In 1929, Dorothy Wu, a multiracial Native Hawaiian and Chinese teenager, suddenly found herself a ward of the Salvation Army Girls’ Home in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, then a US territory.Footnote ¹ Until her institutionalization, Dorothy had worked as a maid in the home of Princess Abigail Campbell Kawānanakoa, a member of the aliʻi or ruling, royal class of the formerly independent Hawaiian Kingdom. To Dorothy’s bewilderment, the Princess abruptly fired Dorothy for “associating with boys,” and recommended her commitment to the Girls’ Home, where she could be “better cared for.” Dorothy found the Salvation Army matrons mean. She complained that they discriminated against “darker girls” like her. After six months, Dorothy ran away. Her escape soon landed her in juvenile court, which sentenced her to the Kawailoa Training School for Girls, a recently opened juvenile detention facility, where matrons worked to shape “wayward girls,” the majority of whom were Native Hawaiian and/or Asian, into “proper” and modern American women.Footnote ²

Dorothy’s narrative is a particularly striking example of what Susan Burch terms “transinstitutionalization,” meaning “the process of moving individuals from one variety of institution to another – as part of sustained containment, surveillance, and slow erasure,” which she argues is a potent type of “settler colonial removal.”Footnote ³ Dorothy Wu’s story gives one example of the path this transinstitutionalization could take. Forced to work at a young age due to the financial circumstances of her family, her perceived impropriety of “associating with boys” got her fired and referred to the Salvation Army Girl’s Home; and when she ran away, her court-ordered punishment was to be sent to the government training school.Footnote ⁴ Though Dorothy’s story ends at the Kawailoa Training School in the archival record I have accessed so far, many other children found themselves on even longer paths of transinstitutionalization. Based on intelligence quotient (IQ) testing conducted regularly at the training schools, children deemed “feebleminded” would often be transferred to the Waimano Home for the Feeble-Minded. And especially for young men incarcerated at the government Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys, their “delinquency” would often get them sent on to Oʻahu Prison. The traffic between these institutions (the training schools, home for the “feebleminded” and the prison) was eased by the fact that, beginning in 1939, they were all administered under the same Territorial Department of Institutions, along with the Territorial Hospital for the Mentally Ill and divisions of parole.Footnote ⁵ As Burch argues, the frequency of transfers between such institutions alerts us to the “dynamic, interlocking and far-reaching … processes, practices, and experiences” that characterize transinstitutionalization as a method of settler colonialism, factors that we might miss if we focus only on histories of particular institutions in isolation.Footnote ⁶

This essay is about how social scientific knowledge production structured the logic and practices of transinstitutionalization in Territorial Hawaiʻi. Specifically, I look at the history of three institutions operated by the Territory of Hawaiʻi: the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys (opened in 1902), the Kawailoa Training School for Girls (opened in 1929), and the Waimano Home for the Feeble-Minded (opened in 1921). The combined rhetorics of correction and care for Hawaiʻi’s children at play in these carceral institutions echoed the broader, paternalistic justifications for annexing Hawaiʻi as saving the islands both from other colonial empires and a Hawaiian Kingdom that white settlers characterized as uncivilized and childish. In this view, US settler colonialism could be portrayed as a progressive uplift of Native Hawaiians, rather than the structural cause of their increasing losses of land, language, and culture. Social science provided the Territorial government language and “evidence” with which to argue that their practices of institutionalization were modern, progressive, and humane, even when the official reports of those institutions suggested otherwise. The Territorial government repeatedly used the scientific imprimatur of work by those like psychologist Stanley Porteus as well as models of training schools and homes for the “feebleminded” in the continental United States as justifications for institutionalizing Native Hawaiians and immigrants of color.Footnote ⁷

Rather than providing a comprehensive account of the history of any one of the institutions I reference here, or attempting to fully reconstruct what life might have been like for the children incarcerated in these spaces, this essay focuses on pulling two main threads through its analysis of the histories of Waialeʻe, Kawailoa, and Waimano. The first thread tracks the settler colonial process of pathologizing Native Hawaiian and other non-white forms of kinship and care, and attempts to replace it with institutionalized care, as determined by white American social science and public policy.Footnote ⁸ Woven into this thread are the broader questions raised by this edited collection in considering how and why we study the history of science in relation to settler colonialism. The second thread examines how a critical history of these institutions offers a different picture of the Territorial period in Hawaiʻi. As I detail below, conventional histories of this time in Hawaiʻi have largely overlooked Native Hawaiian stories, focusing more on labor histories of immigrant populations, and presented the political shifts from Hawaiian Kingdom to Republic of Hawaiʻi to the Territory of Hawaiʻi and then to Hawaiʻi as the fiftieth state of the union as largely smooth and inevitable. Taking seriously the colonial violence and damage done through institutionalization offers a more complex and troubling picture of the Territorial period. The next two sections provide more context on these two threads, before moving into further analysis of Waialeʻe, Kawailoa, and Waimano.

A Structural Approach to Histories of Race, Settler Colonialism, and Science

Social sciences have long played crucial roles in disseminating ideas and practices that shore up white supremacy and settler colonialism. This is not especially surprising. How and why, then, should we seek to understand the ways that social scientists have contributed to structuring settler colonialism? I argue that such histories are most meaningful when they grapple with the ways social scientific research and constructions of so-called scientific truths contributed to building enduring systems of injustice, rather than seeking to ascertain and judge the personal orientations of individual social scientists. Accordingly, the most meaningful historical question is not: “were they racist?” It is not that such judgments are entirely irrelevant but simply that the effects of racism are easily dismissed if recognized only as an individual trait. In the case of Stanley Porteus, one social scientist I consider in this essay as discussed further below, there is little question that he was racist: he published numerous studies claiming that Native Hawaiians and Filipinos had much lower intelligence than white people. My point in studying his work is not to prove his racism but to demonstrate how his research and reasoning created abiding racist ideas about Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, and others in Hawaiʻi. These ideas continue to help uphold the structure of settler colonialism, and thus continue to deserve rich historicization and critique far beyond critiquing Porteus as an individual.

In this approach, I depart from historians who worry about being “presentist,” “objective,” or judging historical actors “who were just from a different time” by our contemporary standards (this excuse almost always made in reference to white people, despite the contemporaneous existence of people of color who acted differently).Footnote ⁹ Some historians of science emphasize, for example, that social scientists who produced racist social scientific theories were not necessarily explicitly “rabble-rousing, hate-mongering” racists themselves.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, many racists were, and are, elite, liberal, and progressive for their times. My point is that it is not particularly useful or interesting to write histories of science in which we see racism as merely an individual trait. Rather, racism is systemic; as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written, “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”Footnote ¹¹ This definition shifts ideas of racism away from the bigoted ideas of any one person to the devastating generational and structural effects of racial discourses on those who are racialized. One way the history of science might better reckon with racism as a matter of “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” is to more frequently put the work of scientists in context with the effects of their “science” on the people it impacted, rather than remain with telling the life story, however complex, of a scientist. Then the weight of any moral judgment of past scientists must fall not only on their individual shoulders but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the structures that their work upheld. So too, the complexity often granted to white scientists in historical treatments should be extended just as robustly to those communities impacted by their scientific ideas and practices.

My analysis of Porteus’s work is accordingly motivated by excavating the impact of his work within the settler colonial logics and policies he helped institute in the Territory of Hawaiʻi, and telling a complex story about the lives of the youth who were impacted by Porteus’s work and the broader system of carceral institutions he supported. Hawaiʻi Territorial officials sought out Porteus’s opinions, and created policies based on his views, precisely because they took him to be an objective, and presumably apolitical, scientist. As I explore further in this essay, Territorial officials valued Porteus’s conclusions about the mental inferiority of Native Hawaiians and Filipinos, among other people of color. Territorial officials institutionalized Native Hawaiians and others based on such “scientific” truths, couching the missions of the training schools as the uplift and civilization of inferior races. Such discourse fit with Progressive-era sentiments that lauded modernization and assimilation of the less fortunate into mainstream American norms. This is another reason why it is not particularly illuminating to assess the personal opinions or “intent” of past social scientists. So-called progressive ideas have been just as violent toward Indigenous peoples as more explicitly racist ones, and as Porteus’s case shows, they often went hand in hand.

To put it another way, academic knowledge production about Indigenous peoples and people of color is far from innocent, no matter the tenor of individual researchers’ intentions. Therefore, in the practice of the history of science, my goal is to historicize how settler colonialism operates, always alongside how Indigeneity has also endured. As Kēhaulani Kauanui argues, through the exegesis of Patrick Wolfe’s work, settler colonialism is an enduring structure, but so is Indigeneity: “indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist.”Footnote ¹² The goal of doing history of science scholarship from a critical Indigenous Studies perspective is to not shy away from the damage wrought by science and settler colonialism, but also to not spectacularize that damage such that we lose sight of the complex humanity of Indigenous peoples. One way I do so in this essay is by attending to the desires of the students at the Territorial training schools, who often frustrated the government’s intended “rehabilitation” by running away, staging strikes, or maintaining Hawaiian culture. Such acts remind us that despite the enormous power of the settler colonial Territorial government to restructure Hawaiian life, Native Hawaiians also lived in ways that were never wholly determined by that structure. Indigenous historian Damon Salesa writes that “an ethical and full engagement with an indigenous past is through an indigenous present.”Footnote ¹³ The politics of seeking desire not just damage, as Indigenous feminist scholar Eve Tuck puts it, is one way to do ethical historical research because it opens up monolithic views of Indigenous peoples today as only tragic.Footnote ¹⁴ The idea is not to simply switch this idea for one in which Indigenous peoples are monolithically heroic. Rather, the goal is to get at the complexities: at describing the structure of settler colonialism and its violences while also showing how Indigenous peoples’ lives operate both within and beyond that structure.

From “Inevitable” to Contested: Reframing the History of Territorial Hawaiʻi

This history of transinstitutionalization must be understood within the broader context of Hawaiʻi being annexed as a US territory in 1898. White settlers had made homes in Hawaiʻi since American Protestant missionaries arrived in 1820, but for over seventy years, they lived under the Indigenous-led government of the Hawaiian Kingdom. A powerful cadre of white settlers overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, seizing power away from Queen Liliʻuokalani who had pushed to shore up the rights of Native Hawaiians in the face of the increasing might of American and British sugar plantation owners. The US federal government did not immediately approve of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s overthrow. Under President Grover Cleveland, the US sent a representative to investigate the overthrow, who ultimately declared it an illegal “act of war.” Cleveland nevertheless left any remedial actions up to Congress, which did nothing to restore the Hawaiian Kingdom’s sovereignty, despite the substantial lobbying efforts of Queen Liliʻuokalani and others. The subsequent US president, William McKinley, promoted US expansionism, and allowed Hawaiʻi to be annexed under the Newlands Resolution in 1898, which justified the need for annexation in order to secure Hawaiʻi as a refueling station for US naval ships on their way to fight in the Philippines.

What did it mean for Hawaiʻi to become a US territory? Popular understandings of Hawaiʻi often assume the inclusion of Hawaiʻi within the United States as a predestined fate, written along a teleology that ends in US statehood. Conventional historiography has similarly often perpetuated simplistic ideas about Territorial Hawaiian history, such as the notion that Native Hawaiians welcomed becoming a US territory and that there was no organized resistance to the annexation of Hawaiʻi as a territory by the United States. Noenoe Silva and other Hawaiian scholars have roundly disproved such assumptions, documenting widespread, organized efforts that were in fact successful in delaying annexation.Footnote ¹⁵

Ronald Williams Jr. has also importantly complicated our understandings of the transition between the Republic of Hawaiʻi (the government formed by those who overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893) and the Territory of Hawaiʻi, which officially formed a government in 1900.Footnote ¹⁶ Many of the same white settlers who held power in the Republic of Hawaiʻi maintained their power in the Territory of Hawaiʻi (Sanford B. Dole, for example, the president of the Republic of Hawaiʻi became the first Territorial governor). However, Williams Jr. argues that the formation of a Territorial legislature posed a significant threat to the white oligarchy. In the Republic of Hawaiʻi, only white men and certain Native Hawaiian men of wealth were allowed to vote. Though Dole and others fought against it, the incorporating documents of the Territorial government re-enfranchised many Native Hawaiians and other non-white residents. When the first Hawaiʻi Territorial legislature convened in 1901, the independent Home Rule party won majorities in both the Territorial Senate and House of Representatives.

As Williams Jr. points out, these Native Hawaiian, Home Rule representatives proceeded to introduce policies that would restore rights to the people. These efforts were blocked by the Territorial governor’s veto and other obstructionist measures, while the press propagated explicitly racist depictions of the Home Rule party, whom they called the “Heathen Party,” as monkeys.Footnote ¹⁷ Conventional historiography of the Territorial period, even when critical of the racism and inequality of the Territorial leaders, downplays the efforts of the Home Rule party as “frivolous.”Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, while well-known histories like Gavan Daws’ Shoal of Time (1968), often remark on the injustices of Hawaiian history, Daws and others tend to paint Native Hawaiians’ position as a sad, lost cause and the rise to power of the so-called Big Five conglomeration of sugar companies as inevitable.Footnote ¹⁹ Most Territorial histories are labor histories that focus on the successive waves of immigrant labor from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and more.Footnote ²⁰ Native Hawaiians are rarely mentioned in such labor histories, even though they did work on plantations during the Territorial period. Here again, the history of the Territory’s training schools offers a different picture of this time. The Territorial training school for boys (largely populated by Native Hawaiians) lent out male youth as plantation labor. The management of the Boy’s School saw a plantation job as a fitting and proper job for its graduates.

In this context, it is important to move away from understanding the Territorial period as a totally smooth transition from the Republic of Hawaiʻi or as a relatively benign period where Native Hawaiians faded into the background. The Territorial government’s attempts at assimilating Native Hawaiians and other non-white residents of Hawaiʻi into white American culture during the Territorial period were far from guaranteed to succeed. As Williams Jr. also points out, the white settler elite of the Territory were an incredibly small minority: only about 6 percent of the population.Footnote ²¹ Further, Dean Saranillio has pointed out how much various and diversely constituted labor movements of plantation and dockworkers in Hawaiʻi during the Territorial period threatened “white settler hegemony” to such an extent that “white supremacy was no longer capable of governing a heterogenous nonwhite population, and a liberal multicultural state began to emerge.”Footnote ²² The government training schools thus can be understood as one concerted effort on the part of a threatened white settler elite to eliminate Hawaiian culture and train Native Hawaiian and other non-white children of the Territory to understand themselves as part of a multiracial and multicultural Hawaiʻi nonetheless structured by white, heteropatriarchal norms.

