Date of Award

Winter 3-1-2025

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

First Advisor

Bruce Duthu

Second Advisor

Colin Calloway

Third Advisor

Donald Pease

Abstract

This graduate thesis involves a retelling of the history of the now defunct Canton Insane Asylum, built in the early 20th century located in Canton, South Dakota. It was America’s first federal psychiatric facility dedicated exclusively for American Indians. The Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians is a touchstone whose microhistory reflects larger political and economic sentiments in both the state of South Dakota and in the United States writ large. Conceiving South Dakota, as first and foremost a white settler society erected on land forcibly wrested from American Indian people, the asylum played an important economic development role and helped transform Canton, South Dakota. All of this was accomplished through physical and medical violence and exploitation of vulnerable American Indians. The Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians was aided and abetted by cheerleading state officials and callously managed by various colonial superintendents of whom one is particularly noteworthy—Dr. Harry Reid Hummer. Methodologically, this thesis leverages archival records (housed and littered across three national archives: Kansas City, Dallas, Texas, and Washington, D.C. as well as state archives) consisting of governmental reports, the insane asylum’s financial records, oral testimonies, and patient case files. Where primary sources are lacking, secondary sources are used. More specifically, the thesis highlights the brutal scientific management and medical practices as carried out by the insane asylum executives and staff members; the inherent capitalistic ethos propelling the insane asylum, the business of confinement, and the manner in which pseudoscience and epidemiology data were contorted to justify the confinement of American Indians. The first patient arrived in 1902, and the facility permanently closed in 1934 due to dehumanizing conditions. Over its lifetime, it warehoused more than three-hundred and seventy American Indians.

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