Image Credit: Franky Lepe, 2018
Sarah A. Whitt, Ph.D.
(Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma)
Assistant Professor
Department of Global and International Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Department of History
UC Irvine
Professor Whitt's research is animated by questions about race, gender, power, and Indigenous experiences of institutionalization in historical relief. Her prize-winning scholarship takes up issues around Indigenous incarceration and confinement; the politics of discipline and punishment; white ascendancy; critical settler studies; contested relationships between Indigeneity and disability; and American public culture.
Education:
University of California, Berkeley
MA, Ph.D.: Comparative Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
BA: Women and Gender Studies
Sarah A. Whitt, Ph.D.
(Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma)
Assistant Professor
Department of Global and International Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Department of History
UC Irvine
Professor Whitt's research is animated by questions about race, gender, power, and Indigenous experiences of institutionalization in historical relief. Her prize-winning scholarship takes up issues around Indigenous incarceration and confinement; the politics of discipline and punishment; white ascendancy; critical settler studies; contested relationships between Indigeneity and disability; and American public culture.
Education:
University of California, Berkeley
MA, Ph.D.: Comparative Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
BA: Women and Gender Studies
Research Specializations:
Native American and Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies & Critical Settler Studies, Gender and Sexuality, History of Science and Medicine, Disability Studies, Carceral Studies, Indigenous Paradigms of Historiography
Book Projects:
Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and American Indian Institutionalization, 1879-1934, examines interconnected histories of American Indian punishment, pathologization, and labor exploitation at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918), Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (1902-1934), and other Progressive Era facilities such as the Ford Motor Company factory in Detroit. Drawing on a rich array of archival materials and oral testimonies, this research reveals how settler institutions deputized white Americans as the disciplinary agents of Indian people, and how American Indian people uniquely experienced institutionalization as a tool of settler colonialism. In examining diverse institutions alongside one another, Bad Medicine demonstrates punitive connections between ostensibly distinct American facilities to argue that the practice of confining American Indian people helped concretize networks of white racial power. This work builds on extant scholarship in Native American history to demonstrate how the institutionalization of American Indian people was inherent, rather than coincidental, to the broader work of U.S. settler colonialism in this era.
Bad Medicine is forthcoming with Duke University Press (Spring 2025).
My second book project, Prisoners of War: Indigenous Histories of Captivity, Memory, and Freedom in the United States, 1880-2023, reframes Indigenous experiences of incarceration in the U.S. as an affective and material history of captivity. From forced removal west to Indian Territory, to the creation of the reservation system and mass incarceration in the twenty-first century, tribal nations have negotiated and resisted subordination to U.S. authority for centuries. The methods of confinement and incarceration may have shifted over time, but the idea of the Indigenous criminal, outlaw, or fugitive has persisted in the cultural lexicon of America--as have ongoing fights for Indigenous sovereignty and freedom. Reading across the grain of diverse archival materials such as Leavenworth penitentiary "inmate" files, newspaper reports, Alcatraz prison publications, and institutional ledgers--as well as cultural artifacts such as "mug shots" and a museum exhibition--Prisoners of War examines diverse experiences, stories, and landscapes of captivity from the standpoint of the Indigenous peoples and tribes who endured them.
Recent Features and Interviews:
8 Historical Moments More Important to Native Americans than the 'First Thanksgiving.' TIME Magazine.
An Indigenous Take on Native American Heritage Month. UCI School of Social Sciences.
Recent Publications:
Sarah Whitt, Wash Away Your Sins: Indigenous and Irish Experiences in Magdalene Laundries and the Poetics of Errant Histories. Research Article. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 46, no. 3 2023. Open Access.
K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Sarah Whitt, Indigenous Boarding School Experiences. Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, Oxford University Press, September 2023.
Sarah Whitt, Traci Voyles, and Susan Burch, Settler Ableism: Indigeneity, Unsettling the Archive, and Accountability in History. Cripping the Archive: Disability, Power, and History. Eds. Jenifer Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy. Under contract with University of Illinois Press. Forthcoming.
Sarah Whitt, ‘An Ordinary Case of Discipline’: Deputizing White Americans and Punishing Indian Men at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1900-1918. Western Historical Quarterly, December 2022.
Sarah Whitt, ‘Care and Maintenance’: Indigeneity, Disability, and Settler Colonialism at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (1902-1934). Disability Studies Quarterly. Special Issue: Indigeneity + Disability, vol. 41, no. 4, 2021. Open Access.
Awards:
This work has been supported by generous scholarships, grants, and fellowships from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Ford Foundation, the Cobell Scholarship, the UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other organizations.