Hygienic Dispossession: Allotment and the Cherokee and Choctaw Health Drives of 1917

Abstract In 1917 the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) sent field matrons into Cherokee and Choctaw homes in Eastern Oklahoma to provide health education, to make home “improvements,” and to flag gravely ill people for removal to hospitals. The results of these “health drives” were limited epidemiologically but catastrophic for the Indigenous people involved and their tribal nations: Health drive staff pressured sick and disabled Cherokees and Choctaws to sell their allotments in order to finance home “improvements” and removals to far-away tuberculosis hospitals. I term this process “hygienic dispossession” and argue that disease and Western public health interventions were powerful weapons of Indigenous dispossession in the early twentieth century. Historians of the West have rarely examined allotment and public health together. Moreover, many have interpreted the health crises in Indian Country as side effects of other federal Indian policies, including allotment. However, this article demonstrates that U.S. reactions to ongoing epidemics (public health policies and practices) played an integral role in dispossession. Today, as tribal nations continue to grapple with health crises and threats to their sovereignty, it is important to draw connections to this history and to develop new strategies that jointly bolster Indigenous health and land tenure.