. Not only did it diminish possibilities of lice and make bathing easier, but it was, in Pemina Yellow Bird’s words, “a form of spiritual murder.” “In many Native belief systems,” she says, “our hair is alive, and has a spirit and power of its own. We do not like others to even touch our hair, let alone shave it off.” The forced cutting of hair also happened at boarding schools, another form of institutionalization. Zitkala-Sa, of the Yankton Sioux nation, chronicled having her hair cut at her first day of boarding school in roughly the same time period. She had tried to run away, and was tied to a chair: “I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit.”
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Family members and tribal representatives had filed complaints about Hiawatha with the BIA since its beginning, indicating among other things that they tried to maintain contact with their loved ones institutionalized at the facility. Employees had filed complaints against Hummer since his arrival, alleging sexual and monetary misconduct. In 1929 Dr. Samuel Silk arrived in Canton to inspect conditions at the federally funded facility (though this was certainly not the first such inspection). At the end of his six-day stay, he compiled a lengthy, highly critical report. The asylum, he said, was “a place of padlocks and chamber pots” with “intolerable conditions” throughout. Only the “poorest kind of medical care” was provided, and conditions were “very much below the standard of a modern prison.” Straitjackets, metal wristlets, and ankle chains routinely confined people. Few ever went home; most died at Hiawatha and at least 131 are buried in a cemetery within sight of the asylum windows. For those inmates who came from tribal nations who valued being buried near one’s ancestors, or with taboos against dwelling close to burial sites, being confined to a building that overlooked the cemetery, far from home, must have been horrific. One local resident remembered nighttime “wailing” coming from the asylum; likely it was not simply wailing, but the honoring and mourning of the dead with death songs.
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After Silk’s condemnation of conditions at the facility in 1929, and again in 1933, the federal government closed the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians. Silk’s final report promoted Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to charge that the Canton institution remained open only “as a result of the greed and selfish inhumanity of certain interests there” and that conditions remained “sickening and intolerable,” “filthy, inhuman, and revolting.”
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Despite its brutalities, the Hiawatha experience was not unique, in that even within horrific institutions of terror human beings created community. As historian Susan Burch has shown, people institutionalized at Hiawatha cared for one another to the best of their abilities. They helped one another maintain contact with outside family members, and they sustained tribal relationships when at all possible.
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At the closing of Hiawatha in December 1933, sixteen patients were deemed lacking “insufficient mental derangement” for further institutionalization. They returned home, wherever that was. Sixty-nine people, apparently considered sufficiently mentally deranged, were transported to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, the only other federal insane asylum—and one already segregated between whites and African Americans. It was also where Dr. Harry Hummer, Hiawatha’s superintendent, had begun his career. Few former Hiawatha residents ever left St. Elizabeth’s.
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At St. Elizabeth’s, the former Hiawatha inmates encountered a staff already arguing about and building treatment regiments around the belief that African Americans lacked mental and physical capacity to handle contemporary and civilized life. In other words, they encountered institutionalized ideologies that already linked being not-white with disability. As Historian Martin Summers smartly notes, medical experts both in the United States and throughout European colonies in Africa thought that those of African descent had “underdeveloped nervous systems, and the more they came into contact with civilization the greater their propensity to become mentally disturbed.” This was not simply an extension of the post–Civil War argument that freedom wrought insanity among former slaves, but part of the larger intellectual framework that justified colonialism abroad and domestically. It supported a segregated social order based on racial hierarchies. As Dr. John E. Lind put it in 1917, Africans as well as African Americans, no matter what pretext of sophistication they embraced, had a “savage heart beneath the civilized exterior.”
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The sixty-nine indigenous people who went by train from Canton, South Dakota, to Washington, DC, may have made a considerable geographic move, but they remained bound within the same ideological framework of subjugation.

Today a golf course lies on the grounds of the former Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, South Dakota. What had been the unmarked cemetery is near the fifth tee. Because of the activism of Lakota journalist Harold Ironshield, activism that has been continued by others since his death, a memorial listing the names of those known to be buried in the Hiawatha cemetery now sits nearby. Like the cemeteries of many current and former insane asylums, only recently, if ever, have those buried been remembered by name. Its history is both unique and hauntingly commonplace.

