Susan Burch

Centering on lived histories of people institutionalized at the Canton Asylum, “Committed” examines Native self-determination, kinship, institutionalization, and remembering. Between 1902 and 1934, this federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota confined nearly 400 men, women, and children from 17 states and 53 tribes. Institutionalization not only impacts those removed, but ripples through families, communities, and nations, and across generations. The wide-ranging ways individuals, kin, and tribal nations responded to their circumstances constitute the through-line of this book. “Committed” expands the boundaries of Native American, disability, and general US social and cultural history by bringing these multiple analyses into conversation with one another.