UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores the racial politics of measurement in US colonialism in the portion of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) homelands today territorialized as upstate New York. Since the last thirty years, Indigenous peoples who live in North America have been figured within health disparities research as a singular race of people, and specifically as a race suffering from greater rates of disease and premature death. This project traces the ways that metrics and measures of racial difference as a biologically-relevant attribute among Indigenous people have been a technique of power in US colonialism. Informed by archival research in four archives, personal interviews, critical review of scientific publications, analytical reflections on Native texts, and participant observation, I argue that these measures constitute figures of Indianness which naturalize colonial dispossession through the construction of Euroamerican reason and order. In a triptych of three chapters, I make the case that these colonial processes of subjectivation construct a “Indian” figure that is dismembered from land, from family, and from one’s own body. First, I show how the units and technologies of land survey—developed and practiced in the late 1700s in post-Revolutionary United States in order to form heritable land-as-property—materialized anti-Indigenous concepts of self and place as the basis of Euroamerican settler governance. My second chapter analyzes how Thomas Indian School (1855-1957) administrators and other personnel produced a Euroamerican sense of order and “care” vis-à-vis discursive practices of health-making, as they surveilled Haudenosaunee children’s mobilities, sexualities, and kinship relations in the US colonial project of dispossession by way of assimilation. Third, I show how mid-1900s racial blood serology research done in Haudenosaunee communities—aimed at defining Indianness through biogenetic measures—aligned with state development projects that enacted forms of termination and relocation by other means in upstate New York. Each chapter addresses how these colonial techniques of power shape the textures of Haudenosaunee lives and sovereignties as they are reckoned and refused. This dissertation suggests that the ethical demands of healing and wellbeing in Native communities extend beyond these racializing measured differences and colonial bureaucracies, to upend and refuse a range of discursive practices that mark Indigenous people as damaged.