Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Clouds loom large like phantoms over South Dakota's flatland. In the state's southeastern corner, the town of Canton. Population, 2,800. On the town's east end, golfers play the city's Hiawatha Course. This course contains 121 graves clustered between the fourth and fifth fairways. These graves hold the remains of Indians who died in the federal government's Canton Insane Asylum.

Just how these men, women, and children buried here lived and died at Canton remains a mystery. What does remain of their lives is listed on a beige stone on the burial grounds west side. That stone holds a dark plaque, which lists their names and dates of death. Clara Christopher worked at the asylum since its inception. In 1979, when she was 91, a graduate student recorded Christopher's memories of the asylum.

CLARA CHRISTOPHER: The first patient that arrived, I remember, was the 1st of December in 1902. Let's see. The hospital was just a little while ready when they took the first patient in.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Christopher worked at the Canton Asylum for 25 years in a variety of jobs, ranging from cook to head of supplies. She remembered new patients.

CLARA CHRISTOPHER: They see the name written, asylum, and it hurt them. They were really heartbroken. I could never stand to see them crying. When they'd come in, I knew I was going to get a new patient, I used to run off someplace and hold my ears like that, so I couldn't hear them. You know, sometimes, out on the reservation, they just have something against an Indian or something, and he was vicious or something like that, and they prescribed insane.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: The bulk of information about the asylum's operation, patients, and staff comes from the writings of Dr. Samuel Silk, clinical director at what was then the country's premier psychiatric hospital, Saint Elizabeth's in Washington, DC. Silk inspected the Canton Asylum in 1929 and filed a report.

SAMUEL SILK: Three patients were found padlocked in rooms. One was sick in bed, supposed to be suffering from a brain tumor, being bedridden and helpless. A boy about 10 years of age was in a straitjacket lying in his bed. One patient who had been in the hospital six years was padlocked in a room, and according to the attendant, had been secluded in this room for nearly three years.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: 32-year-old Frank Hart is a living link to the asylum's history. While researching his family tree, he discovered his great grandfather had been held at the Canton Asylum. Hart, an Ojibwe who lives in Calgary, Alberta, sifts through a small file he's collected about his family.

FRANK HART: This is some of the leaders of the Thief River. And this is kind of his marriage, I don't know if you call it a certificate, but--

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: All remains of his great grandfather's life are a few government documents. Hart says his great grandfather Marcus served on the Red Lake Tribal Council of the Minnesota Ojibwe.

FRANK HART: His Indian name was [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] which means like a war eagle who was all over the place in the sky. He was a leader, a warrior. And he was a good man. He was a stern man. I mean, he was the kind of guy who wouldn't take a guff off of anybody.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Federal records show a Red Lake Reservation superintendent committed Hart to the Canton asylum after he showed symptoms of senile psychosis during a hospital stay. The records indicate Hart was a heavy drinker who one night laid down in a fire and suffered second and third degree burns. Frank Hart says his relatives have never talked to him about alcoholism and his great grandfather.

Records show Indians such as Marcus Hart were stripped of their Indian identities upon arrival at the Canton Asylum. Authorities would have spoken to him in a language he would have struggled to understand. Hart would have gone from the open woods of Northern Minnesota to being locked in a ward where sealed windows held in the stench of unemptied chamber pots filled with human waste. At night, the only light flickered from an attendance lantern, passing occasionally on rounds.

Golfer Arnie Lunder is one of the asylum's last living witnesses. He's lived in Canton for 84 years. Today, he plays the course's sixth hole. To his left is the Indian burial ground. He remembers accompanying his mother on visits there.

ARNIE LUNDER: The women were all out on the front, playing around on the grass out in front there. And one of the head nurses came out and said, bring her back in. She was laying on a blanket. So they took one on each corner and drug her up the steps. I thought it really impressed me. It was kind of cruel.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Even for its time, the asylum did not meet minimum standards required of an institution treating the mentally ill. Gerald Grob, a professor of history and medicine at Rutgers University, is a leading authority on the history of US mental health policy.

GERALD GROB: What you had here was an institution that you would only could define as being deviant. It wasn't doing what a lot of other hospitals-- If you go to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, and I've been through their records, which are at the national archives, there are very detailed records of patients and the like. They don't exist-- I don't think they ever existed at the Canton Asylum, partly because the person running it, as far as I could tell, had almost no contact with psychiatry.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: During a subsequent investigation, Saint Elizabeth's Dr. Silk concluded many of the Indians confined at Canton were locked up because they had clashed with White men, a school, or an agency, not because they were mentally ill.

