“Care and Maintenance”: Settler Ableism and Land Dispossession at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, 1902–1934

This chapter centers on the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in Canton, South Dakota, the first and only institution designed solely for Indigenous confinement on psychiatric grounds. Reading across the grain of medical association proceedings, boarding school publications, photographs, and Canton “inmate” case files, this chapter shows how the medical confinement of landholding Indian people at Canton led to land dispossession on a small-scale, case-by-case basis. Records reflect that approximately four hundred Indian people were forcibly confined to Canton—often as a result of disagreements with boarding school superintendents, reservation agents, and other white citizens—and that some Indian people were dispossessed of their landholdings while incarcerated there.