« Unhealthy settler colonialism: Darrel Manitowabi, ‘Colonialism and Indigenous peoples’, in Toba Bryant (ed.), Handbook on the Social Determinants of Health, Elgar Online, 2025
Guilt or fury in the face of settler colonialism: Samuel Hayim Brody, ‘The Reality of Settler Colonialism’, Boston Review, 19/02/25 »

Even more unhealthy settler colonialism: Sarah A. Whitt, Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians, Duke University Press, 2025

17Feb25

Description: In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination. In so doing, Whitt centers the experiences of Indigenous youth and adults alike at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive Era facilities. She demonstrates that in the administration of these institutions, which involved moving Indigenous people from one location to another, everyday white Americans became deputized as agents of the settler order. Bringing together Native American history, settler colonial studies, and the history of medicine, Whitt breaks new ground by showing how the confinement of Indigenous people across interlocking institutional sites helped concretize networks of white racial power—a regime that Native nations and communities continue to negotiate and actively resist today.


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