In the article, Wild Indians: Native Perspectives on the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians, scholar Pemina Yellow Bird, raises her voice in respect to the native community. White settlers invaded aboriginals land and justified their violence on the basis that natives were characteristically primitive, mentally ill, and uncivilized, yet they committed the inflicting. Indigenous peoples are the intergenerational survivors of a holocaust where nobody escaped unscathed. In 1889, the United States Congress forcibly placed native peoples, primarily the elderly, into the Hiawatha Insane Asylum for Indians of Canton, South Dakota. The asylum promised to heal, rehabilitate, and eventually release them, but in reality, this disciplinary action was part of an ongoing cultural genocide that sought to destroy the racialized ‘Other,’ that cast slow suffering upon the aboriginal population.
The U.S government cast natives as ‘Wild Indians,’ thereby marking them as inhuman, which sanctioned such inconceivable violence. They were removed from their village, their families, and left to rot in these asylums, where they were withheld from food, medical care, and nobody was released until they died. The scientific and medical model that promised to “take the Indian out of the man” …show more content…
Our history textbooks are largely written by the white master narrative, which makes them politically bias. Discrimination can only be conquered through education, not colonization. While residential schools are embedded into the Canadian elementary curricula, it discounts several other atrocities from the master narrative, such as the Hiawatha Asylum. Journal articles are mainly accessible through subscription costs or post secondary tuition fees, thereby limiting access to high-income households and youth, which makes it incredibly difficult for Indigenous scholars to raise their
The U.S government cast natives as ‘Wild Indians,’ thereby marking them as inhuman, which sanctioned such inconceivable violence. They were removed from their village, their families, and left to rot in these asylums, where they were withheld from food, medical care, and nobody was released until they died. The scientific and medical model that promised to “take the Indian out of the man” …show more content…
Our history textbooks are largely written by the white master narrative, which makes them politically bias. Discrimination can only be conquered through education, not colonization. While residential schools are embedded into the Canadian elementary curricula, it discounts several other atrocities from the master narrative, such as the Hiawatha Asylum. Journal articles are mainly accessible through subscription costs or post secondary tuition fees, thereby limiting access to high-income households and youth, which makes it incredibly difficult for Indigenous scholars to raise their