These institutions can also be understood more broadly as a kind of violence that worked to keep Native Hawaiians from more explicit resistance to American colonization. Gender Studies scholar Laura Briggs, for example, has argued that “child taking” is a time-honored “counterinsurgency tactic” with a deep history in the Americas. “Child taking …” she writes, “has been used to respond to demands for rights, refuge, and respect by communities of color and impoverished communities, an effort to induce hopelessness, despair, grief, and shame.”Footnote ²³ I agree that, as with the contexts of Native American and First Nations children removed by the US and Canadian settler states to boarding or residential schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Hawaiʻi Territorial institutions that incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Asian children operated as a way to discipline and terrorize not only those children but their immediate and extended families.Footnote ²⁴ So too, these practices were not limited to the United States and Canada. Similar institutions existed in other settler colonial contexts such as Australia.Footnote ²⁵

Such schools also existed across Latin America, as other scholars in this book show. Often Latin America is seen as outside the scope of settler colonial studies, but many scholars have shown that it can be productive to make connections between the colonialisms of Latin America and the rest of the world. For example, boarding schools for Indigenous peoples operated in Mexico from 1926, when the Casa del Estudiante Indígena opened in Mexico City. Soon a larger system of such schools, called internados indígenas, was established, with institutions across the country. Alexander Dawson argues that like the boarding schools to the north, the ones in Mexico sought to “produce individual subjects who spoke the national lingua franca, dressed and acted in ways that were deemed modern, and contributed to a dynamic national economy as workers or farmers.”Footnote ²⁶ Nonetheless, the schools in Mexico were also significantly different, Dawson argues, in the sense that they attempted to prove that Indigenous peoples in rural areas could contribute to national development. In doing so, they tended to “cultivate rather than break down ethnic affiliations.”Footnote ²⁷ Tanalís Padilla further argues that teacher training schools for the rural population of Mexico actually encouraged a sense of social justice in rural schools, based on a “socialist education principle that teachers be advocates for worker and campesino interests.”Footnote ²⁸ So too, “many found the rural normal [school] to be the path by which they escaped poverty.”Footnote ²⁹ While at times, then, education of Indigenous peoples in Mexico opened up much broader possibilities than was the case with Native American boarding schools, Dawson argues that after 1940, the efforts toward a pluralistic inclusion of Indigenous cultures and communities within the Mexican nation were largely transformed. As he notes: “Indigenismo was … divested of its mandate to undertake revolutionary and egalitarian social reforms, and instead became a tool for promoting capitalist accumulation and social control.”Footnote ³⁰

The schools in Hawaiʻi never embraced a revolutionary class consciousness, even temporarily. But the largely white leaders and policymakers who established the schools did, undeniably, see themselves as progressive. The Territory framed the process of forced assimilation and constant threat of child removal as a form of care and rehabilitation. Social science played a key role in undergirding the Territory’s assertion that institutionalization was a modern, progressive, and even caring process for Hawaiʻi’s children. Psychologist Stanley Porteus was at the center of producing such social scientific knowledge. A founding member of the Psychological Clinic at the University of Hawaiʻi in 1922, Porteus is perhaps most well-known outside of Hawaiʻi for the creation of the Porteus Maze Test, a nonverbal, spatial intelligence test designed to measure mental capacity for planning, as I will discuss further below. In Hawaiʻi, he was involved not only with the development of psychology as an academic discipline at the University of Hawaiʻi, but was also frequently consulted by the Territorial government, particularly in regards to the training schools, Waimano Home, and other public institutions run by the Territorial government.

In justifying why civilized society required such expensive institutions, in a policy recommendation report to the Territorial government, Porteus painted Indigenous societies as necessarily less compassionate. “There are no homes for dependents in primitive life,” wrote Porteus in a report published in 1949. “Also, the native who goes really crazy does not last long. There are no hospitals for the insane, nor for anyone else. Things are different in civilization.”Footnote ³¹ To Porteus and many white Territorial leaders, this was the necessary burden of civilizing the relatively new US territory of Hawaiʻi: the high cost of the responsibility of the state to care for and discipline a seemingly ever-increasing number of “dependents,” “delinquents,” criminals, and disabled people. The cost of the Territorial institutions was a long-standing and ongoing concern, often remarked upon in the annual reports of the schools, along with suggestions about how to lower costs. Porteus’s report was in part a defense of the need to continue funding these institutions. To Porteus, this expensive responsibility was a sign of “civilization” both having higher standards of its citizens and being more compassionate toward them. Porteus portrayed Indigenous peoples as brutal out of necessity, noting, for example, that “among the Australian aborigines, roaming over huge stretches of almost foodless country, there is no room either for the weakling or the rebel.”Footnote ³² Thus, Porteus reasoned, “the higher the standards of living – and by this, I do not mean more food and more conveniences but also higher standards of work and effort – then the greater number of people who cannot attain to them.”Footnote ³³ Notably, Porteus believed that “civilization” also required greater intelligence, and that many Indigenous peoples would never be able to attain that intelligence.

The reference to Aboriginal Australians stemmed from Porteus being born in Australia, of “Irish-Scottish stock.”Footnote ³⁴ This is notable for the purposes of this essay in the sense that Porteus was familiar with institutionalization and settler colonialism in the different but resonant settler colonial contexts of Australia, the continental United States, and Hawaiʻi. He started his career as a teacher in 1913 at the Bell Street Special School “for the feebleminded” in Fitzroy, outside of Melbourne, Victoria.Footnote ³⁵ It was at Bell Street School that Porteus began developing his own intelligence test, which would be known as the Porteus Maze Test. In 1918, he moved to the United States, where he took up a position as director of Research at the Vineland Training School, an institution also designed for the “feebleminded,” in New Jersey. Vineland was already a well-known institution for its “research program on mental retardation, clinical psychological testing, and child development” under psychologist Henry Goddard who was director of Research at the school from 1906 to 1918, and whom Porteus replaced.Footnote ³⁶ At Vineland, Porteus continued to develop and tout his Maze Test and did further research on “cranial capacity and intelligence.”Footnote ³⁷

Thus, the Hawaiʻi Territorial government took Porteus as an expert because he had a long history of being understood as an expert at institutions for the “feebleminded,” despite no formal education or training in psychology. Dean Saranillio puts it bluntly: “There is no shortage of evidence that he was making things up as he went.”Footnote ³⁸ Certainly he came to Hawaiʻi steeped in settler forms of knowing and “care” from other settler colonial contexts. By framing the Territorial government and its institutions as compassionate to “dependents,” Porteus ignored how “civilization” in fact created “dependents” in Hawaiʻi in large part through the settler colonial dispossession of Native Hawaiians from land and ways of life that had sustained them for centuries before white settlement. The common Native Hawaiian adoptive practice of hānai, in which children were raised by family or friends who were not the biological parents, was especially targeted as a cause of needy and delinquent children. White reformers argued that hānai caused confusion and anxiety in children, though there was little evidence of this.Footnote ³⁹ In fact, many of the children who wound up in Territorial institutions had not participated in hānai practices, but arguably could have benefited from them, given that they were often orphaned or had run away from untenable home situations. Yet, like many other practices of Native Hawaiian culture, hānai was discouraged in the Territory and white leaders sought to replace extended families with nuclear families, and communities’ own forms of care with modern institutions run by charities or the Territorial government, where “dependents” would be subject to additional training and “rehabilitation” to conform to white US culture. The “cause” of delinquency and dependency was often attributed to children’s families, whose cultures were pathologized as atavistic and incompatible with modern life.Footnote ⁴⁰

As Susan Burch writes in the context of the history of Native Americans incarcerated at the Canton Asylum for “Insane Indians” in South Dakota between 1902 and 1934, “the violence of Canton Asylum was collective as well as individual” and did (and continues to do) much to break a “fundamental tenet” of many Indigenous communities – that of “being a good relative.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Hawaiʻi State Archives records on the training schools, which form the foundation of my research on this topic, are filled with official reports and correspondence, but also with letters from parents and other kin asking for their children back. When examined from this angle, the “child taking” of the Territorial-era institutions, and their afterlives, perhaps helps to explain why so many Native Hawaiians in the Territorial period and beyond felt compelled to make sure their children spoke only good English (rather than Hawaiian or pidgin), and to think of themselves as American rather than Hawaiian.Footnote ⁴² Though these sentiments have often been presented as robust consent to Hawaiʻi’s annexation by the United States and eventual statehood, I suggest that they are also evidence of families desperate to keep their children, and terrified of losing them to indeterminate sentences in a government institution. In the following sections on Waialeʻe, Kawailoa, and Waimano, I attempt to read parts of each institution’s archive of largely official reports, social scientific studies, and other ephemera, against the grain to reveal the intertwined threads of the settler colonial process of replacing Hawaiian forms of care and kinship with institutional, “scientifically proven” ones, and the ways that critical histories of these institutions offer a more complex and contested history of Territorial Hawaiʻi than many recognize.

The dominant discourses at each institution that each of the following sections examines – “delinquency” at Waialeʻe, “immorality” at Kawailoa, and “feeblemindedness” at Waimano – were deeply intertwined, and appeared at each institution. Yet social scientific knowledge claimed to be able to precisely identify, isolate, and/or (in some cases) rehabilitate these different categories as distinct pathologies that these different, specialized institutions would help care for or cure. Such knowledge, which in turn structured and justified the Territory of Hawaiʻi’s policies of transinstitutionalization, was fundamentally grounded in settler ideas of race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, labor, and ableism. The discovery of “feeblemindedness” at Waialeʻe or Kawailoa could be the cause for transfer to Waimano, but as I discuss more below, the discourse of “feeblemindedness” also undergirded the particular fears white settlers had about “delinquent” boys and “immoral girls.” In the archives of these institutions, however, the self-assured ability of settler social science and Territorial public policy to effectively care for and “cure” children of delinquency, immorality, and feeblemindedness is shown to be, in practice, deeply contested and constantly challenged by the children incarcerated at these institutions, and their families, as well as the institution’s own administrations and governing boards.

“Delinquency” at Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys

Indeed, though the training schools were designed to “cure” delinquency and other bad behavior, many were concerned that the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys only further trained boys in crime. “We call this place a ‘training school.’ It is a school and it does provide training but one subject high on the curriculum is vice,” wrote Porteus of the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys in his 1949 report.Footnote ⁴³ Other reports frequently remark on the number of boys incarcerated at Waialeʻe who went on to serve sentences at Oʻahu Prison.Footnote ⁴⁴ Located on 733 acres on the remote North Shore of Oʻahu, distant from Honolulu, Waialeʻe sought to definitively remove youth from what officials understood to be the ill-effects of urban living. Boys at the school trained and worked largely in agriculture, both producing food to sustain the community of the school and on sugar and pineapple plantations located nearby. Yet, from its earliest days since its opening in 1902, Waialeʻe’s isolation, along with the school being routinely short-staffed (in part because it was difficult to recruit teachers to live so far from town at Waialeʻe), was also a weak point. Boys frequently ran away, and could be difficult to recapture.

The boys incarcerated at Waialeʻe were commonly committed because of charges of “delinquency.” A “delinquent” was defined by Territorial law as “Any minor who violates any law of the Territory or any county or city and county ordinance or who is incorrigible, vicious or immoral, or who is growing up in idleness or crime, or who is an habitual truant from school, or who habitually wanders about the streets in public places during school hours without lawful occupation or employment.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Note that such a definition was particularly concerned with those who did not stay in the roles allotted to them – whether it was being truant from school or being in a public space without a job. Such a broad definition of a delinquent left enormous subjective judgment to law enforcement and courts. Notably, the majority of the young men sent to Waialeʻe were Native Hawaiian.Footnote ⁴⁶

The school largely blamed the “delinquency” of the boys on the failures of their families. “In the main, these charges have come from homes which have failed in the proper training of their children,” noted a 1921 report.Footnote ⁴⁷ This was perhaps the key difference in how Territorial officials understood children, still understood as innocent to some extent, as different from adults – that their bad behavior could be attributed to their families or a “poor home,” instead of being seen as only an individual character flaw. In the view of administrators of the training schools, the sentencing of a “wayward” boy at Waialeʻe from a “bad” family was not punitive to the boy, for whom it was a kind of rescue, though in effect, it punished the family (by taking away their child). “If his home is bad or his environment debasing, he should not be punished, he should be replanted,” reads a memo to the Board of Industrial Schools circa 1930. The memo further defines the job of an industrial school as “to reduce the population of the schools by constant (and of course careful) transplanting of the bulk of its entrants back into normal social environments.” The “transplanting” would not return boys to their “poor homes” but to parole jobs and “home placements,” after “the desirable disciplining of the mind and body.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Such comments were at least partially concerned with the cost of running the training schools, and submitted along with arguments for how the schools could be maintained at lower cost. However, in practice, many children were still kept at Waialeʻe and Kawailoa for indeterminate sentences.

The other reason often remarked upon to explain the cause of the “delinquency” of the boys incarcerated at Waialeʻe was their “low mentality.” In a 1934 report, the superintendent of Waialeʻe notes the need for more “psychological” testing and the transfer of “morons and feeble-minded” boys to Waimano Home.Footnote ⁴⁹ A major section of Porteus’s comments in his 1949 report on the boys at Waialeʻe similarly focused on their intelligence. Undoubtedly, Porteus saw what he called the “Hawaiian and Oriental” boys (the vast majority of the Waialeʻe population) as mentally inferior to “Caucasians,” a finding consistent with his observations in his 1926 book, coauthored with Marjorie Babcock, Temperament and Race, where he argued that Hawaiʻi’s non-white population (including the Portuguese) averaged 73.3 percent of the intelligence of white people, with Filipinos and Hawaiians having the most “racial defects.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, he noted that spending much money on attempting to seriously educate such populations would be akin to “helping lame dogs over stiles, and when they are over they are still lame.”Footnote ⁵¹ Notably, this book was based on research produced for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association after the 1924 Sugar Strike on Kauaʻi that resulted in the deaths of sixteen Filipino workers, known as the Hanapēpē Massacre.Footnote ⁵² As Dean Saranillio notes, such research was “supposed to help white settler leaders better understand and control Hawaiʻi’s nonwhite population.”Footnote ⁵³ Because of their inferior intelligence, Porteus argued more specifically in his 1949 report on the Territory’s institutions, that the boys should receive basic instruction in the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic). Porteus also put little stock in industrial training, however, noting that “practically speaking, they are as much outside the boys’ interests and abilities as ordinary school subjects.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The one thing Porteus thought the boys were fit for was “outdoor work such as gardening,” which justified his recommendation that the older students at Waialeʻe should be transferred to a forestry camp. Yet, he also makes a long digression in the report disagreeing with a previous report’s characterization of “nearly forty percent” of the Waialeʻe population as being of “very low mental classifications.” Instead, he cites his own Porteus Maze Test findings on the Waialeʻe population to note “an unsatisfactory average” in “practical intelligence” but distinguishing much of the population as merely “delinquent” rather than “feebleminded.”

Such classifications all had particular histories and nuances specific to the practices of early to mid twentieth-century intelligence testing, psychology, and psychiatry in the United States. Porteus’s Maze Test was one intelligence test among many; the most widely used at the time being the Stanford-Binet. The Porteus Maze Test purported to uniquely measure what Porteus called “planfulness,” or planning capacity and foresight. It consisted of a graduated series of printed mazes (a total of eleven designs for the series for children aged three to twelve and a similar advanced version for those aged thirteen and up), which subjects would take by tracing a route through a maze printed on the exam sheet. The test was considered an “unsuccessful trial” as soon as the subject drew their line into a blind alley, and the test was considered failed after two trials for each test. Like other intelligence tests, the test scores resulted in a “mental age,” which was compared to the subject’s actual age to classify the subject’s intelligence. Porteus argued that his test provided an important supplement to the Stanford-Binet, allowing for a more accurate measure of a subject’s “social fitness” as compared to educational ability. Tests that gauged educational ability, Porteus wrote in touting his own test, “do not detect the mentally unstable, who form a large proportion of the socially unfit.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In short, then, the difference to Porteus between the “delinquent” and the “feebleminded” was that the delinquent was capable of some industry, though they lacked the ability or desire to fit in with society, as opposed to the feebleminded who was intellectually unable to participate in society. In this distinction, Porteus seems to both promote his own intelligence test as more accurate and reserve the Waialeʻe population as proper subjects for agricultural labor, rather than subjects fit for the Waimano Home for the Feeble-Minded. As I will discuss further in the following sections, these distinctions Porteus made about the male youth of Waialeʻe fit with broader trends across the United States that understood female “feebleminded” people as greater threats to the national “gene pool” and thus more deserving of indefinite institutionalization and/or sterilization.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, alongside his explicitly racist view of Native Hawaiian and Asian immigrants in Hawaiʻi as mentally inferior to white people, Porteus held out a progressive hope for rehabilitating these “delinquent” but not really “feebleminded” boys into a productive labor force for the Territory. I would draw attention to how this racist sentiment supplements Porteus’s injunction to the Territorial government that “we” are responsible for rehabilitating such populations into proper adjustment to civilized society. In other words, the racism of seeing Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants as inherently less than white people informed Porteus’s sense of social duty to these groups. In this way, racist views were not incompatible with reformers’ sense that they were doing charitable and civilized work; rather, this sense was dependent on scientifically argued racism that upheld the anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant sentiments that the ideological structure of settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi operated through.

