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Abstract
This article asks: How have disability, indigenous arts and cultural praxis transformed and challenged the historical sociological archival research into relationships among asylum‐making, medicalized colonialism and eugenics in the Woodlands School, formerly the Victoria Lunatic Asylum, the Provincial Asylum for the Insane in Victoria, BC 1859–72 and the Public Hospital for the Insane, (herein, PHI) and most recently, the Woodlands School in New Westminster, British Columbia (1878–1996)? How can the experiences of ‘patients’ often silenced or suppressed in archival historical sociology and in official institutional records be re‐claimed through the textual analysis of official documents, the arts, oral history, and community engagement? The article unearths the unexplored dimensions of medicalized colonialism in the first critical shift – from 1859–97 – from a minimal juridical state in which magistrates and judges determined the processes of commitment to one in which medical authorities as colonial administrators had greater control over PHI than in previous years. Through a textual analysis of clinical case records, patient files, legislation, colonial medical administrators’ correspondence, and the records of the first Royal Commission Public Inquiry in 1894 into the abuses and deaths of patients at PHI, the research reveals the fissures within the discourses of colonial medical administrators and staff within the emerging medical‐juridical apparatus. Gaps, silences, or truths untold in the official records are then counter‐posed with insights gleaned from the art of First Nations, Secwepemc Tania Willard, oral historical work with Qayayt First Nations, Rhonda Larabee, on whose grandfather’s land the Woodlands School was built, key reports from the independent community living, de‐institutionalization, self‐advocacy movements, confirming the systemic physical, emotional, and sexual abuses that went on at Woodlands, as well as with the testimonial narratives of the self‐advocate survivors of Woodlands in their documentary film, From the Inside/Out! Analyzed relationally, these sources provide a richer understanding of the links between the disturbing past of PHI and the present legal struggles pertaining to Woodlands. Disability and indigenous studies are shown to challenge and transform ableist normalizing medicalized colonialism and its pastoral educational sociology. The article concludes that no time is a time for nostalgia about Woodlands or such related total institutions.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
Leslie G. Roman would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for the generous funding of the research of which this project is a part. I also thank numerous helpful archivists, professionals and staff at the British Columbia Archives, especially Mac Culham and the reference staff at the New Westminster Library and the Rare Books Collection at University of British Columbia’s Barber Library. Thanks also go to the four anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, whose comments strengthened the paper. Grateful appreciation also goes to Tania Willard, Rhonda Larabee, Steven Point, and most especially, the artists of From the Inside/OUT! and survivors of Woodlands and now, self‐advocates who have shared their lives and experiences in Roman’s graduate and teacher education courses to students seeking to understand the discrepancies between official texts about Woodlands and the self‐advocates’ experiences. Tania Willard donated the reproductions of her powerful woodcuts for this article.
Notes
1. In Canada, First Nations, Aboriginal, Indigenous, and Native, are inclusive terms used to describe the original inhabitants or peoples prior to colonialism. In contrast, ‘Indian’ is the colonial term used in official colonial documents to describe how settlers saw First Peoples.
2. Evidence draws from Roman’s (Citation2005) larger case study of the Woodlands School supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
3. See also Pemina Yellowbird’s (Citation2004). ‘Wild Indians: Native Perspectives on the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians’ (circa 2004). Download for free at: dsmc.info/pdf/canton.pdf.
4. See, for example, the url: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/aboriginal-heritage/020016-3008-e.html#cc, Vancouver Island Treaties, 1850–54, accessed March, 2007, which documents the conflicts between British Imperial government and particular First Nations to abolish land rights. In 1849, the context of heated contestations over the land and treaty rights between different First Nations and the Hudson Bay Company (HBC), James Douglas, Chief Factor of the HBC at Fort Victoria (1849–58), recommended that Aboriginal interest to lands in proximity to HBC operations be purchased as the ‘native Indian population has distinct ideas about property in land.’ (18) The HBC replied that, in its view, this population had only a right of occupancy, but no title to the land. Douglas was instructed to confer with the chiefs and to confirm them in the possession of only those lands that they had cultivated or built houses on by 1846 (the date when British sovereignty over Vancouver Island was asserted). All other lands on the island were to be available for colonization. In the spring of 1850, Douglas summoned the Chiefs of the Songhee, Klallam and Sooke of the Victoria, Metchosin and Sooke regions to a conference. After lengthy negotiations, the Chiefs agreed to sell their lands to the HBC ‘with the exception of village sites and enclosed fields.’ By ‘deeds of conveyance’ (term used by Douglas), nine First Nations surrendered (ceded) their lands ‘entirely and forever’ in return for blankets and certain small reserves of land. They retained hunting and fishing rights on unoccupied lands. Similar treaties were concluded with First Nations at Fort Rupert in 1851, Saanich in 1852, and Nanaimo (where there was a coal deposit) in 1854. These 14 HBC treaties extinguished Aboriginal title to 927 square kilometers, or about one‐fortieth of Vancouver Island. The Douglas treaty system stopped in 1854 due to cost considerations. The treaty process was not extended to the mainland. As a result, much of the Province of British Columbia, which entered Confederation in 1871, retained un‐extinguished Aboriginal interests to lands and resources. This situation became known as the ‘BC Indian land question.’ The unfinished treaty activity of the nineteenth century is currently being addressed by the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, through the negotiation of modern land claims agreements.