The federal government provided even more reason for indigenous nations to fear its supposed caretaking efforts by undertaking a federal campaign against trachoma in the 1920s. Trachoma, a highly infectious eye disease also common among immigrant communities, affected nearly one in four Native Americans, and in some tribal nations and boarding schools the rate was as high as one out of every two people. Left untreated, the sometimes painful disease could result in blindness. In 1924 the federal Office of Indian Affairs initiated an anti-trachoma campaign. Instead of the more benign approach of improving sanitation conditions and providing health education, or the widely used strategy of prescribing medications such as silver nitrate, OIA officials endorsed an invasive and debated surgery called tarsectomy. This involved using forceps to turn the eyelids inside out in order to scrape off the infected corneal tissue. Among members of tribal nations as wide-ranging as those in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Montana, and California, over 22,773 tarsectomies were performed between 1925 and 1927.
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Among other problems, however, tarsectomy often did not work. It remained a controversial medical procedure that was quickly discredited, long before its use was abandoned, and tarsectomized patients “frequently experienced severe complications, which could include an untreatable recurrence of trachoma, entropion, scarring, or blindness.” As historian Todd Benson has written, “OIA doctors had caused even more suffering for American Indian patients.” Despite cautions and efforts to conduct small test cases, OIA doctors had gone ahead with their surgical efforts. They then blamed indigenous communities for the medical failures. As one OIA trachoma specialist wrote, “The Indian is a born skeptic anyhow, and must be handled by those familiar with his temperamental vagaries.”
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White racism thus resulted in both painful and ineffective surgical procedures—and in increasing blindness in an already marginalized population.

When President Benjamin Harrison issued his first address to Congress in 1899, and as the nation wrestled with whether to assist or simply ignore disabled Civil War veterans, he warned of the undesirable consequences of industrialization. Railroad workers, he proclaimed, were subject “to a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier in time of war.” Railroads were creating an “army of cripples.” In 1910, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (a man about as dissimilar to Harrison as could be) proclaimed that “‘compensation for the victims of injury’ stood ‘above all’ other issues in terms of its legislative significance; no other issue was ‘of half the importance.’”
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Industrialization was supposed to usher in both wealth and leisure, but it was disabling American workers in incredibly large numbers. Progressive Era reformers sought to soften the disabling blows of industrialization via protective labor legislation—and they used visuals of the disabled bodies of American workers to reveal the horrors of capitalism unchecked—but it is hard to exaggerate the impact of mines, steel plants, railroad yards, textile factories, lead poisoning, fast assembly lines, and repetitive motion on the bodies of working-class men, women, and children. And industrial accidents that resulted in a laborer’s diminished income capacity, or a lack of income, meant that entire families suffered.

Thomas Johnston, perhaps, was lucky. The young black man employed at a Pittsburgh mill had both his arms broken by falling steel laths. His arms healed but “permanently took crooked and weak for any kind of mill work.” He lost significant income while recovering but had the good fortune to then gain employment as a private cook, earning approximately the same as he had before.
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Samuel Jones’s experience was more common. A dinkey, a small locomotive, ran over his foot and “crushed it so badly that he had to lose his leg below the knee.” The Homestead Steel Works, his employer, gave him $150 and a watchman’s job, but his earnings were cut by almost 40 percent. Crystal Eastman, a labor lawyer, journalist, and contemporary of Jones, estimated that approximately 43 percent of the survivors of industrial accidents had to make do with a diminished income.
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Too many men and women found themselves in situations similar to Andrew Antonik, a European immigrant who also worked at Homestead. He staffed the “skull-cracker,” a heavy iron weight dropped from a height in order to break up scrap pieces of steel. One night in April 1907 Antonik failed to dodge the heavy flying steel scraps. He had worked a twenty-four-hour shift the day before. As Eastman reported, “His leg was crushed and had to be taken off below the knee.” In October he had healed enough to appear at the company office with an interpreter (assumedly he didn’t speak English). He had been given $150 “and the promise of an artificial leg and light work as soon as he should be able to get round.” A year after his accident, Eastman found Antonik in the backyard of his boarding house. The artificial leg and the promised job had never materialized. He had sent $50 to his wife and five children in Europe, and was now out of money. Eastman estimated that approximately 13 percent of laborers who survived accidents were never again able to find work.
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Both temporary and permanently disabling work accidents were shockingly routine. In her investigations of Pennsylvania steel mills, Eastman found one mother who could not even remember how or when her sixteen-year-old son had lost two fingers in the mill, because it was so unremarkable. One retired steel worker insisted to her, “I never got hurt any to speak of.” After persistent questions, “he recalled that he had once fractured his skull, that a few years later he had lost half of a finger, and that only three years ago he was laid up for nine weeks with a crushed foot.”
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Investigators found similar statistics in every industrial field. An 1890 estimate was that 42 percent of Colorado railroad workers were injured on the job every year. Chinese immigrant laborers building the transcontinental railroads regularly lost their fingers and hands to both hammers and explosions. In 1907 protective labor legislation proposed by Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, the progressive senator from Wisconsin, limited trainmen to
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sixteen hours of labor per day, and telegraphers to nine hours. Complete accident numbers are difficult to attain. In 1907 death on the rails, for both passengers and employees, was nearly twelve thousand a year, and the number of serious injuries presumed to be several times larger.
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