UC Berkeley

False Promises: Race, Power, and the Chimera of Indian Assimilation, 1879-1934, analyzes the punishment of adult Indian women and men at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918) and the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (1902-1934). While previous boarding school scholarship has focused on the experiences of children, my work finds that as a result of an overlooked policy change, adults eighteen years of age and older, rather than youth, were Carlisle’s demographic majority between 1912-1918. Through an analysis of gendered forms of Indigenous punishment at Carlisle and Canton, this work exposes sites of Indian-white conflict, such as labor and sexuality, that were as integral to the American project of nation-building as was the indoctrination of Indian children in off-reservation boarding schools. By considering two settler institutions alongside one another, I demonstrate punitive connections between those ostensibly distinct facilities, and show how the practice of confining adult Indian people at Carlisle and Canton inaugurated and concretized networks of white racial power in this era.

In bringing together the fields of Native American history, American studies, and race, gender, and medicine in the Progressive era, my work traces overlapping institutional histories of Native American confinement, punishment, and resistance, and demonstrates patterns of racial prejudice that have ongoing relevance for Indian people in the twenty-first century. This research builds on extant scholarship in Native American history to demonstrate the key role that American institutions played in furthering the subjugation of Indian communities under U.S. settler-colonialism, deputizing white American civilians as the disciplinary agents of Indian people by virtue of proximity to them. This research expands current interpretations of Carlisle as an institution intended solely for the indoctrination of Indian children. Additionally, this work begins to address the neglected history of Indigenous incarceration and elimination at Canton, and the ways in which emergent eugenicist ideologies were operationalized at both of these American facilities. False Promises traces overlapping histories of confinement to reveal how white Americans wielded punishment as a form of racial power held in common over all Indian people, and locates Carlisle and Canton on a historical continuum of policies and practices aimed at the eradication of Indigenous populations.