GERALD GROB: Would not the United states, if it could be held liable at all, be liable in these cases for enormous damages. It is not only that the medical director of Saint Elizabeth's finds these patients to be perfectly sane. They are known to be perfectly sane to the director of the asylum, Dr. Hummer. But he assumed the position that these people were below normal, mentally deficient, and they should only be discharged after they were sterilized. And as he did not have any means of doing this, there was nothing left but to keep them there.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Canton's staff restrained many asylum patients in metal wristlets, camisoles, and shackles with iron chains. Silk noted that one girl who suffered from epilepsy miraculously escaped severe burns, even though she was chained near a hot water pipe during her seizures. University of South Dakota history professor Herbert Hoover says the creation of the asylum most likely grew out of an ignorance of Indian culture, not an organized plot designed to confine sane Indians.

HERBERT HOOVER: It really was I think a well-intentioned desire to accomplish cultural imperialism without killing Indian people. And this I think was a part of it. The great fault in it, of course, is not investigating to discover how Native Americans had dealt with what we call insanity prior to the arrival of Whites. So we took Western European strategies of dealing with insanity.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: The Canton Asylum was created in 1902, a time when the United States official Indian policy was assimilation. Hoover's University of South Dakota colleague Leonard Bruguier says whatever the intent behind the asylum, it was a convenient tool for reservation agents. Bruguier is a member of the Yankton Sioux and director of the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota.

LEONARD BRUGUIER: So in order for the agent to feel more comfortable on his reservation by having a bunch of yes people, it would be very easy for him to say this person is insane and then have them shipped off up to Canton to be administered by a whole different set of rules. Basically, he would just be able to get rid of him.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: John Collier, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Roosevelt administration, ordered the Canton Asylum closed and the patients sent to Saint Elizabeth's in Washington, DC. In response, the residents of Canton waged a federal court battle to keep the asylum open. The asylum was a major contributor to Canton's economy in 1933, a time when the country was plunged deep into economic depression.

Members of the nearby Rosebud Sioux also opposed Canton's closing. They didn't want their friends and relatives in the asylum sent thousands of miles east. The fight generated national news coverage from New York to Montana. Collier prevailed in court and closed the Canton Insane Asylum in December, 1933. Dr. Samuel Silk immediately sent 17 Indians home. Some who were freed had been confined at the Canton asylum as long as 16 years. Another 69, including Frank Hart's great grandfather, required hospitalization and were sent by train to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital. Most of them would spend the rest of their lives institutionalized.

A decade after the asylum closed, the federal government sold the property to the city of Canton for $1. The county attorney at the time was Craig Brown. Brown says none of the local officials thought it unusual to build a golf course on the land, even if 121 bodies were buried there.

CRAIG BROWN: Well, we didn't think a whole lot of it. It was the Indians had found out about the cemetery when they started their religious exercises out there. And of course, it became quite a topic of discussion until we did something about it.

[TRIBAL MUSIC PLAYING]

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Harold Ironshield, a member of the Lakota Nation's Yankton Tribe, holds ceremonies at the gravesite each May, remembering those who lived and died at the asylum. Ironshield believes the federal government used the Canton asylum to jail Indians who wouldn't conform.

HAROLD IRONSHIELD: These people were victims of the federal government as usual because of their involvement with spiritual ceremonies because kids didn't really understand the kind of conformity that they were to abide by. They didn't understand why they couldn't speak their tribal languages. They didn't understand why it was that all of a sudden, they had to change.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Some representatives of tribes contacted by NPR said privately they didn't want to talk about the Canton Asylum because doing so might create more conflict with the federal government. But Leonard Bruguier of the University of South Dakota has another theory why many native people won't talk about the Canton Asylum. Shame. Bruguier says the Canton Asylum attacked a core Indian value, that those who were considered different, mentally ill or otherwise, contributed to Indian society.

LEONARD BRUGUIER: We took care of them. And then all of a sudden, we had this insane style, and they say, this Indian is insane. We're going to move him up to Canton, and he's going to be with people like him. A lot of Indian people are ashamed that they let this happen to one of their relatives, that they let somebody come in, just take them and take them away. And then basically, in many cases, they were never heard from again.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: The legacy of the Canton Asylum exists today here at the Hiawatha Golf Course, where the graveyard of 121 Canton patients exists between the fourth and fifth fairways. Moving the graves isn't an option. Doing so would be costly, and some Indian elders say moving the graves would disrupt the spiritual journeys of those buried here. Meanwhile, the course has moved the fifth hole's tee box 20 yards further away from the graves.

On this day, 10 American Indian men, including Harold Ironshield, crouch at the base of the stone. They burn sage, smoke tobacco, and pray for the spirits here. Ironshield has petitioned the state of South Dakota to declare the land a historic site. In the past, Hiawatha golfers sometimes hit balls off the graves. But now they've adopted a rule that if a ball lands on a grave, the player will take a free drop and play the shot outside the cemetery. I'm Elizabeth Stawicki, Minnesota Public Radio.