At times, the families of children sent to the training schools were also subjected to intelligence testing. The results of their tests would be included in the files kept by social service agencies and used as rationale for removing children from their families. For example, as noted in a Master’s thesis on “Truancy in the Schools of Honolulu,” by Esther Roberts Holmer in 1935, multiple case studies note the “mental age” of “truant” boys’ mothers. Mrs. Salazar, for instance, the mother of Will, a “Portuguese-Hawaiian boy of 12 who has been truant …” is described as having a “Binet mental age of 10 years, I.Q. 72; Porteus mental age of 9 years – good rote memory, though retarded ability – showed very little planning, is easily confused and disturbed …”Footnote ⁵⁷ Holmer also notes that Will has a “low mental age, (10 years, at 12)” and that “Since his mother is definitely ‘retarded’ and at least two other children are ‘slow,’ it is reasonable to suppose that none of the family is very brilliant.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Overall, intelligence testing of Native Hawaiian parents provided the Territorial government and its agencies seemingly hard, scientific evidence that poor and working-class Native Hawaiian families were not deserving of having children and that the Territory should intervene.

Such rationales that pathologized Native Hawaiian families and perpetuated an inherently racist notion that Native Hawaiians had lower “mental ages” and intelligence than white people could always be used as an implicit or explicit explanation as to why Waialeʻe did not often succeed at reforming “delinquent” boys. Though Waialeʻe incarcerated youth who were Native Hawaiian as well as Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Puerto Rican, and other members of immigrant communities in Hawaiʻi, Native Hawaiians were often singled out as especially irredeemable. A 1938 Master’s thesis in Education from the University of Hawaiʻi did a “follow-up study” of fifty men who had been enrolled at Waialeʻe. The author, Elizabeth Miller, determined that thirty men were “well-adjusted” to society after their time at Waialeʻe, and twenty of the men were “poorly-adjusted.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Miller pointedly comments that “fourteen of the poorly adjusted men were Hawaiians or Part-Hawaiians.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Additionally, nine of these twenty men were in prison, three on parole and one in the Territorial Hospital. Miller made her judgments about social adjustment based on a survey that tallied a range of categories including profession, wages, quality of their neighborhood and home’s furniture, neatness of their children, and if they drank alcohol or not. Overall, she concluded that her study demonstrated the difficulties of readjustment for Waialeʻe graduates and argued for “the sympathetic understanding and help of the more fortunate members of the community.”Footnote ⁶¹

Thus, Miller, like Porteus, saw herself as merely relaying the facts about Native Hawaiian men’s tendency to be more poorly adjusted than other men previously enrolled at Waialeʻe, though of course her survey judgments were subjective. Without investigating more into why Native Hawaiian men might be more poorly adjusted than others, she leaves readers with the sense that they are just inherently more prone to criminality. Yet, she argues that her finding is simply evidence of the need for more charity toward Native Hawaiian and other men of color who are paroled from Waialeʻe, thereby distancing herself from the possibility that her findings are racist. This rhetorical move, conscious or not, on the part of Porteus and Miller, is a powerful one in the context of science and the structure of settler colonialism. It allows the damage of settler colonialism (Native Hawaiians’s dispossession of land, culture, and nation) to be erased in the discourse of white settler leaders and scientists “helping” Native Hawaiians, who, in the evidence of settler science, are inherently backward, inferior, and poorly adjusted. The operation of this move does not depend on whether Miller or Porteus are individually racist or personally supportive of all the aims of the Territorial government in regard to Native Hawaiians. Rather, such rhetoric naturalized the structure of settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi, by both painting the Territorial government’s institutions as solely charitable and portraying Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, and others as mentally inferior to white settlers.

“Immorality” at Kawailoa Training School for Girls

While Waialeʻe was often considered a failure even by Territorial officials and consultants like Porteus, the Kawailoa Training School for Girls (also called the Maunawili School for Girls or the Girls’ Industrial School) was commonly seen as more successful and modern. Before opening the campus in a rural area on the windward side of Oʻahu near the towns of Kailua and Waimānalo in 1929, a previous girls’ school was located in Mōʻiliʻili in urban Honolulu. The school was moved due to space constraints and the idea that the girls would benefit from a rural environment, instead of an urban campus where, as noted a 1925 report by the school’s superintendent, “men of questionable character are continually getting in touch with our girls.”Footnote ⁶²

Instead of reforming the petty crimes of truancy or delinquency focused on at the Boys’ school, the crimes and methods of rehabilitation at the Girls’ school were focused on perceived sexual immorality. Girls were committed to Kawailoa in large part for perceived “sex offenses” or “sex delinquencies.” As with Waialeʻe, the blame for this “immorality” was the child’s family and, by extension, Native Hawaiian culture more broadly. “The majority of the girls are committed because of sex delinquencies, are part Hawaiian and are from families known to many social agencies,” notes a 1938 report.Footnote ⁶³ As with Dorothy Wu whose story this essay began with, a “sex delinquency” did not need to involve actual proven sexual relations but merely the appearance of improper “association” with boys or men. The primary end goal of rehabilitation at Kawailoa was to train girls to be more moral and equipped to perform domestic labor so they could work as maids in wealthy homes until they married and kept homes for themselves. As a 1938 report puts it, “The purpose of a correctional institution is twofold: Vocational training and social readjustment. In a girls’ school, vocational training should emphasize home making, which is the probable and hoped-for ultimate profession of any normal woman.”Footnote ⁶⁴

One acceptable reason for parole from Kawailoa, and to some Territorial officials the most desired outcome, was if a girl was to be married. Such marriages required the prior permission of the juvenile court and/or the Board of Industrial Schools.Footnote ⁶⁵ We can think of this transfer, from Kawailoa to marriage, as a kind of transinstitutionalization that is different from but related to the transfers from the training schools to Oʻahu Prison or Waimano House. Marriage was a Territorial institution too, which sought to “rehabilitate” common Native Hawaiian forms of intimacy and kinship into a heteropatriarchal structure that aligned with white, settler colonial norms. Legal marriage was not uniformly valued by Native Hawaiians and “common-law” relationships, which could be easily dissolved as desired by either party, were (and still are) widely accepted. So too, same-sex relationships and nonbinary gender identities and roles were traditionally accepted and valued. Concerns over sexual relationships between the young women incarcerated at Kawailoa are often commented on in the archival records. A 1938 report makes note of a recent policy change allowing “the presence of friends other than relatives on visiting days … [so that] Boy friends may call on girls and correspond with older girls. This situation has practically eliminated homosexual practices which used to be so rampant at the school.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Still, this concern was very active in 1945, as noted in the handbook given to girls on their arrival at Kawailoa, which emphasizes as a rule that “Holding hands, kissing other girls, and walking with arms around each other are forbidden. ʻBoy haircuts’ are not permitted. Girls are expected to be friendly with all, but not too intimate with any of the other students.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Such a rule makes clear how potential lesbian or queer relationships among those incarcerated at Kawailoa were threatening because of how they went against heteronormative expectations but also because pleasure and intimacy (sexual or not) could threaten to break down the discipline of the school.

Though a heterosexual marriage was presented as the model of success for the future of a girl incarcerated at Kawailoa, presumably one of the reasons why the sexual “immorality” of Native Hawaiian and Asian girls was of such concern at Kawailoa was a prevalent assumption by social scientists and the general public at this time that they would reproduce similarly immoral children who would also not be beholden to the white, settler colonial norms of Territorial Hawaiʻi. This concern attached to so-called “feebleminded” women in particular ways. As Michael Rembis puts it in his study of a girls’ training school in Illinois, they “reproduced at a much higher rate than their ‘normal-minded’ counterparts, swelling the ranks of society’s ‘unfit’.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Such concerns nationally spurred many involuntary or coerced sterilization campaigns in many states in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, this eugenic concern also justified indefinite segregation of feebleminded women, especially of child-bearing age, from society. In my research so far, these concerns are not explicitly stated in the records of Kawailoa or Waimano Home (similarly I have not yet seen records of sterilization), but this discourse about the danger of feebleminded women reproducing at high rates certainly helps explain why the “immorality” of Native Hawaiian young women would have been so important to check and rehabilitate.

The official staff manual of Kawailoa in 1945 describes “the building up of a desirable attitude toward work” as key to the rehabilitation of delinquent girls. “Most of our wards have never been taught that work is an important part of every satisfactory life, and so regard it as punishment,” the manual notes.Footnote ⁷⁰ The school placed a heavy emphasis on getting the girls accustomed to domestic and agricultural labor along with building skills such as sewing, and weaving lauhala mats, fans, and baskets. Many could be paroled into jobs as cooks or in laundries. In the manual given to those newly incarcerated at Kawailoa, the superintendent Pearl McCallum warned: “You will find that everyone works, and you will be expected to work. Do not try to shirk when you are given a job to do, but remember that the more you learn while you are here, the more successful you will be when you leave the school to make your own living.”Footnote ⁷¹ Such training and systems emphasized the necessity of the girls fitting into the capitalist, heteropatriarchal society of the Territory.

Though Kawailoa generally enjoyed a better reputation than Waialeʻe, Kawailoa nonetheless faced many of the same challenges. The archival records of Kawailoa attest to the many challenges the institution faced in reforming the children incarcerated in its cottages into “useful women.” Archival materials note many incidents of runaways, strikes, and even occasionally violence against school teachers or staff. In February 1939, a report notes eighty-four instances of girls running away from Kawailoa within one month (this included many multiple attempts by the same girls; the total population of Kawailoa at this time was 133).Footnote ⁷² A 1938 report notes that in one cottage of the school, “The girls were noisy, unruly and quarrelsome. There were two runaways and many more had the notion in their heads. They broke window panes and yanked nails off from other windows. They used lipstick and rouge and smoked in the house. This last offense was by a group of six girls who continued their misbehavior by a so-called ‘strike’ in class.”Footnote ⁷³ Apparently the “strike” meant that the girls refused to go to class. Their punishment was “two mornings of isolation at home in holokus.” A holoku is a missionary-styled Hawaiian dress, which despite its colonial foundation, likely would have signaled particular connections and affinities to Native Hawaiian culture, in contrast to contemporary American-styled clothing. That wearing a holoku was considered a punishment underscores the extent to which Native Hawaiian culture was pathologized and stigmatized at Kawailoa. In the reports, being made to wear a holoku and stay in isolation was presented as a kinder punishment than previous protocols enacted at Kawailoa of corporal punishment, locking girls in a “punish” cell, or shaving a girl’s hair.

A later report from 1938 includes an attempt to explain the frequency of runaways from Kawailoa, amid apparent bad press. Superintendent Edith Field notes that she has:

Field’s interpretation of the reasons for those incarcerated at Kawailoa running away acknowledges minor forms of responsibility on the part of the institution: that there has been some “bad handling on the part of the staff” and that the school has a “dull routine.” But largely, she sees running away as merely bad behavior or immorality – the wildness of the “excitement of the chase” or the loose nature of girls wanting to see a “boy-friend,” underscoring the kind of perceived “sex offenses” that often got girls committed to Kawailoa in the first place.

However, Superintendent Field’s account of the causes of running away contrasts with first-hand accounts by the “runaways” themselves. In a 1938 “Red Roof Weekly” newsletter produced by girls at Kawailoa, a recent runaway named Violet who was returned to the school is interviewed. Asked why she ran away, she answers first, “One reason because of being my baby’s birthday. Another reason was that Mrs. Hoke said I had to behave for four or five weeks. So I was burnt up and took off.” The interviewer, another girl at the school, asks if it was really so hard to behave for four or five weeks. Violet admits that it is not so hard, and when asked again why she ran away, she says, “Oh, for pleasure.” This small glimpse into the life of a young woman at Kawailoa notes that her reasons for running away had primarily to do with returning to and reconnecting with her family and simply wanting to experience pleasure and live a free life. Violet is referred to in the newsletter as a girl, but actually she is also a mother. She has a baby that she is apparently prevented from seeing regularly; the note of it being her baby’s birthday suggests that it may have been her baby’s first birthday, traditionally an especially important milestone that was and still is marked with a large lū’au, or feast and party. From the archival record, there were many pregnant girls committed to the school. In some cases, it appears Kawailoa became the place the juvenile court would send any unmarried pregnant girl, despite objections from Kawailoa superintendents.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is unclear from the records I have accessed so far exactly how babies of those incarcerated at Kawailoa were handled. It appears that sometimes babies were allowed to remain with girls at Kawailoa for at least a short time after birth, but were likely separated from their mothers and sent to extended families or other “home placements” within their first year of life. This is another example of how institutionalization broke families and non-settler forms of care; in this case, we see the intergenerational impact as Violet is separated not only from her own parents but also her own child.

We know that like at Waialeʻe, intelligence tests and other social scientific studies were conducted at Kawailoa, and that transfers were regularly made to Waimano Home.Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet, from the record I have accessed so far, the emphasis in the institution’s official reports is less on the low intelligence of those incarcerated at Kawailoa and more with using psychology to “treat problem cases.” In fact, in at least one instance, high IQs are cited as a reason for running away: “It is unfortunate that we have so little to offer our brighter girls,” a 1939 report remarks. “Among the 10 chronic runaways from Aloha are 6 girls with I.Q.’s of better than 100. One of these has an I.Q. of 123, had completed 3 years of high school and should be in college.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Instead of low intelligence, at least through the reports filed from the late 1930s, “over-emotionalism” or “emotional problems” are cited as the driving factor that explains the girls’ immoral behavior. Accordingly, “mental hygiene” and other “psychological” care are posited as an appropriate treatment to help rehabilitate those at Kawailoa. An extended anecdote in a report by Superintendent Frances Brugger in 1938 describes the desired outcome of promoting “mental hygiene”:

This account encourages viewing Kawailoa staff as kind and caring therapists, who just want to facilitate self-discovery and self-reflection in those they keep locked up. This account, however genuine, emphasizes the image of this girl as troubled and troublesome (a self-image she has internalized and desires to “straighten up”) instead of the fact that this girl is being kept indefinitely, against her will in an institution. She was not running away from herself but from Kawailoa and the settler colonial, heteropatriarchal future that institution imagined for her.

