DST 500 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Infant Mortality, Candon, Psych

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Disability Studies
• Course: DST 500
• Professor: Jenna Reid

Document Summary

Wild indians: native perspectives on the hiawatha asylum. Three magic questions integral to native recovery experience: what happened to us, how are they affecting us, look among original teachings, values, instructions to rediscover what we must do to take good care of ourselves. Native people: highest suicide rate, infant mortality rate, lowest life expectancy. Must tell native stories: honest airing of horrors of holocaust = x master narrative. Hiawatha insane asylum for indians of candon, south dakota. Not allowed to practice own spirituality, ceremonies become criminal activities. Person could be locked away on trumped up/minor charges. Asylum started as pork-barrel project - congressmen wanted to attract settlers, create. Treaty $ diverted into reservation agents" pockets jobs, build economy of new state. Indian defectives expensive to house in state institutions. No one trained in the field of psychiatry in staff who dealt with insane native patients.