University of Hawai‛i at Mānoa – “Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions”
Join Susan Burch from Middlebury College for her talk, “Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions”, as part of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Disability Studies Speaker Series.
Between 1902 and 1934, the United States confined hundreds of adults and children from dozens of Native nations at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, a federal psychiatric hospital in South Dakota. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. For them, Canton Asylum was one of many places of imposed removal and confinement, including reservations, boarding schools, orphanages, and prison-hospitals. Despite the long reach of institutionalization for those forcibly held at the Asylum, the tenacity of relationships extended within and beyond institutional walls. Drawing on oral history interviews, correspondence, material objects, and archival sources, Burch reframes the histories of institutionalized people and the places that held them.
View the official event flyer.
Event Details
Date: March 12, 2025
Time: 1:00p.m. PST (11:00 a.m. HST)
Location: on Zoom
About Susan Burch
Susan Burch is a Professor of American Studies and a former director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Middlebury College. Her research and teaching focus on the overlaps of deaf, disability, race, Indigeneity, and gender and sexuality in late nineteenth- and twentieth- century U.S. history. She is the author of Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to 1942 (2002) and a coauthor, with Hannah Joyner, of Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (2007). She has coedited anthologies including Women and Deafness: Double Visions (2006), Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2010), and Disability Histories (2014).Her most recent work, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions (2021) centers on peoples’ experiences inside and outside the Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric institution created specifically to detain American Indians.