“Feeblemindedness” at Waimano Home

When children incarcerated at Waialeʻe or Kawailoa were determined, often through the results of intelligence testing, to be “feebleminded,” they could be transferred on to the Waimano Home for the Feeble-Minded, which opened in 1921. Waimano was situated on 612 acres of Territorial land overlooking Pearl City and Pearl Harbor, on the leeward side of Oʻahu.Footnote ⁷⁹ Waimano held both children and adults. Commitment required the ruling of a circuit court judge, but “any adult relative, guardian, or custodian of the individual sought to be committed, or any authorized social agency, or an agent of any governmental department or bureau, may file in court, an application for the commitment of the individual into Waimano Home.”Footnote ⁸⁰ A “certificate stating that individual is in need of institutionalization,” was required by the court, “verified by a committee consisting of a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist and a psychiatric social worker.”Footnote ⁸¹ Before the opening of Waimano, so-called feebleminded children, or “juvenile defectives,” as one study put it, would have been committed to the Territory’s training schools. But as those schools became overcrowded and their superintendents argued that “feebleminded” wards made their gendered “rehabilitation” of “delinquent” boys and “immoral” girls more difficult, they advocated for a specialized institution, which would become Waimano. As with Waialeʻe and Kawailoa, Native Hawaiians were overrepresented at Waimano.Footnote ⁸²

Waimano Home, throughout its history, was largely focused on “custodial care,” though some administrations attempted more concerted efforts toward education and training than others. Tamotsu Ishida, writing in 1955 about Waimano, notes that the proximity of the institution to the military base at Pearl Harbor and the beginning of World War II guided some of these changes: “It was seen that the Home could play a valuable part in the war by the production of vegetables on the farm. Thus, the agricultural program was accelerated and at the same time, it was seen that much help could be given the defective in other fields of vocational training.”Footnote ⁸³ It is unclear how much actually changed in practice. Reports from the mid late 1940s continued to describe Waimano’s primary function as “custodial care,” a characteristic which distinguished Waimano from the Territorial Hospital for the Mentally Ill, which was more “equipped for making diagnoses and therapeutic treatment” of the “insane.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Many of those incarcerated at Waimano were kept there for their entire lives. A 1942 report estimates 68 percent of the total population “will remain there for their entire lifetime” because they do not fall into the “higher class” of the “feebleminded” who are “taught many things and, when possible, are placed on parole.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This report further broke down how the “feebleminded” were categorized, largely according to intelligence test scores: as “moron, imbecile, idiot, and incorrigible. The last named are few in number, fortunately, but require constant vigilance since they are dangerous both to themselves and the attendants. A moron’s I.Q. is 50–69 inclusive – the imbecile’s, 20–49 inclusive and the idiot’s, below 20.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Porteus and the staff of the Psychological Clinic appear to have been very involved with such testing and categorization at Waimano, as with the training schools.Footnote ⁸⁷ Porteus, in the same 1949 report where he castigates Waialeʻe for training boys in “vice,” notes that Waimano is “in a healthy state, with, at present, adequate accommodations except for obsolete buildings in the girls department.” He does recommend better treatment plans and the creation of a new director of research (similar to the position he held at Vineland).Footnote ⁸⁸

Similar to, and inextricably intertwined with, official explanations of the causes of “delinquency” and “immorality” described by staff and administrators at Waialeʻe and Kawailoa, the cause of “feeblemindedness” was understood to rest with the child’s family. Though “feeblemindedness” was generally understood as a genetic handicap which was hereditary, and thus not always the intentional fault of a family, there was also a sense that the family was irresponsible for having children to whom such traits would be passed on. This was shaped by the fears, mentioned above in relation to pregnancies at Kawailoa, about “feebleminded” women reproducing at greater numbers than average and dragging down the “racial stock” of the nation. In a 1942 report on Waimano, the pathologization and presumed genetic nature of “feeblemindedness” as well as “delinquency,” “immorality,” and criminality more broadly is clear in this quote:

This quote presents the institutionalization of many of members of the same family, throughout the carceral institutions of the Territory of Hawaiʻi as evidence of the supposed dangers of “feeblemindedness.” Though a race is not mentioned in reference to this (and “others comparable”), for many reading this report, given the overrepresentation of Native Hawaiians at all of these institutions, it would likely have been a Native Hawaiian family they pictured.

This use of the discourse of the “feebleminded” as a danger to modern, settler society is a potent form of settler ableism, a term used by American Studies scholar Jessica Cowling to draw attention to the ways that settler colonialism is structured by ableist logics.Footnote ⁹⁰ Ableism, as Susan Burch defines it, is “a system of power and privilege that hierarchically organizes people and societies based on particular cultural values of productivity, competitive achievement, efficiency, capacity and progress.”Footnote ⁹¹ Settler ableism is evident in the ways that settler ideas of “normality, fitness, and competency” have been used to judge Indigenous peoples, and so often designate them in need of “rehabilitation,” assimilation, or other forms of institutionalization and correction.Footnote ⁹² The assumption that Waimano Home would segregate and properly care for the “feebleminded” was a settler ableist one that took for granted that everyone should aspire to white, settler forms of intelligence (especially including white settler ideas of productivity, given how Waimano emphasized training and preparing those incarcerated for jobs or at least work in the gardens at Waimano). Settler ableism also structured the assumptions that dominated Waimano, Waialeʻe and Kawailoa, that non-white forms of care (including Native Hawaiian families caring for their children) were not sufficient, modern, or appropriate, as with the references to the low intelligence of Hawaiian mothers whose sons were “delinquent” and therefore sent to Waialeʻe.

While I have not been able to find much in my research so far on how Native Hawaiians or Asians in Hawaiʻi may have understood different forms of intelligence, certainly categorizing and institutionalizing people based on their scores on Western-designed intelligence tests was not a traditional practice. Permanent institutionalization in other contexts was heartily resisted by Native Hawaiians; namely, in the case of leprosy or Hansen’s disease during this same period, we know that many Native Hawaiian families fought the Territorial government taking their family members who had been diagnosed with Hansen’s disease to the so-called leper colony of Kalaupapa on the island of Molokaʻi.Footnote ⁹³ Resistance or reluctance to commit children or adult family members to Waimano appears to have been a common enough reaction that a study on Waimano from 1955 notes that one of the main tasks of a caseworker at Waimano would involve explaining to parents that “institutionalization is usually long-term,” and further that “… they must leave the patient in the institution until such time that the staff feels that the child is ready to return home, to go on a work placement, or to go to family care. It is highly probable too that in many instances the family must be helped to sever ties for the good of the patient.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This description of what it meant to institutionalize a child at Waimano Home showcases how cruel and carceral this practice could be. Not only would children not be released until “the staff feels that the child is ready” but also, “in many instances,” Waimano would recommend completely cutting the child off from their family. Again, in many explicit and implicit ways, Waimano, like Waialeʻe and Kawailoa, emphasized through settler ableism that Native Hawaiian and other non-white families were incompetent, and that their children were often better off without them.

Conclusion

The histories of Waialeʻe, Kawailoa and Waimano have rarely been featured in official histories of Hawaiʻi, but many people in Hawaiʻi are familiar with these institutions because of family ties and stories lived and passed down to them. These institutions also live on in literal and haunting ways. Kawailoa is now the site of the Hawaiʻi Youth Correctional Facility, a state juvenile correctional facility. The ruins of some of the buildings at Waialeʻe remain visible from the highway and are well-storied as a haunted site; officially, after Waialeʻe closed, the campus was used by the University of Hawaiʻi as a “livestock experiment station.” Waimano is also storied as a haunted place, and has even been used as the setting for spooky TV shows; officially, the state continues to use some of the buildings as offices. By telling the histories of these institutions together, my hope is that we can move away from both uncritical histories of the Territorial period in Hawaiʻi and passing interest in these sites as spooky. This chapter has attempted to show how focusing on the ways these institutions deployed interlocking discourses of “delinquency,” “immorality,” and “feeblemindedness,” offers a critical understanding of the ways that the Territory of Hawaiʻi instituted settler colonial hierarchies (of race, gender, sexuality, and ability, among others) by pathologizing Native Hawaiian and other non-white forms of care and family. That children and their families resisted institutionalization and attempted to continue to care for each other demonstrates not only their humanity, but a powerful if overlooked critique of settler colonialism.

I hope this chapter also provides readers a different perspective on social science and its complicity with settler colonialism, with specific reference to Stanley Porteus and the Psychological Clinic and their work across these Territorial institutions, but also more broadly. In 1974, shortly after Porteus’s death, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa named one of its buildings “Porteus Hall.” Ethnic Studies and allied students immediately protested, but these efforts were initially unsuccessful.Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1998, the university’s Board of Regents finally agreed to rename the building, though the change did not occur until 2001.Footnote ⁹⁶ At the heart of the protests was Porteus’s major published text, Temperament and Race (1926), which as discussed above, portrayed white people as the most intelligent race, while Filipinos and Native Hawaiians were the least intelligent. This history of the ethics of commemorating Porteus demonstrates that though the psychologist was a prominent leader and well-respected in Hawaiʻi by the white elite during his lifetime, his legacy has been significantly contested by Native Hawaiians and other students of color. However, because this fight over the name of Porteus Hall focused so much on the individual man, I would argue that less attention has been paid to the broader legacies of his and his colleagues’ work in applying intelligence testing and encouraging the Territory to use the results of those tests to institutionalize or transinstitutionalize people who did not readily accede to white, settler norms of gender, sexuality, and ability. This chapter is one step toward beginning that broader work, which continues to be urgent precisely because of the often painful intergenerational legacies of Waialeʻe, Kawailoa, and Waimano that continue to reverberate across many Hawaiian families today, and the still prevalent assumption that the Territorial period was benign, as well as the legitimacy many social sciences still lend the settler colonial state as they take and institutionalize children.

On April 24, 1945, a twenty-four-year-old Black former bartender and mechanic from Caguas named Marcial Hernández García (alias “Yombe”) entered the Insular Penitentiary at Río Piedras (popularly known as Oso Blanco).Footnote ¹ A week prior, the Caguas district court sentenced him to eight years for a bundle of offenses ranging from breaking and entering and multiple counts of theft to a crime against nature, all of which he claimed to have committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Behind bars, he was interviewed and studied by penitentiary health professionals, who were interested in his life before prison and his health while incarcerated.Footnote ² Psychiatrist José R. Maymí Nevares, for instance, concluded that Yombe suffered from mental maladjustment, or more specifically, episodes of bewilderment during which he observed “abnormal” and “undisciplined” conduct.Footnote ³ Several individuals familiar with him in Caguas before he was jailed confirmed his erratic state of mind. These potential advisors had since distanced themselves from him, telling parole officials he was “half-crazy.”Footnote ⁴

To treat Yombe’s mental instability, he was isolated in a cell and regularly observed. An intelligence exam (Wechsler-Bellevue test) administered by psychologist Juan B. Picart, on which the prisoner scored a 63 (indicative of mental deficiency), corroborated “signs of organic cerebral disease.”Footnote ⁵ Picart’s clinical and vocational analysis confirmed Yombe’s cognitive and applied shortcomings, leading prison technocrats to believe that mental infirmity was why he neglected to study or learn a new craft while in Oso Blanco. This could become a problem, as reform logic prevailed in the penitentiary alongside carceral capitalism.

When Yombe was finally eligible for parole between late 1948 and early 1949, officials rejected the prospect given that his mental state and behavior had not improved much. Parole officer María Casasnovas cosigned their reservations, and in the end, Yombe remained imprisoned. Still, penitentiary health professionals sensed that the man was treatable and therefore salvageable. They insisted that solitary confinement, psychiatric observation, psychological examination, social work interviews, an appropriate labor assignment, and sports would achieve his rehabilitation. In fact, Oso Blanco Classification and Treatment personnel forecasted Yombe’s rehabilitation as “regular,” so they went about preparing him for parole reconsideration. Health professionals viewed his impaired mind as surmountable, especially if addressed across rehabilitative techniques, and more importantly, as but a snapshot of a complicated, panoramic whole that included both the tangible and intangible.

This brief foray into Yombe’s experience, who was interviewed, studied, and deemed worthy of rehabilitation by an interdisciplinary group of penitentiary health professionals, reveals myriad, overlapping encounters between different health practitioners and convicts and the frequent exchanges and loops between them in a mixed-race society under US rule. At the microlevel, the interaction between Yombe and Picart was mediated by science and destabilized homogenous notions of Blackness. Prison authorities categorized Yombe as Black. Picart was also of color.Footnote ⁶ Sharing skin tone did not mean the two men were entrenched kin folk, though, for they had diverging class backgrounds. Whereas Yombe had worked in bars and gas stations and expressed wanting to be his own boss, ship logbooks indicate Picart frequently traveled to New York City, where he earned an MA degree at Columbia University Teachers College in 1946.Footnote ⁷ Both men negotiated settler colonial scenarios, albeit from very different positions and with different goals and outcomes in mind.

More broadly, Yombe’s case illustrates that multiple settler colonial traditions shaped how members of Oso Blanco’s Classification and Treatment Board (i.e., psychologists and those trained in social science disciplines like social workers) coevaluated incarcerated people in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ⁸ Spanish colonial ethnographic approaches to criminal science informed mid-century social scientists’ compilation of prisoners’ histories. These, in turn, allowed them to better “see” the entirety of the people under their scrutiny and in their care.Footnote ⁹ This happened in a laboratorial setting, however, which reflected eugenic American approaches to science, such as psychometrics, that arrived in Puerto Rico after 1898.Footnote ¹⁰ The result was a “creole” (racially mixed, race-neutral) nationalist science that blended Spanish and American colonial traditions, while contradictorily utilizing the resulting knowledge to reclaim Puerto Rico’s future.Footnote ¹¹

The blended creole science apparent in Yombe’s case and others like it in modern Puerto Rico substantiates insights about the multidirectionality of science and medicine in Latin American and Caribbean history.Footnote ¹² In the mid twentieth century, the Partido Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Party, or PPD) and the statesman-turned-governor Luis Muñoz Marín presided over the rise and fall of Puerto Rico as a social laboratory.Footnote ¹³ During this era of multifaceted reform, health professionals promulgated social science research that was cognizant of prisoners’ humanity, showcasing that racialized colonial subjects created their own scientific expertise and used it for the purpose of national rehabilitation in the midst of unequal relations with the United States. Critical ethnography and psychometric tests enabled Puerto Rican social scientists to forge their own “objective” assessments of prisoners. The creole-appropriated projects of mapping convict minds, lives, and behaviors, rehabilitating them, and (re)integrating them into the Puerto Rican political economy and body politic helped mute and overturn long-standing colonial assumptions about tropical unfitness. “Repairing” prisoners positioned privileged creole technocrats to contribute to a broader project of rationalizing domestic self-government, a vision that came to fruition in 1951 via commonwealth status. The irony was that they aspired to rehabilitate inmates while reinforcing common tropes of their dysfunction.Footnote ¹⁴

Using a variety of sources, this chapter traces Puerto Ricans’ pursuit of a decolonized science, one that responded to the archipelago’s evolving health challenges despite biomedical progress and the reduction of mortality rates.Footnote ¹⁵ Penitentiary psychologists and social workers used psychometrics and ethnography to measure the intelligence, skill sets, and personalities of prisoners, and to signpost how to best uplift them. These diagnostic and descriptive tools revealed that convicts required discipline, tutelage, and treatment, but that they also had redemptive potential regardless of social difference. Socio-scientific interaction of this kind troubled linear notions of human progress, tempered professional preferences for certain technologies of power, and formed and made visible the value commitments of prisoners and the experts charged with evaluating and shepherding them.Footnote ¹⁶ Instead of seamlessly accepting the results of mental tests, social scientists put them into dialogue with inmate ethnographies to forge what to them were forward-looking treatment programs, illustrating how racialized racelessness and intersubjective exchanges transformed Puerto Rican corrections, at least for a time.

