The Long History of Institutionalizing Settler Power

In October 2024, outgoing US President Joe Biden formally apologized to Native American nations for the intergenerational harms of the boarding school system, a nation-spanning project undertaken by federal, state, and territorial governments in league with Christian churches, private philanthropic ventures, and the US Army. Two months later, he formally designated a new national monument on the former site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School to “tell the story” of the schools. The following spring, the administration of US President Donald Trump pulled $1.6 million in funding for digitization initiatives designed to reveal and preserve the experiences of students incarcerated in facilities like Carlisle. Public reckoning with the United States’ history of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples, already trailing other settler states, is once again stalled, this time by a political regime with an avowed hostility to histories it deems non-patriotic.1 Sarah A. Whitt’s timely and devastating book, Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians, arrives against this contemporary backdrop. It joins a body of critical scholarship on Carlisle and other schools written in recent decades, including work by David Wallace Adams, Jacqueline Fear-Seagal, Brenda Child, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, and Andrew Woolford.2 Unlike many of these valuable works, however, Whitt does not attempt to reconstruct the fabric of life at an individual boarding school. Nor is she primarily interested in the experiences of child inmates of the schools. Life stage plays an important role here: Bad Medicine focuses on adults who entered, lived, and sometimes died within a host of US institutions mobilized to “civilize” American Indians. In the latter stages of the assimilation era adult wards played an increasingly important role in places like Carlisle, which sought to maintain enrollment numbers (and thus funding and relevancy) by expanding their remit. Mining and countering the colonial archive, Whitt illustrates how adult institutionalization “helped concretize, maintain, and expand networks of white racial power” in the Progressive Era (4).