Hygienic Dispossession: The Convergence of Disease, Ableism, and Settler Colonialism in the Age of Allotment

Throughout the early twentieth century, twin engines of destruction churned through Indian Country: disease and dispossession. In this paper, I will elaborate on my concept of “hygienic dispossession” to explain how these phenomena were interdependent in ways that historians have not yet discussed. By the early 1910s, federal officials working for the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) could no longer ignore the growing epidemiological catastrophe affecting Indigenous communities across the United States. On reservations, infectious diseases (especially tuberculosis and trachoma) threatened communities’ very existence, as did an insidious tangle of allotment policies and practices. To quiet critics, the OIA embarked on a series of ad hoc public health campaigns, or “health drives,” on tribal lands. Going door-to-door, field matrons and their medical supervisors provided health education, flagged the gravely ill for removal to hospitals, and induced families to rebuild their homes according to Western standards. But who would finance such home “improvements” and institutionalizations? Surely not the chronically underfunded and usually callous OIA. Instead, health drive staff adopted a tactic that reservation superintendents already utilized: they pressured sick and disabled Indigenous people to sell their allotments. Using an ableist understanding of “proper land use” to mean extracting value through farming, OIA staff argued that Native people who could not farm had no “use” for their lands. I term this process “hygienic dispossession” and argue that disease and Western public health interventions were powerful weapons of Indigenous dispossession in the early twentieth century. Today, as tribal nations continue to grapple with health crises and threats to their sovereignty, it is critical to draw connections between land and health and to develop new strategies that bolster both.