Blended Science

The history of science in Puerto Rico is as long as the history of the archipelago.Footnote ¹⁷ Puerto Rican science acquired cross-imperial and polyglot features in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through vertical health interventions and studies of botany, disease, forensic pathology, and medicine.Footnote ¹⁸ In many of these accounts, characters of flesh, bone, and blood were relegated to the background. By the eve of the twentieth century, people-centered ethnographies increasingly characterized local scientific knowledge production. This shift was evident in the growth of social science studies, particularly a steady stream of anthropological and sociological literature about peasants, mental patients, and criminals.Footnote ¹⁹

Among the studies published in the late nineteenth century that shed light on Spanish colonial ethnographic research in Puerto Rico are those of the physician-criminal anthropologist José Rodríguez Castro. In the early 1890s, he published several medico-legal reports about crime and madness on the southern coast. One of his investigations spotlighted a Black adolescent named Isidora Gual who had strangled her infant son. Rodríguez Castro applied European ideas and ethnographic methods to Gual’s case to distinguish between her criminality and insanity. His narrative revolved around her youth, sensuality, lack of education, class and race background, regional origins in Guayama (a Black part of the island associated with sugar plantation slavery and witchcraft), and family history of mental instability. In addition to only possessing fifty-three centimeters of cranial circumference, the generally somber Gual endured numerous spells of hunger and sickness with her child.Footnote ²⁰ The precise answer as to why she killed the boy lay somewhere between her individual decision-making and the social conditions shaping her circumstances, a position that contrarian colleagues contested.Footnote ²¹ Truly understanding the case, Rodríguez Castro wrote, necessitated examining “all her life,” her decisions over time, and moral and physical factors.Footnote ²²

Resolving health problems, such as the prevalence of alcoholism and anemia, in part instigated the turn toward multidimensionalizing people and using them to explain crime, disease, and other infirmities in Spanish colonial Puerto Rico. US military scientists subsequently recast Puerto Ricans as disease-ridden rural subjects.Footnote ²³ In the early twentieth century, scientific knowledge production in Puerto Rico primarily revolved around biomedicine and the focus of the economy, agriculture. During the interwar years, nutrition became a public health concern and biochemists, home economists, agronomists, and social workers promoted rural hygiene programs.Footnote ²⁴ By the mid twentieth century, the wombs of women increasingly garnered the attention of scientists.Footnote ²⁵ An exception to this biomedical-corporeal rule surfaced in the mid-1910s, with the anthropological works linked to the initial phase of the New York Academy of Sciences’ Scientific Survey of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Although Franz Boas and John Alden Mason composed thick descriptions of Puerto Rican Indigeneity, rural oral folklore, and Blackness while nurturing liberal-reformist colonial interests to remake an “empty” colony in the image of a “civilized” metropole, it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that ethnography fused to modern Puerto Rican statecraft.Footnote ²⁶

Human science in Puerto Rico, then, has historically responded to colonial-imperial politics and prerogatives. Under Spanish rule, ethnographic science attentive to socioeconomic and spiritual conditions prevailed. Under American rule, science became more laboratorial and rigid.Footnote ²⁷ Puerto Rican scientists of all persuasions continued to tout the importance of the laboratory under colonial-populism, but they also rediscovered ethnography as a tool that could help address the dual challenges of crime and stagnant colonialism. While the Spanish and US-Americans had contrasting rehabilitative logics, in both cases these emanated from the intersection of biopower and custodial-regulatory practices.Footnote ²⁸ What rehabilitation looked like on the ground under colonial-populism, however, mirrored the socio-scientific outlook of Muñoz Marín and the PPD, who dominated Puerto Rican politics for several decades and articulated a “reformed colonialism” rather than reinforcing colonialism proper or insisting on independence.Footnote ²⁹ The colonial-populist project of the PPD merged state-controlled development, modernization, and “democracy” without rupturing cultural and political bonds with Spain and the United States, respectively.Footnote ³⁰

A major site where Puerto Rican leaders hoped to manufacture civic foot soldiers for this project was the Río Piedras scientific corridor, a cluster of welfare institutions located on the outskirts of San Juan close to the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras (UPR-RP) campus, an agricultural experiment station, and a leper colony in Trujillo Alto.Footnote ³¹ Oso Blanco (Figure 6.1), modeled after Sing-Sing penitentiary in New York, opened in 1933 and was the capstone of a transinstitutional complex that included the prison, an insane asylum, and a tuberculosis hospital.Footnote ³² Each of these institutions reinforced one another in a common epistemic fabric. A culture of rehabilitative corrections that triply pathologized inmates emerged on the grounds of the complex, where inmate bodies, minds, and behaviors served as raw material for a local yet cosmopolitan medical class whose research was well-disposed and self-aggrandizing.Footnote ³³ In this context, incarcerated people conveyed their stories to penitentiary technocrats, while social scientists’ narratives of inmates exposed their desires to resurrect the Puerto Rican “nation.”

Figure 6.1 Front view of the Presidio Insular in Río Piedras, undated (but likely circa 1930s–1940s given the institution’s name), photographed by M. E. Casanave.

Source: Colección Archivo Fotográfico El Mundo, Biblioteca Digital Puertorriqueña, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Knowing Precedes Rehabilitating

In the early twentieth century, academia helped advance and reinvent settler colonialism. Universities and scholars contributed to forging purposeful knowledge about colonies and drawing the boundaries of growing but racialized and exclusionary academies.Footnote ³⁴ In the Western hemisphere, US-American scholars in the humanities and social sciences approached South America with fresh eyes to ingrain or reject prior generalizations and stereotypes of the subcontinent. Their research laid the groundwork for a new apparatus of knowledge in the service of inter-American relations, imperial hemispheric hegemony, and informal empire.Footnote ³⁵

Puerto Rico’s flagship university (founded in Río Piedras in 1903) and Columbia University played key roles in informalizing the US Empire and building local capacity for education and the health and social sciences.Footnote ³⁶ Columbia made inroads into Puerto Rico in the 1910s and 1920s, when its faculty documented folkloric traditions and established a tropical medicine school in San Juan. In 1915, the “father of American anthropology,” Franz Boas, traveled to the Caribbean and participated in the Scientific Survey of Porto Rico.Footnote ³⁷ He and the archeologist and linguist, University of California-Berkeley graduate John Alden Mason, together researched Puerto Rican Indigeneity, presumed to have been long decimated in the wake of Spanish colonial expansion in the sixteenth century. Later, Boas supervised Mason’s research on rural peasant (jíbaro) and “negro” Puerto Ricans – the still living and visible portions of island identity by the mid twentieth century – efforts that “rescued” the equivalent of reams of highland oral folklore spanning poetry, sayings, songs, riddles, and folktales, and that documented Black vocabulary, religion, medicine, and customs.Footnote ³⁸ Meanwhile, the tropical medicine school was inaugurated in September 1926 and operated as an imperial research outpost. It was celebrated as a private–public partnership and testament to North Americans’ and Puerto Ricans’ commitment to forging a shared America and equality in hemispheric relations. Asymmetrical relations between metropole and colony persisted unabated, however.Footnote ³⁹

Columbia faculty again pushed the boundaries of Puerto Rican social science in the mid twentieth century. After World War II, UPR-RP’s new Center for Social Research commissioned a large-scale study to determine how modern social science could be employed to examine and resolve Puerto Rico’s social and economic problems. Anthropologist Julian Steward helmed the study, which was published in 1956. The People of Puerto Rico focused on how modernization affected local subcultures and underscored that health and welfare programs on the island had therapeutic and political significance.Footnote ⁴⁰ While Puerto Rican authorities weighed the impact of social science on statecraft, penitentiary social scientists like Picart lent their expertise to raising convicts from mental and social death. In both cases, acts of knowing preceded acts of rehabilitation.

When Oso Blanco was inaugurated in May 1933, Puerto Rico’s appointed governor, James Beverley, highlighted the prison’s modernity. This meant a concrete structure with sanitary facilities, the efficient use of space inside and of land surrounding the prison, self-sufficient (and later profitable) institutional productivity, and the application of social sciences like criminology.Footnote ⁴¹ Modernity also signified professional subjectivities linked to notions of rationality and progress.Footnote ⁴² It connoted humanizing punishment, which manifested in the attempted procurement of regenerative treatment.Footnote ⁴³ Colonial and local authorities alike envisioned Oso Blanco as a site of physical and mental rehabilitation. According to Attorney General Charles Winter, it was a place where convicts would be inculcated with healthy and moral habits through labor, education, and science. The point was to return “useful citizens” to their families, their communities, and society devoid of “criminal inclinations.”Footnote ⁴⁴ But a decade-plus would pass before the social sciences became fixtures at Oso Blanco.

Socio-scientific classificatory schemes, methods, and research in Puerto Rican corrections interfaced with intellectual currents emanating from the US mainland. In a paper published shortly after World War II by federal prisons official Frank Loveland, who around the same time was contracted by Puerto Rico’s government to conduct a critical study about incarceration there and suggest improvements, he stressed the variability of rehabilitative ideas. Analyzing corrections in the periphery taught Loveland that rehabilitation was a multifaceted, cooperative process involving individuals and institutions. Without cooperation from both sides, constructive results could not be obtained.Footnote ⁴⁵ Social scientists, critical ethnography, and psychometrics formed part of Loveland’s arsenal to streamline the holistic improvement of incarcerated people.

By the mid-1940s, mental tests had become a vital instrument of prison classification by opening different pathways to work toward the institutional adjustment of inmates, their rehabilitation, and their eventual societal reintegration. With these goals in mind, the mental exams of the era sought to measure the intelligence, skills, and personalities of incarcerated populations.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Puerto Rico and elsewhere, prison authorities believed that mental test results would clarify treatment paths for inmates. They also became synonymous with literal and symbolic health in Oso Blanco at a time when elite Puerto Ricans aimed to redefine the colonial pact with the US government amid exorbitant poverty, overpopulation, economic transformation, and political crisis.Footnote ⁴⁷ Carceral health professionals associated with the PPD contributed to building a local constituency that bore evidence of this reformist undertaking. Racially diverse convicts were perceived as candidates in this vein. To an extent, this distinguished the Puerto Rican approach to carceral rehabilitation from the eugenic carcerality flourishing in the United States. Indeed, creole rehabilitation sought to (re)integrate the races anthropologists like Boas and Mason were so eager to disjoin earlier in the century. Still, penitentiary social scientists deployed rehabilitative techniques that revealed the caprices of scientific medicine and the spurious, philanthropic university-based research informing it.Footnote ⁴⁸

Psychometric Testing

Since the late 1800s, psychometric tools have served as technologies of power that create normative frameworks for thinking about racialized people.Footnote ⁴⁹ They claim epistemological consistency and ontological universalism but can also be tools of juridical power and social control. The globalization of psychometric instruments in the twentieth century failed at universalizing “the human” yet contributed to colonial expansion. In mid-century Puerto Rico, neither Spanish nor American colonial frameworks were hegemonic. The creole nationalization of science and parallel pursuit of comprehensive human science under colonial populism subverted exclusively Spanish or American approaches to rehabilitation. Spanish, American, and creole flows of scientific knowledge production crashed into one another in the first half of the 1900s, with the latter becoming prominent at mid-century. Creole supremacy circumvented conventional exchange relations, reversed value, and upset predominant social structures and hierarchies associated with settler colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁰ The colonial conceits that informed acceptable manifestations of modernity and state formation remained visible in the ways psychometric tools reproduced certain standards and tropes during the era of the PPD, but were also translated over.

The development and use of psychological tests and measures in the West and Puerto Rico spans more than a century.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1920, adaptations of the Pintner tests of Non-Verbal Abilities circulated on Puerto Rico’s main island; the Stanford Achievement test then appeared, by 1925.Footnote ⁵² These were followed by other exams administered to public school students and incarcerated youths.Footnote ⁵³ In 1927, for example, Attorney General George Butte, who was later active in the Philippines, reported that University of Puerto Rico psychologists completed an educational and mental survey of imprisoned young people in Mayagüez, using, among other tests, the Stanford Test of Ability, which had been previously used by the Commission from Columbia University in a study of public school children.Footnote ⁵⁴ Clinical psychological services, on the other hand, were not routinely offered in psychiatric hospitals, facilities serving veterans and children, and prisons until the 1940s and later.Footnote ⁵⁵ This slow expansion coincided with the maturation of psychology as an academic discipline emphasizing mental processes, introspection, behavior, and interpersonal relationships.Footnote ⁵⁶

Puerto Rican psychologists trained in the United States and elsewhere aspired to develop and perfect mental tests attuned to the local linguistic and cultural milieu. This was because cultural mistranslation weakened the reliability of these diagnostic tools. Therefore, it was difficult for Puerto Ricans to obtain the expected mean Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of 100, the prevailing Anglo standard. A clear bias emerged when speakers of languages other than English were tested within parameters designed for English speakers. Standardized culture-free tests could universally estimate the intellectual functioning and manual capabilities of different groups, in theory resulting in more equitable assessments of colonized people.Footnote ⁵⁷

Multiple tests were adapted in Puerto Rico between the 1930s and 1950s. These included the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, the Binet Intelligence Scale, and the Goodenough Draw-a-Person test.Footnote ⁵⁸ Reliance on mental tests in Oso Blanco aligned with the growth of psychology in Puerto Rico at large. Prison psychologists connected to UPR-RP assessed the intelligence, cognitive and mechanical abilities, and personalities of convicts. Exam results reiterated to the Classification and Treatment Board that inmate minds harbored rich data that could and should be scientifically excavated, explained, and repurposed. In mapping prisoners in this way, penitentiary social scientists laid bare their own moral and behavioral preferences as well as those of Puerto Rico’s criminal-legal system and government.Footnote ⁵⁹ From their collective point of view, the end of a rehabilitated Puerto Rico “free” of colonial mismanagement justified the means of utilizing uneven psychometrics on prisoners to confirm their dysfunction and redemptive potential.

Pursuing Comprehensive Human Science

Oso Blanco endured scientific growing pains in its first decade of existence. Shortly after officially opening in 1933, the penitentiary lacked a psycho-pathological clinic to examine, diagnose, and treat convicts suffering from mental lesions.Footnote ⁶⁰ The next year, in 1934, Attorney General Benjamin Horton encouraged Puerto Rican legislators to carve carceral mental health positions into the new fiscal year’s budget. A psychiatrist and psychologist were “indispensable” for the study of prisoners’ “defects” and treating the “mental disorders” either caused or influenced by the crime(s) they committed, Horton insisted.Footnote ⁶¹ As of 1935, the posts still had not been created.Footnote ⁶²

There is little to no mention of carceral mind science in Puerto Rican government justice publications between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s. By 1946, psychiatric and psychological services were routine in Oso Blanco and overlapped. Psychological testing fell under the umbrella of psychiatry in terms of government reporting. Attorney General Enrique Campos del Toro, for instance, observed that “The number of new cases taken care of during the fiscal year by the psychiatrist at the Penitentiary were 138, of which the majority were cases of mental deficiency, psychopathic personality and psychoneurosis. Fifty-seven did not reveal apparent mental disturbances.”Footnote ⁶³ Mental tests helped prison authorities draw these conclusions. Governor Jesús Piñero relayed the following year, in 1947, that “Medical care to the indigent and public welfare activities in general increased throughout the Island, and a modest educational program [and census] on mental hygiene, with special emphasis on the problem of the feebleminded, was undertaken.”Footnote ⁶⁴ To be feebleminded was fused to promiscuity, criminality, and social dependence, equated “mental deficiency,” and denoted a level of functioning just above “idiocy.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Puerto Rican penitentiary health professionals imbued the category with similar opprobrium in their estimations of incarcerated rural people in the mid twentieth century.Footnote ⁶⁶

Psychometric exams of convicts were administered on the UPR-RP campus and inside the penitentiary. Performing well or poorly on intelligence tests did not automate or preclude rehabilitation, though. For example, in September 1948 Picart assessed Enrique Carmona – a spoiled, “rebellious” seventeen-year-old wheat-colored (trigueño) prisoner from Toa Alta.Footnote ⁶⁷ Carmona took the Wechsler-Bellevue test (Form I) on the UPR-RP campus and earned a complete score of 56, which meant he was “mentally retarded” or a “high moron.”Footnote ⁶⁸ However, Carmona had “psychological potential” that could bear fruit “under favorable environmental conditions.”Footnote ⁶⁹

In contrast, in January 1949 Picart evaluated a thirty-one-year-old white “psychopathic” prisoner who grew up between San Juan and New York named Santiago Ocasio Soler.Footnote ⁷⁰ Picart used the Wechsler-Bellevue to secure numerical values for the inmate’s verbal and manual skills by having him respond to arithmetic problems, order blocks, and finish drawings. There was a discrepancy between Ocasio Soler’s verbal and nonverbal scores because he took longer than expected to complete the former and was too sure of himself on the latter. Yet, his “mental deterioration” was an “insignificant 7 [percent],” and overall, he scored a 118 (in the normal superior range), a number that exceeded the Anglo standard of 100.Footnote ⁷¹ Like Carmona, Ocasio Soler was deemed rehabilitable. In both cases, a psychologist of color (Picart) presided over administering and explaining their mental test results, an inversion of the presumed racial and scientific orders.

