‘A Living Burial’: Inside the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians
There have been many attempts by the U.S. mental health establishment to lock up, restrain, sedate or destroy the spirits of Native people, but none so notorious and depraved as what was done at the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians. Maybe that’s why stories of the people who suffered there are so hard to come by. Fortunately, a cadre of researchers are working to reconstruct what really happened in a federally-funded psychiatric gulag that was fully operational only 85 years ago. There’s no centralized archive to dig through, and whatever remnants remain of Hiawatha inmate lives are scattered like ashes across multiple states and numerous warehouses of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Fragments from the pitiful records of two inmates are gathered and rewoven here, allowing these imprisoned ancestors to finally speak their past to our present.
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