5. British Columbia’s Mental Health and Addictions timeline states that 1850 is British Columbia’s first recorded case of insanity: shortly after arriving in Victoria, a deranged Scottish immigrant allegedly [use ‘assaulted’ J.S. Helmcken, the jail doctor. The ‘maniac’ is placed on the next ship back to Scotland. It also records that in 1864 an infirmary for women is opened in Victoria, and includes a handful of female ‘lunatics’ among its patients. However, treatment for mental illness is non‐existent. Most mentally ill people are left to fend for themselves or, if deemed dangerous or troublesome, are locked in the crowded city jails of Victoria and New Westminster. http://www.bcmhas.ca/AboutUs/History.htm (accessed August 9, 2007).
6. Such worldwide transnational colonial projects are often colloquially called in Indigenous scholarly communities, ‘The Captain Cook experience’ (Personal Communication: G. Smith, October 5, 2005).
7. A biography of Helmcken (1975), the chief medical surgeon and gaol doctor employed by the Hudson Bay Company stipulates that three women (not two) were sent from the local gaol to the Victoria Insane Asylum.
8. Terms, such as mental defectives, lunatics, and idiots are unacceptable now. However, it would be hindsight to suggest that other understandings were invented at this time. It is also important to note that forms of mental illness and cognitive and developmental impairments remain stigmatized to the present day.
9. The British Columbia Insane Asylums Act of 1873 (36 Victoria no 28 amended 1893) was the provincial government’s primary mental health law until the 1897 Hospitals for the Insane Act (61 Victoria, c.101).
10. For years, The Songhees were studied by white colonial anthropologists and ethnologists in terms of their habits, the flora and fauna associated with their lands. Writing in letter dated 12 July 1914 to the Honorable Henry Esson Young, MD, who became the Provincial Secretary of Victoria, Charles F. Newcombe, an ethnologist and former Commissioner of the 1894 Royal Commission Inquiry into the Public Insane Asylum, confirmed the view that the reserve designated for the Songhees was responsible for taming them. In the context of collecting and naming ‘specimens’ of the oak tree for the Museum [Provincial] he states: ‘This little commission reminds me that we have fewer Museum specimens and general information about the Songhees than any other tribe…..The old stuff has all gone long ago and to represent the “material culture” of the Songhees it would be necessary to have models made, in the way as Teit has been working for us with the Thompson River Indians. I should be able to work at far greater advantage now that heretofore, as the Songhees are well content with their present conditions and are no longer the sullen inimical people they used to be before their removal to the new Reserve. ….’(BCA, Newcombe Family Correpsondence, Series B, MSS, 1077, vol. 7, folder 2. Emphasis Added).
11. We use pseudonyms for patient names which come from the private or restricted files throughout the article, and we alter or generalize locations and other identifying details to safeguard confidentiality. Pseudonyms are not used for names which are a matter of public record and also not currently legally contested or part of our Court agreement.
12. Later on, the magistrates ceased using the legal commitment paper and merely signed medical certificates as witnesses to the medical certificates, verifying the signatures of each doctor. The ‘criteria’ used on the medical certificates (i.e., ‘appearance,’ ‘behavior, ‘ and ‘speech’) and what ‘others’ described as the state of ‘madness.’ Lay people and constables relied on fairly cursory and often contradictory evidence for their findings.
13. See, for example, ‘A manifestation of disease of the brain, characterized by a general or partial derangement of one or more faculties of the mind, and in which, while consciousness is not abolished, mental freedom is is weakened, perverted, or destroyed’ (Hammond Citation1837, 265) or Spitzka’s conception: ‘Insanity is a term applied to certain results of brain disease and brain defect which invalidate mental integrity’ (Spitzka 1883Citation1883, 17).
14. The sources for the Annual Reports for PHI varied because a complete set was not easily available in any one institutional location. Documents are found in the Ministry of Health Services, Hospital Services, and Mental Health Services Branch Reports (herein, AR in MHS) and still others are located in the Sessional Reports of British Columbia (herein, AR in SRBC). Still others were located at the British Columbia Archives (herein, AR in BCA). All Annual Reports were usually published the year following the year data were collected.
15. Over this 58‐year period, the number of residents at the close of the year grows exponentially, approximately six times the number of newly admitted admissions recorded. About one‐third of those admitted died and just under two‐thirds of the admitted are discharged not recovered. In 1920 and 1928–35, witnessed a spike in admissions, just over 500 and this coincides with an increase in those listed as discharged not recovered (see Figure ).
16. No changes were made to the content of quotes from historical documents unless italics are shown for emphasis.
17. See Yip (Citation1998) for an historical analysis of colonial psychiatric asylum building in Hong Kong.
18. Though racial designations are always problematic, persons of color did not get noted in the demographics of the Annual Reports and yet would sometimes appear later in the qualitative notes from medical personnel as ‘colored.’
19. See Kelm (Citation1992/1993), who showed that unlike other provinces in Canada, women in British Columbia’s Public Hospital for the Insane, were not overrepresented as inmate populations. Instead, they were underrepresented, which is what our own preliminary data show. Men far outnumbered women in the PHI records of admissions. Out of material necessity, families played a significant role in the commitment processes, challenging the conventional analyses that psychiatrists alone acted as agents of social control.
20. The first private establishment opened as the Hollywood Sanitarium in New Westminster, BC in 1919.
21. The Public Hospital for the Insane became the Woodlands School in 1950.
22. See the entire texts of Harper’s apology and that of other Federal Party’s in Open Anthropology, ‘Canada’s Apology to Aboriginals,’ 3.1; http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/canadas-apology-to-aboriginals/ (accessed July 22, 2008).