Oso Blanco Classification and Treatment practitioners had lucid exchanges about these and other cases and shared their research with one another. Mimicking developments in the United States to a degree, psychometric tools in Puerto Rico formed part of a culture of observation and evaluation that consolidated and expanded vertical forms of social control.Footnote ⁷² Notwithstanding the limits of many exams, psychologists like Picart deployed a variety of mental tests to determine on which minds different ones could be applied. His work, in conjunction with the efforts and interpretations of the Classification and Treatment Board, tended to essentialize “mentally deficient” prisoners. Convicts thus served as psychological specimens. But many social scientists also valued the “egalitarian” creed of the PPD and wanted the prisoners striving for rehabilitation to do so as well. As convicts showed signs of conforming progress, the liberatory effects of colonial-populist rehabilitation became more pronounced. Prisoners were corralled and studied in Oso Blanco, where social scientists viewed them as objects of research. Just as significantly, social scientists desired to comprehensively understand and civically redeem convicts, transforming the meanings of citizenship and socio-scientific knowledge production in a settler colonial context.Footnote ⁷³

Redeemable Prisoners

Rehabilitative corrections flourished in the mid twentieth century.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Puerto Rico, Classification and Treatment officials investigated the lives of convicts, generated socioeconomic portraits of them, and organized health and social science data they later channeled into treatment programs.Footnote ⁷⁵ The director of Socio-Penal Services compiled findings and approved or modified prescribed plans. Treatment programs covered the medical, social, psychiatric, psychological, educational/vocational, and religious-spiritual aspects of rehabilitation. They usually concluded with a bottom line indicating whether individual prisoners could be rehabilitated at all. Crucially, incarcerated people had little to no say in whether they wholeheartedly consented to such practices, for at the time human subjects research was not legally micromanaged. Still, degrees of reciprocity were built into the human subject-researcher encounter, even if on highly unequal terms.

Classification and Treatment personnel utilized variable diction to convey inmate rehabilitative prospects. Proclaiming that prisoners were “rehabilitable” meant they were salvageable physically, mentally, socially, morally, and civically. Psychometric exams such as the Wechsler-Bellevue test, the Otis Mental Ability test, and the Rorschach Inkblot test either set the interpretive tone for Classification and Treatment Board efforts or built on already available ethnographies of convicts. In short shrift, however, board practitioners rejected exclusively considering IQ. Instead, they made a habit of contemplating exams intersectionally, meaning that Classification and Treatment experts believed multiple exams disclosed more together about individuals’ rehabilitative prospects than apart. Although mental tests pointed to the intellectual, interactive, and mechanical “deficiencies” of inspected prisoners, they also served as a compass for the prison technocrats charged with crafting treatment programs. Regardless of inmate identities or the nature of their crime(s), they were generally considered eligible for rehabilitation – even if getting there would be an uphill climb. This does not mean that categories like race, class, or sexuality were irrelevant relics of a bygone era. Rather, health professionals defied and contradictorily engaged them to achieve the more pressing goals of self-government and constituency building.

The confluence of convict ethnographies, mental tests, and treatment programs repeatedly surface in the archival record. For example, in March 1950 prison authorities reviewed the case of a twenty-five-year-old white prisoner from Cayey serving time for mutilation named Onofre Rodríguez López. Classification and Treatment official Gloria Umpierre reported that this convict was well-educated, and that he appeared to be a “trustworthy,” “serious,” and an all-around “normal” person.Footnote ⁷⁶ Perhaps most importantly, he showed repentance for his crime, possessed an excellent attitude, and was willing to adapt to what authorities demanded of him. He was a “good” case for rehabilitation. These conclusions would seem to suggest that Rodríguez López’s whiteness dictated Umpierre’s favorable assessment. However, his exam results divulge other interpretations.

Rodríguez López underwent protracted testing while incarcerated. He earned a high average score of 118 on the Otis test, above the Anglo standard of 100. More impressive was the fact that he answered questions quickly and correctly. Rodríguez López scored 39 points on the Bell Adjustment Inventory, which implied that he was “relatively well-balanced emotionally” compared to his immediate peers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet, his social skills needed improvement, for he was an “isolated type.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The answers he gave to questions about interpersonal interactions (21 total) exposed his social shortcomings. In short, being white did not mean he had flawless social prowess. Psychologists also probed Rodríguez López’s manual ability via the MacQuarrie test. He boasted average mechanical ability overall, performing well on the relational awareness, speed, and visual portions of the test, but underperformed on others. Prison officials recommended that the convict be given vocational work assignments to take advantage of the skills he had, and to cultivate and strengthen the ones he lacked. Interviews and religious services could further enrich his rehabilitation process, experts believed.Footnote ⁷⁹

As Rodríguez López’s case suggests, mid-century Oso Blanco social scientists believed that determining intelligence had to be complemented by the measurement of nonintellectual characteristics, such as manual skills and/or personality traits.Footnote ⁸⁰ The pattern is visible in cases of convicts of color as well. For example, in April 1950, Oso Blanco’s Classification and Treatment Board studied a twenty-seven-year-old Mulatto prisoner from Guaynabo serving time for homicide named Antonio Hernández Alamo. The “always smiling” Hernández Alamo impressed board members as “trustworthy” and “humble” but also as “a bit ignorant” and not in full control of his emotions.Footnote ⁸¹ He earned a 77 on the Otis test, a borderline deficient score. If exposed to interviews, religious guidance, challenging recreational activities like reading, and agricultural labor therapy, Hernández Alamo was a “good” case for rehabilitation. In fact, the prisoner teemed with “plenty of rehabilitable material.”Footnote ⁸² His mixed-race background did not disqualify him.

Hernández Alamo’s Otis test result was but one component of a more comprehensive psychology and broader human science that also depended on a social worker’s evaluation of his personality. In his case and others, penitentiary social scientists bridged ethnography and psychometrics. A thirty-eight-year-old Black asthmatic inmate from Guayama serving time for homicide named Adolfo Ortiz Gutiérrez, who “feared the dark” and was tortured by nightmares about ghosts, is another case in point.Footnote ⁸³ According to Classification and Treatment experts, who evaluated the convict in July 1950, he appeared to have “emotional problems,” found “lying satisfying,” and earned a 74 on an Otis test (borderline intellectual deficiency). These findings convinced them that they needed to administer personality tests to diagnose and treat Ortiz Gutiérrez more effectively. He had a “regular” chance to be rehabilitated. Interviews, religion, reading, and films could help bring him back from the mental and social brink.Footnote ⁸⁴

While white prisoners scoring in the normal range or exceeding it on a given intelligence test and mixed-race or Black prisoners scoring in the borderline deficient or inferior range can certainly be interpreted as settler colonial social science in action, that Oso Blanco social scientists experimented with combinations of tests in either racial scenario is suggestive of their awareness of the inequities baked into psychometrics and the need to evaluate incarcerated people on the basis of other shared criteria. Even if we assume prisoners of color were exclusively marginalized in this regard, a low intelligence score and rehabilitation were not mutually exclusive. This was the case for Salvador García Salamán, for instance, a twenty-one-year-old Black convict from Río Grande incarcerated at the Zarzal penal encampment in 1953 whose “below average intelligence” failed to raise serious concerns about his rehabilitative prospects.Footnote ⁸⁵

The opposite could also be true. For example, Picart administered a Wechsler-Bellevue test to a forty-six-year-old Black inmate from Santurce named Pedro Sánchez Alvarez in December 1948. The convict scored in the normal range (93). In his qualitative analysis, Picart noted that Sánchez Alvarez had satisfactory immediate and deep past memory, satisfactory mental concentration, and a “great ability to comprehend practical, real-life situations and to resolve situations involving arithmetic reasoning.”Footnote ⁸⁶ He expressed himself easily with ample vocabulary. The strengths and promise Picart saw in Sánchez Alvarez contrasted sharply with opinions of him shared by several of his immediate family members, who labeled him a “lost cause.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Here communal opprobrium did not flow from social scientists, but from Sánchez Alvarez’s own brothers and other kin. For every García Salamán or Sánchez Alvarez, however, there was someone who incarnated socio-scientific stereotypes. A twenty-six-year-old Mulatto prisoner from San Juan named Ricardo Estrada Padilla, for example, combined “below average intelligence” and “criminal tendencies.” These put his rehabilitation in jeopardy but never annulled it.Footnote ⁸⁸ Similarly, health professionals understood a quinquagenarian Mulatto from Coamo named Sandalio Mateo Vázquez as a “suspicious hypocrite” with “below average intelligence,” yet he was “rehabilitable.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Prisoners’ crimes, their backgrounds, and their (un)favorable personality traits and test scores did not automatically qualify them for or disqualify them from rehabilitation. Education, labor therapy, social orientation, religious services, and so on could transform convicts, although this was not guaranteed. While psychologists and social workers had occasion to belittle and racialize convicts, implicit in their mapping prisoners’ worlds and articulating rehabilitative programming for them was the belief that inmates could be raised from living death. Social scientists and inmates together made the human sciences more human in a place (the prison) where dehumanization was and remains the expected norm. There, race largely functioned as a pivot on which creole science partially turned at a time when colonial-populists reimagined Puerto Rican national identity on race-neutral terms.

Conclusion

As Puerto Rican rehabilitative corrections hit their stride in the mid-1940s and 1950s (though not without challenges and shortcomings), Puerto Rico’s government contracted federal consultants to conduct studies of the penal system. It was not until later in the 1950s and 1960s that justice officials finally implemented some of the recommendations put forward by the studies.Footnote ⁹⁰ University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras social workers drew from the studies to renew the promise of Puerto Rican rehabilitative corrections. In a critical analysis published in 1959, Rosa Celeste Marín, Awilda Paláu de López, and Gloria Barbosa de Chardón chronicled the work of contemporary university social science faculty in the prison system. Faculty assessed the personalities of maximum-security prisoners incarcerated in Oso Blanco and found that many of them tested as “mentally deficient” and were vulnerable to ongoing mental infirmity and recidivism.Footnote ⁹¹ To gather the data leading to these and interrelated findings, social scientists administered a diverse batch of psychometric tests: the Porteus Maze, Rorschach, Thematic Apperception, Draw-a-Person, and Bender-Visual Motor Gestalt tests. Psychologists also put exam results into conversation with ethnographic information about convicts. The collective data laid bare the psychological features of each inmate, as well as tendencies in their emotions, thinking, and behavioral and cognitive functioning.Footnote ⁹²

Discussion of prisoners’ mental test results increasingly revolved around their dangerousness and propensity to mentally deteriorate when released from prison, however. A growing pessimism surrounding prisoner rehabilitation, flashes of which were apparent in the 1950s, gained momentum in Puerto Rico by the mid-1960s, evidenced by an uptick in studies that accepted the premise of criminal pathology yet lacked the rigor of previous generations to confront it.Footnote ⁹³ This coincided with successive governments across Puerto Rico’s party divide suffocating the rehabilitative ideal in the decades that followed.Footnote ⁹⁴ No longer were social science tools and methods viewed as pathways toward convict redemption. Instead, they functioned as instruments of intense pathologization and othering, which aligned with how US researchers and authorities trafficked in them across groups and national borders earlier in the century.Footnote ⁹⁵

In the mid twentieth century, Puerto Rican social scientists exposed convicts to Spanish and American rehabilitative logics and practices. They transcended binaries (Spanish and US colonialism, Black and white, researcher and research subject) to foster a creole science and pugilistic nationalism that aspired to prove that prisoners could be rehabilitated and become colonial-populist citizens. This nationalism countered the American settler colonial image of Puerto Ricans as perpetual tutees. In a sense, Puerto Ricans pursued a decolonized science in the mold of their African peers, who as Erik Linstrum has argued, utilized psychology to disclose the limits of British imperial authority.Footnote ⁹⁶

While the mid-century social scientists involved in evaluating prisoners often cast them as deficient, returning incarcerated people of all colors to society as productive laborers, family providers, and citizens – indeed, as human capital – illustrated that the colonial-populist (and later commonwealth) state just might live up to its racial democracy rhetoric.Footnote ⁹⁷ Socio-scientific research behind bars also showed that Afro-Puerto Rican health professionals like Picart could lay claim to scientific knowledge production, invest the epistemological riches in a more equitable domestic future without invalidating the relationship between metropole and colony, and unsettle assumptions about who got to possess research subjects and exercise health authority. Even though it was included as a category for describing incarcerated research subjects, race played a restrained role in inmate rehabilitation. The equity project within Puerto Rican corrections was paradoxical and failed, however, precisely because it depended on extracting pain and damage narratives from racially heterogeneous Puerto Ricans of perceived lesser status in the first place.

Colonial-populist Puerto Ricans’ alternative deployment of social science contributed to Puerto Rico’s modernization process but not in a way that automatically segued into rigid race-based exclusion.Footnote ⁹⁸ Whereas anthropological ethnography is now cast as a valuable instrument in the struggle against systems of oppression, particularly in the Western academy, this was not always the case. Intelligence tests, for their part, are still being used for reactionary purposes. Social science literature linking race and intelligence continues to be published, and it appears the social science community that works on intelligence accepts this without challenge notwithstanding their recognition of the ethno-racial biases and controversies that have long tainted psychometrics.Footnote ⁹⁹ The case of mid twentieth-century Puerto Rico, then, offers an inviting vantage point from which to understand how carceral human science, ironically, lent itself to the search for and realization of other realities, well in advance of our own preoccupation with reimagining the world.

In 1974, the United States passed the National Research Act, which set the rules for the treatment of “human subjects” of research. The law pertained to both biomedical and social science research and it remains in place today, largely unchanged over fifty years, despite revisions in 2018 that nonetheless retained the basic structure and assumptions of the law. Those assumptions included a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. In 1974, the immediate prompt for the law was the public revelation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: government scientists had been withholding a viable treatment for syphilis (penicillin) from people enrolled in the studies, who were low-income Black men in rural Alabama. The US government had been funding the Study for four decades; and scientists had been writing and reading about it in medical journals for just as long. Although the public exposure of medical suffering and abuse at the hands of the US government was the immediate prompt for the law’s passage, the content of the rules – how procedural, government bioethics would work according to the law – had been two decades in the making within the National Institutes of Health.Footnote ¹

As a result, since 1970, a specific field known as modern American bioethics has dominated secular, English-language spaces of political power – the language of ethics as it is spoken in US domestic and foreign policy, international “medical diplomacy,” global market regulation, and transnational corporations. It is the lingua franca of Euro-American science imperialism. It speaks louder and talks over the more context-informed, justice-based practices of science, making it easy to forget that this bullish and coercive variant of bioethics is a historical fluke.Footnote ²

Shortly after the law’s passage in 1974, Carolyn Matthews, a white-settler free-spirit from Portland, Oregon, settled in her hometown and went back to college. In 1977, when she was in her late thirties and recently settled in Portland, she enrolled in a school that was designed for working adults. She could get course credit for her prior work experience, so she typed up her two decades of job experiences. She had worked a good deal in healthcare settings and been both a “human subject” of government medical research and a researcher of human subjects.

I met Carolyn after I put a description of my historical research in the Antioch College alumni magazine, and Carolyn got in touch with me. I was researching a program at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), through which NIH “procured” healthy human civilians for medical experiments during the decades after World War II.Footnote ³ Across several conversations between 2016 and 2018, Carolyn relayed her life story. We talked by phone twice for official oral histories, we emailed updates about this project and our personal lives, and I visited her at her house in Portland, Oregon. Carolyn had been willing to tell me the story of her time at NIH’s Clinical Center. But her NIH story extended into a longer, politically saturated narrative about bioethics – one that toppled the bookends of her NIH story and was impossible to ignore.

Carolyn shared with me the paper she had written in 1977 for course credit describing her job as a healthy human subject at the NIH Clinical Center (as well as her volunteer work as a lab technician there); she summarized the skills – and life experience – she gained as an x-ray technician in Arizona taking films of Akimel O’odham people; she listed her responsibilities as a research technician in Boston. It was her story – about her working life.

But woven into this 1977 story about her work life was another story – about her ethical awakening. This woven story compared her experiences as a human subject of NIH experiments to the experiences of the low-income hospital staff and patients whose organs she scanned in Boston after they received injections of radioactive tracers. The Akimel O’odham people, however, were absent. Whereas she inserted the Akimel O’odham people into the story of her working life, they were illegible as part of her bioethical understanding.Footnote ⁴

This chapter tells Carolyn’s story in two registers. It sets Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974 alongside her moral recounting of those experiences in her college portfolio – which she composed after the crystalizing moment of the Tuskegee revelations, which set the moral vocabulary and framework for research on people in terms of modern American bioethics. The point is not that Carolyn had a lapse in moral judgment in her practices or recall of her experiences. The premise of this chapter is that Carolyn perfectly articulated the logic of American modern bioethics. The insight of Carolyn’s story is that the field of American bioethics operates with settler state presumptions. The question the chapter explores is how, specifically, the broad imperial logic of bioethics works – through what concepts, practices, and imperceptions.

