“Dis-membered” Pasts: Histories of Removals, Institutions, and Community Lives

This presentation will draw on three “dis-membered histories”: North Carolina’s institutions for the deaf and blind, disabled people in Japanese internment camps, and the Hiawatha Asylum, a federal psychiatric hospital for American Indians located in South Dakota.  My hope is to shed light on marginalized histories and to expand our interpretation of who “counts” in 20^thcentury U.S. social and cultural history. This project focuses on examples from history that involve removals—from kinship and cultural communities and from particular geographic locations. State interventions to remove certain people and place them in specific settings reveal the vivid and complex interplay of numerous factors shaping identities and status. Focusing on the life stories of institutionalized individuals and groups “on the inside” illustrates the importance and evolving characteristics of community and networks.

An “interdependent” theoretical framework to the study of identity in American history also informs this work. Historical forces, which include but are not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, disability, age, and place, are deeply interdependent. They constantly shape, inflect, complicate, and otherwise amplify the meaning of one another. Examining these case studies through the analytical lens of interdependence also acknowledges a larger, dynamic relation between individuals and groups of people, relationships that strongly shape identities and historical experiences.