The discourse of modern American bioethics is a geopolitical concern, and relationships across the Americas provide a special vantage on the field. Because of the coterminous geography, the history of science and ethics across the Americas points attention to the production of boundaries – to national borders, racial categories, citizenship status, and moral designations together through science.Footnote ⁵ For example, the same US government scientist who led the Tuskegee Syphilis Study from 1932 to 1972 also conducted related experiments in Guatemalan prisons during the 1940s, in which the research team intentionally infected incarcerated people with syphilis.Footnote ⁶ The production and enforcement of racial hierarchies within and between the US and Guatemala facilitated the research. In addition the research was predicated on logics of spatial containment and moral worth that justifies systems of incarceration and colonialism – within and between US, Latin American, and Native spaces (as also seen in Chapters 5 and 6). The study of science ethics across the Americas highlights how boundaries are strategically fabricated, not only through scientific efforts but also for science.

My intention as a white settler historian is to invoke the experiences of a fellow white settler knowledge maker – namely, Carolyn – in an imperfect effort to hold settler science (read: myself) to account.Footnote ⁷ My hope is to approximate Kim TallBear’s technique of “studying up.” While TallBear’s standpoint, as a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar, in relation to white settler science is different from my own, the technique offers a way to study the (re)production of settler colonial structures within science and also to avoid co-opting and capitalizing on those injustices.Footnote ⁸

The chapter follows Carolyn across three sites and over three decades. In 1962, Carolyn served as a healthy human subject at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, a time and place where Native people had a lively presence (second section). When she was not on study, Carolyn worked enthusiastically but without pay as a lab technician in the hospital. This volunteer work resulted in an offer to work for pay on an NIH research team collecting samples from a Native American tribe in Sacaton, Arizona, which she readily accepted (third section). After Sacaton, Carolyn worked as a scanning technician in Boston, Massachusetts (fourth section), before she returned after many years to Portland, Oregon, where she reflected on the ethical implications of her experiences in medicine (fifth section). The point of a critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform practices – in science, in history, and in transformative bioethics.

Bethesda, 1962: Carolyn as Research Subject

Carolyn enrolled in Antioch College in 1962 and arrived at the NIH Clinical Center three months later. The Clinical Center was the US government’s main research hospital, located on what was called at the time NIH’s “reservation” in Bethesda, Maryland. As part of its Congressional mandate, the Clinical Center could not admit people for treatment alone; everyone admitted to the hospital had to be a research subject (often as part of a treatment). For its part, Antioch College was one among a set of small colleges organized around a pragmatist pedagogy that prioritized “experiential learning.” Every other quarter, for four years, students moved away from the tiny silvan town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, and took jobs anywhere they could imagine.Footnote ⁹ “I was very restless, even too restless for Antioch,” Carolyn told me. “I just wanted to be on my own.”

In the early 1960s, Antioch had a reputation for radical politics and drew students with a bent toward social activism. But Carolyn knew none of this when she was considering colleges. The hegemonic activism and what college histories called “militant intellectualism” was imperceptible from her high school in Portland, Oregon.Footnote ¹⁰ “It was a shock, and it was a good thing that I did not drop out right away.”

“I was in a very conservative family, in a conservative town,” Carolyn told me. Growing up, she was an only child and in 1951 her father’s carpentry business went bankrupt. Her parents packed up their pickup truck with some clothes, the dog, their camping gear, and Carolyn. They let the bank have the house and drove east to the Rocky Mountains, stopping for a few weeks at a time for her father to do carpentry jobs and for Carolyn to go to school (Figure 7.1). When the weather turned cold, they crossed the Colorado border into Arizona and set up house for a few months in Phoenix. Carolyn’s father worked, she went to primary school, and on weekends the family visited the national parks of the Sonora Desert (Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.1 Carolyn Matthews, around age eight, and her father, circa 1951. Her dog Rip van Winkel (Rippy) is also in the photo. Roger Burmont Matthews stopped for food during a road trip to find work. The photo description on the back reads, “Chow time! On road/ between Boise Idaho & Salt Lake City.”.

Photographer credit: Melba Cambridge Matthews. Source: Matthews Collection, VANV

Figure 7.2 Carolyn Matthews in moccasins, Rippy, and her mother, circa 1951.

Photographer: Roger Burmont Matthews. Carolyn’s father wrote a description on the back around 1951: “Grain Grinder. Tonto National Monument.” The Tonto National Park is in the Upper Sonora Desert, near the ancestral home of Akimel O’odham people. Source: Matthews collection VANV.

For tribal members, the commodification of cultural authenticity offered one way of earning money out of the brutality of dispossession – turning the white American popular mythology into tourism dollars in the capitalist colonial structure that had long oppressed Indigenous groups. There was a way to look “Indian” to the white consumer eye that, in the postwar decades, reenacted a nineteenth-century fiction.Footnote ¹¹

While Carolyn and her parents were in Arizona, the latest US federal policy change related to Native Americans was emerging. In 1955, the Public Health Service, within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (today’s Health and Human Services), was handed responsibility for the Indian Health Service, formerly called the Division of Indian Health and located within the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. The new Indian Health Service was a response to decades of federal cuts to Native clinics and reliance on private contractors, as well as state and local governments, to attend as they saw fit to the health needs of Native communities.Footnote ¹² In Arizona as in other places, the poverty that caused poor health was not predetermined, but an expression of political structures working against many Native people’s desires.Footnote ¹³

After Carolyn’s stay in Phoenix, the family drove back to Portland and built a new house. When Carolyn arrived at Antioch College at eighteen years old, she was a curly-haired aspiring anthropology major with braces on her teeth. One of Carolyn’s first experiences as an Antioch student was working a co-op term at NIH. At the time, NIH administrators had “procurement contracts” with several colleges, a few labor unions, and the national organizations of two Anabaptist churches, to supply “normal control” human subjects for medical experiments.Footnote ¹⁴ In addition, the federal Bureau of Prisons flew or bussed twenty-five men to the Clinical Center every five weeks for most of the 1960s in an arrangement akin to convict labor leasing.Footnote ¹⁵

She got free room and board, and a small “stipend” from NIH funneled through the college. When scientists were not using students in medical experiments they were allowed – encouraged – to work unpaid in “career placements” designed to keep the Normals busy, away from mischief or rumination, and advertised by NIH as a way to boost their resumes through (unwaged) work experience at a prestigious institution. Importantly, she also got course credit from Antioch and a chance to see Washington, DC in her downtime. To get these resources, however, she also had to give.

She arrived at the Clinical Center in early October and was assigned a bed in the ward on 8 West, having been allotted to NIH’s Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. Each of the institutes that comprised NIH was given space at the Clinical Center for their “bedside” research – their studies on whole people. Based on the studies they had planned, the scientists forecasted their need for Normals and every three months sent their order to the administrator for NIH’s “Normal Volunteer Patient Program,” the hinge between Antioch and NIH. Carolyn’s body was projected into a study on insulin clearance. She started on Tuesday morning.

Her room had a private bathroom, which she shared only with her roommate, a German Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn with thyroid disease, whom Carolyn adored. However, for the study, the nurses needed her to urinate, not inside the private bathroom, but in the open hospital room into a commode while they waited – and to do it every fifteen minutes. When Carolyn and I met in 2016, I helped her get access to her NIH study record and she allowed me to see a copy, too. The study record includes a log of study procedures (researchers), social surveillance notes (nurses), and legal forms (administrators) for the autumn of 1962. It includes a note from Nurse Cushing the same day Carolyn started the study: “Unable to void @ prescribed times so test running irregularly.”Footnote ¹⁶

Her record does not include a consent form.Footnote ¹⁷ “Regarding informed consent: It’s hard to tease out what I felt at the time, in 1962, from the perspective of 54 years later.” Carolyn wrote me an email in the summer of 2016. “Although the NIH docs knew I had an interest in biology, I actually did not have much knowledge about it yet.” She had two months of college course work at that point and told the doctor who admitted her that she was an anthropology major. “The docs may have credited me with a higher level of understanding than I deserved, and I wasn’t assertive enough to say ‘I do not understand’,” Carolyn said. “I do know that I was very trusting of the whole thing, and it never occurred to me to question anything.” She shared a sensibility with many white Americans of the early 1960s. The Cuban Missile Crisis took shape the week after she arrived, reinforcing public support for the sciences of national defense. A month later came the death of Eleanor Roosevelt, champion of social safety net programs as former First Lady and of international human rights as Chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights after World War II. Trust in authority – in government, in science, and in medicine – among middle-class white Americans would only unravel later in the 1960s. At the same time, sovereignty claims in the United States were being made ferociously by the American Indian Movement.Footnote ¹⁸

While Carolyn was at the Clinical Center as a “normal” subject, there were also children from Native communities living in the research hospital as sick patients to study and treat. Irene was a thirteen-year-old Navajo girl who, in the summer of 1964, got a new roommate at the Clinical Center on the same floor where Carolyn had lived, the 8 West for insulin and diabetes. Irene’s new roommate was a nineteen-year-old Normal from an Anabaptist college in Kansas who described her time with Irene in daily letters home to her boyfriend. “I had enjoyed being alone so much,” the young woman wrote after Irene temporarily left, “but am glad she’s back now since we still have not gotten the TV back (and I hope we never will).” Irene had a tracheotomy; she was shy and spoke little; the location of her family is unknown. Federal concern specifically with the health of children from Native communities is a legacy of boarding school programs that removed Native children from their homes, cut them off from their families, and socialized them into white American habits, priorities, and networks.Footnote ¹⁹ Tuberculosis was a particular concern on reservations and in the total institutions of boarding schools especially. Irene’s presence at the Clinical Center was likely an effect of the Bureau of Indian Affair’s failures and Congress’s reassignment of responsibility for Native health to the Public Health Service, which also subsumes NIH.

They developed a sweet intimacy. “Irene + I have been having a very good time together lately,” the young woman wrote. “She acts so different around some people but not like a vegetable with me.” The young woman was set to return to her Anabaptist college at the start of September. “She said she will miss me when I leave. I just hope I’ve been a good influence + have helped her see more in life than the TV set.”Footnote ²⁰ The following year, Irene was still living on the eighth floor of the Clinical Center, the young woman’s boyfriend now living at the Clinical Center serving as a Normal himself. “I suddenly remembered you wanted me to look up Irene,” he wrote to her the following year, “but she wasn’t in.” Irene was, however, still living on the same ward on 8 West.Footnote ²¹

Another “normal control” Anabaptist young woman wrote to her grandparents about Native children at the Clinical Center. The young woman played with the children as part of her unpaid work assignment in the Clinical Center’s recreation department, where she went during downtime from experiments. “[O]ne of my favorites is Alice [redacted], a 5 year old Am. Indian,” she wrote to her grandparents, “I might have mentioned her before.” Alice also lived on the endocrinology unit, 8 West. “Alice has a very rare condition, at least for a girl. Her blood does not clot,” the Normal wrote. “I’m not positive, but I think she has to have transfusions something like every five days.”Footnote ²² Like Irene, the nature of Alice’s illness, the location of her family, or the condition of her assent are unclear.

The idea that it made sense to talk about “Am. Indian” as a group was a product of the US settler state. Until the American Revolution, settlers considered Indigenous people to be white, which was simultaneously a political and a biological statement. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, white elites lumped various Native groups into the racial category of “red.” When they were white, Native people were imagined as physically and mentally like white settlers, if socially different, and, therefore, capable of reform and worthy of assimilation. The contrast was with people whose families were African, nearly all enslaved at the time. Ruling elites and citizens of a slave nation could better justify the institution by maintaining the strategic fantasy that any perceived physical differences between settlers (largely European descent) and the people they enslaved (largely African descent) indicated a physical incapability of adopting dispositions on which political rights rested.Footnote ²³ When Native people became “red,” they too were reimagined as biologically different from white settlers, politically intractable, and incapable of governance.Footnote ²⁴ This recategorization justified explicit federal policies of termination starting in the early nineteenth century – including deportation, expulsion, and extermination.Footnote ²⁵

The political attitudes of the white settler state overlay a material need for territory – fields, mountains, water – and the resources they contained, as well as exigency of smooth travel that possession allowed. Thus, Native dispossession and scientific racism by the United States is always interdependent with Black subjugation.Footnote ²⁶ After the Civil War, scientific racism, under the banner of social Darwinism, elaborated stage theories of society, including Lewis Henry Morgan’s three-stage insult of savagery, barbarism, and civilization.Footnote ²⁷ These stage theories were teleological, associating practices and people with a period in evolutionary time. The racial category of “red” was a political tool that built in the assumption of difference in social evolution and distance in evolutionary time, which then prompted scientists to design studies that treated these assumptions as real.Footnote ²⁸

The US federal government introduced the category of “Indian” to the US Census in 1850 but the aim – and census-takers’ activity – was to count only Native people who “renounced tribal rule” and “exercised the rights of a citizen.” In the mid nineteenth century, the point was to track the settler-state goal of disappearance through “assimilation” and to count the number of people who needed to pay federal taxes particularly after the Indian Apportionment Act (1871) that parceled Native people’s land for private ownership. The criteria for being “Indian” changed after the Dawes Severalty Act (1887), through which the US government took possession of Native land. After the Dawes Act passed Congress, people were required to register on tribal rolls (Dawes Rolls), which were based on ancestry. Thereafter, US census-takers were taught to count people as Native depending on their blood quota, not based on whether they renounced tribal rule (and were potential taxpayers). The addition, revision, and reintroduction of “Indian” into the census tracked the careening US policies toward Native groups.Footnote ²⁹

By 1962, the category of “Native American” lumped together the people that Carolyn had seen in Arizona as a child and the children from the Great Plains that lived in the Clinical Center in the 1960s, as well as many more groups – including Inuit people, Hawaiian islanders, and people who straddled the borders of settler states, like Mohawks (US–Canada) and Akimel O’odham (US–Mexico).Footnote ³⁰ The creation of a bureaucratic category to capture a variety of Native groups suggested a coherent scientific racial grouping. It also suggested a homogeneity and commensurability, which belied a range of lifeways, lineages, and experiences under American Empire and global capitalism.

Although Carolyn was poor at being a “normal control” human subject, she was diligent in her career assignment as an unpaid lab technician. Dr. Jan Wolff was leader of the Clinical Endocrinology Branch, and supervisor of the young scientist who had enrolled Carolyn as a Normal. Together, they processed data for their endocrinology research in their laboratory.Footnote ³¹ Carolyn helped. How would people have perceived her then, more than fifty years ago, I asked in one conversation? “Oh, naïve,” Carolyn told me, “Cooperative, except for not being able to pee on schedule, mostly cooperative.”Footnote ³²

Hormones from the thyroid process iodine, and, troublingly, nuclear fallout sends out radioactive iodine. As of 1962, the United States was continuing a program of testing nuclear weapons in the ocean and upper atmosphere, as well as in the deserts of the American Southwest. Thus, the United States was funding both research on atomic science and research on the diseases that atomic science caused. Under its Atoms for Peace campaign, the US government paid the salary of Dr. Wolff, who was figuring out how to block the thyroid function in the event of a nuclear accident.Footnote ³³ Another (paid) technician would stop at one of NIH’s slaughter houses and bring thyroid glands from sheep, pigs, and other animals to the lab. Carolyn’s job was to grind up the glands and prepare them for tests. She did not know what the researchers were trying to learn. “It had something to do with thyroid,” she said. “It was very lofty and technical.” She did not find her work interesting; she just wanted to do a good job.Footnote ³⁴

Interesting or not, she was happy. So it was easy to smile when the Washington Post photographer arrived at Dr. Wolff’s lab (Figure 7.3). With Carolyn in a white lab coat, her situation was too delicious to resist: a human guinea pig doing research on other lab animals. The photographer snapped pictures of Carolyn rather than the scientists. Readers of the Washington Post were taught what it was like for her and other Normals to be subjects of NIH medical research. “Personal consent is essential,” the article instructed. “No volunteer ever starts any test without first understanding its purpose, methods, duration, demands and inconveniences or discomforts.” The people who served in medical research were portrayed as a type. “They are not dare-devils, nor fools, nor even overly inspired idealists,” the journalist wrote. “They’re ordinary men and women, mostly in their twenties, who see a job that needs to be done and offer to do it.”Footnote ³⁵ NIH strategically allowed access at the Clinical Center only to sympathetic journalists to manage its reputation.

Figure 7.3 Carolyn Matthews as “Normal Control,” published in the Washington Post, 1963.

Source: Co-op Photo Collection, Olive Kettering Library, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH.

In the evenings, Carolyn would get a pass from 8-West nursing station, trundle down to the first floor, and wait in the sweet autumn dusk for Jan Wolff’s car. Wolff and the esteemed biochemist, Edith Wolff, who had married him, hired her as their babysitter. Word of Carolyn spread among the upper ranks, and she started babysitting for other scientists, too. Still, it came as a surprise when the doctor made a proposition. “[O]ne day when I was in my room on 8-West, another doctor who I’d never seen before came into my room – his name was Dr. William O’Brien – and said, ‘Hey, I’m putting together a team to go to Arizona to take x-rays, to find the incidence of rheumatoid arthritis in this Indian population in Arizona. Would you consider coming?’”

Carolyn had never seen him before. He had just returned from a three-month stay at the Blackfeet Indian Reservation on the US border with Canada.Footnote ³⁶

“Me being this restless person I already told you about, I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’d love to’.”Footnote ³⁷

Sacaton, 1963: Carolyn as Research Technician

Carolyn arrived with the team in January 1963 and had ambitions of making an ethnological study of the Native community. It was a romance drawn from popular knowledge of the dominant school of cultural anthropology at the time, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology.Footnote ³⁸ Practitioners drew “plans” of space from a bird’s-eye view, often Indigenous villages and tribal meeting places (Figure 7.4). Carolyn named the “dust, dirt, grit,” and drew arrows to the world beyond the paper’s edge as she imagined it. “The desert to infinity,” they pointed. For structural anthropologists, it was unnecessary to learn of the world beyond the paper’s edge because the “plans” of physical space corresponded to the social structure of a group, which itself could be “mapped” with ink and paper. Lévi-Strauss was credited with helping to dismantle the racist orthodoxy in mid-century Euro-American science. His target and that of many others was race science and eugenics, which claimed racial inequality was the natural consequence of biological difference, rather than the result of political oppression and discrimination, as the liberal academy agreed. In some camps, however, structural anthropology in general and Lévi-Strauss in particular were rebuked for replacing race science with a nonetheless essentialist and race-based concept of human difference. Essential racial difference was built into the visual grammar of structural anthropology. Its mapping method assumed that people with a different skin color also had within their bodies a fundamentally different social “structure” – where the white Euro-American experience was the unmarked category against which difference was compared. But Carolyn’s amateurism left room for subversion. In drawing a plan of the NIH site, her untrained anthropology flipped a method and a viewpoint that scientists had originally developed on (and had used to discipline) Native groups back onto a scientific community.Footnote ³⁹

Figure 7.4 Carolyn Matthews’s “plan” of field site, undated.

Source: Carolyn Matthews collection, VANV.

Soon Carolyn dropped her ethnographic ambitions as scores of people emerged out of the desert to infinity. That seemingly endless vacant sandscape was in fact striped with irrigation ditches and established villages.Footnote ⁴⁰ People of the Akimel O’odham tribe, known to settlers as the Pima Indians, had farmed the banks of Keli Akimel (the Gila River), which lent the people its name. The river also distinguished them from their kin, the Tohono O’odham (Papago), who lived to the south and migrated between desert and mountain, farming and hunting, depending on the season.Footnote ⁴¹ The Akimel O’odham, by contrast, were steady, resident agriculturalists. Until the late nineteenth century, they grew cotton, wheat, corn, beans, and melon for subsistence, often with surplus, which they traded or gave to neighboring tribes, to travelers en route to the Pacific coast’s mineable mountains, or to administrators of the Mexican and American governments surveying the land and its resources. Mexico officially claimed the land after that colony itself gained independence from Spain, but the Mexican government still let the tribe govern itself as a matter of convenience.Footnote ⁴² Akimel O’odham land remained part of Mexico even after the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), when the United States claimed swaths of territory that it governs today as the states of the Southwest and Pacific Coast.Footnote ⁴³

The group’s land remained part of Mexico – and its people effectively self-governing resident farmers – until the United States bought a bite of land south of the Gila River in 1854. Then the United States claimed much of the Akimel O’odham land as its own and pushed people into a newly parceled reservation, its linear borders drawn over a small section of their previous territory. The drive for railroads, mail service, and other accoutrements of national infrastructure hardened the US containment, as did US mining interests in the region.

In the 1950s, local scientists around Phoenix bemoaned the recent changes in the foods Akimel O’odham people ate. Where beans, tortillas, and chili peppers were staple for older folks, younger people bought packaged food at trading posts. “The Pima Indians are a southern Arizona tribe which has readily acclimatized itself to Western civilization through fairly close proximity to off-reservation urban communities,” one local scientist explained in 1959. They were geographically near “civilization,” the scientist said, and yet consumed “mostly non-perishable foods that are bought because of long distances traveled and lack of facilities for storage of perishable foods.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Scientific investigations left unremarked the relation between changes in the tribe’s foodways and the United States’ enclosure of the tribe in a reservation away from the Gila, the government’s systematic denial of water for their irrigation systems that decimated their remaining farm lands, and federal policy on agriculture and economics favoring industrial capitalism. Left unremarked was the possibility that these changes in foodways were a political problem, not an outcome of nature (e.g., droughts), and therefore not natural and inevitable.Footnote ⁴⁵

When the new arrivals from NIH parked their trailers a short stretch from the US Public Health Service’s Indian Hospital, they made their first discovery: they were far from the only scientists studying the local tribe (Figure 7.5.).Footnote ⁴⁶ Inside the PHS Indian Hospital, a young clinician had been collecting information from Native medical records on a stack of index cards.Footnote ⁴⁷ He was of the mind, as a colleague put it, that there was a “critical need for good health for Indian people if they were to take their rightful place in American Society.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The praise winced with settler assumptions and values. The clinician had first studied tribes in the area during the late 1950s under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute, which was part of NIH. He interviewed and examined Navajo uranium miners who were digging radioactive materials.Footnote ⁴⁹ Uranium is an essential building block of atomic weapons and nuclear states were the only buyers on uranium markets. The US government was spending money both to continue its nuclear weapons development program and to investigate the diseases that resulted from the program, especially cancer from exposure to uranium dust, nuclear waste materials, and fallout from test explosions.Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 7.5 NIH trailers at data collection site, circa 1963.

Source: NIDDK, PowerPoint. Thanks to NIDDK Sacaton Branch.

By the time Carolyn arrived, she had gotten two weeks of official training at the NIH Clinical Center on how to use the equipment before flying to Phoenix with the team.Footnote ⁵¹ So with limited formal training, her working knowledge of making x-rays – how to arrange people’s bodies like a portrait sitting, where to touch to tactfully drape the lead apron, when to swivel the machine like a carnival game – came from practice in conditions unlike those of the Clinical Center exam rooms.

Among other things, Carolyn was now standing inside a truck (Figure 7.6). When the door swung open it let in a burst of light and air – along with a person hoisting up into the vehicle. She took four pictures: neck, pelvis, hands, and feet. Then she stepped to the tail of the truck to let the films develop in the makeshift darkroom. At the end of January, she turned nineteen years old.

Figure 7.6 Carolyn Matthews’s NIH research team on location in 1963.

Photographer: Carolyn Matthews. Carolyn Matthews wrote a description on the back in 1963: “X-ray van / Joel [Silverman] + Dr. [Thomas] Burch / (pineapple juice used / for glucose tolerance test / is in Black Label beer / cartons).” Source: Carolyn Matthews collection, VANV.

At first, the work was steady and manageable. Bernice, a member of the tribe, recorded each person’s basic information in a mobile-home trailer when they arrived, then gave them a drink from the carton of Black Label beer. Bernice was hired as a temporary secretary for NIH, and her husband was hired too. He worked as a driver, one of the locals who knew the topography and motored around the reservation collecting tribe members for the study.Footnote ⁵² When he pulled up to the site, he pointed his passengers to Bernice’s trailer, who then directed them to Carolyn’s truck. He waited as they crossed the sand to the last truck, where a member of the NIH team took their blood and saliva. The drink from the beer carton had been pineapple juice, not alcohol, and the needle in the vein allowed the researchers to test the level of sugar in their blood. Then he gathered his passengers to return them home. By late March, his trips were so frequent and his car so full, Carolyn was working ten-hour days.

In the evening, Carolyn and the rest of the NIH team drove to Chandler, the next town over from Sacaton and off the reservation. NIH had rented an old estate hotel, La Hacienda, with separate units for each of the families: Dr. William O’Brien, his wife, and two toddlers; Dr. Thomas Burch, head of the field unit; Dr. Peter Bennett and nurse Sally Bennett, his wife, both from the United Kingdom, and another young researcher also taking x-rays. Carolyn had a unit to herself as a family of one. Most nights, she cooked, cleaned herself, and promptly went to bed. On Sundays, the team cooked a communal meal in the central kitchen and ate together in the banquet hall.

At that time, there was a beguiling, and, to many researchers, highly suspect explanation circulating in the medical literature for a smattering of seemingly unrelated diseases: arthritis, diabetes, fever, and skin rashes.Footnote ⁵³ These different conditions had a common cause, researchers argued, at least in some instances: an autoimmune disorder.Footnote ⁵⁴ Before joining the NIH team, Bennett had done influential work in the UK to first argue that arthritis was often a sign of an autoimmune attack (rheumatoid arthritis), and not always the result of wear and tear on the joints (osteoarthritis). After his initial work, Bennett was keen to investigate whether genetics determined the autoimmune malfunction, but he conceded in a 1960 write-up: “No definite views on causation can be expressed on the evidence available.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Picking up the scent of a research question from across the Atlantic, NIH researchers got to work. In the fall of 1962, while Carolyn was serving as a normal control at the Clinical Center, O’Brien decamped for the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. He led a field team in the first of a two-phase study of the causes of autoimmune-based, rheumatoid arthritis. To help collect data from the Native community, NIH invited Bennett to Montana. Building on the work of the UK team, the NIH group wanted to find the “non-genetic etiology for these conditions,” namely, rheumatoid factor (an indicator of autoimmune disease). When O’Brien had come to Carolyn’s hospital room at the Clinical Center, he had been a stranger to her because he had been in Montana gathering x-rays and blood from Native community members.

In addition to genetics, another possible cause of arthritis was climate. The NIH team designed their field survey in Sacaton to allow them to test the hypothesis that climate (hot/dry versus cold/moist) predicted a particular form of arthritis better than genetics (“heredity”). The logic of comparison articulates the racialized assumptions of NIH scientists. There are plenty of hot dry places in the United States. But scientists wanted to control for another key variable: race. By this logic, scientists needed, then, to pick people (a “stable population”) in a hot dry place that were related to people thousands of miles away on the US–Canada border. There is little that is intuitive about the idea that a group of people in the Sonoran Desert were a “stable population” given migration and relationships across the US–Mexico border; there was little reason to imagine they were more closely related to people in Montana than to residents of Phoenix, where Akimel O’odham people moved, married, and worked. Through their logic of comparison it is possible to see how scientists imagined this political difference in how the US government treated groups as a biological reality.Footnote ⁵⁶

By April, the team had brought nearly all of the adults living on the reservation – one thousand in all – to the trucks for an exam, x-rays, saliva swab, and blood draw.Footnote ⁵⁷ The team packed up the trailers and their families, said goodbye to Bernice and the other local workers, and went back to Bethesda. Carolyn returned to school.

Boston, 1964: Carolyn as Research Technician

In the spring of 1964, Carolyn decamped for another co-op assignment: in Boston, where she worked as a live-in cook for a communal home for the Quaker church.Footnote ⁵⁸ At the end of the quarter, she decided to stay. She had gotten out of sync with her Antioch cohort when she skipped a beat to go directly from Bethesda to Sacaton. (“I was never one of the tribe,” she said.) She also never fit the mold of the politically radical Antioch student. And the pacifist politics of her Quaker housemates had started to compel. US imperialism bore down in Southeast Asia and nuclear weapons enhanced its menace. Within American borders, the practice of nonviolent resistance of the mainstream Black Civil Rights movement aligned with the goals and philosophy of the Quaker church. In the early 1960s, only a few groups connected US imperial projects, on the one hand, and the Black Civil Rights movement, on the other hand, in a way that articulated the movement as a response to American imperialism via chattel slavery and its extensions.

As a result, it was possible for middle-class white Americans, like Carolyn, to miss imperial projects close to home. Like the Black Civil Rights movement, the Red Power movement mobilized in the late 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁹ Unlike the Black Civil Rights movement, however, the demands of Red Power were not for civil rights defined by liberal individualism. Native American sovereignty movements, contemporary with the nonviolent Civil Rights movement, demanded recognition of their full political authority over land and lives that the US claimed or presumed to control.Footnote ⁶⁰

With her NIH credentials, despite now being a college drop-out, Carolyn was hired as a scanning technician in the Radiation Department at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, next to the Harvard Medical School. This steady job, one she had found herself not pointed at in a college binder, felt very good in concept. She wore a lab coat, fetched doctors to inject people with radioisotopes, and scanned their bellies with a new machine the department was testing. At the end of the week, she got her own paycheck.

In practice, the work felt considerably worse. Instead of sending radioactive atomic particles into the bodies of Akimel O’odham people (her job as an x-ray technician with NIH), she was using a new machine that absorbed atomic waves from people’s temporarily radioactive bodies. Carolyn worked under Dr. James Potchen, who got his medical training during the Eisenhower administration and the federal “Atoms for Peace” campaign, through which the Atomic Energy Commission urged researchers to find uses for atomic science beyond its use for weapons.Footnote ⁶¹ Under the Atoms for Peace program, the federal government made and mailed radioactive versions of molecules to scientists around the country, including the radioactive iodine used in Jan Wolff’s lab at the NIH Clinical Center, where Carolyn had worked without pay when she was not serving in experiments. Radiologists like Potchen knew that when the radioactive version of a molecule, called radioisotope tracer, is put into the body (in a drink, or through an injection), it moves through the body just like a regular molecule, but it emits radiation. If researchers had a machine that could detect radiation as well as human tissues (x-rays are only good for bones), they could see how “normal” bodies work and where sick bodies are having problems. During his first year of residency, Potchen designed such a machine. Today he is credited with making the first radionucleotide image in the esteemed Harvard hospital system.Footnote ⁶²

To get clinicians beyond Boston to use his scanner – and, through the instrument, to extend the reach of his influence – he needed to show its usefulness. He corralled the experimental results of his scanner to get funding from the Atomic Energy Commission to continue testing the machine and to establish its precision.Footnote ⁶³ He hired Carolyn to do the scans.

The work felt ethically wrong to Carolyn, and by Potchen’s own admission it was. “That first image was produced at night somewhat surreptitiously,” Potchen said, “because all clinical radioisotopes at the Brigham were in the domains of the departments of surgery, endocrinology, or hematology. Radiology did not have permission from the ‘clinical chiefs’ to be using isotopes on patients.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The Atomic Energy Commission had control over isotope distribution, and sent isotopes to medical departments for their exclusive use.

It was unclear what patients and healthy people knew about the injections they got and about the scans. Carolyn herself did not know much, nor did she ask. Sometimes she scanned patients for a diagnosis or to ready them for surgery. Other times she scanned the healthy hospital orderlies and janitors, her fellow low-skill laboring friends. Every few days, she carried the radioactive waste down the hall to an open storage room in the hospital.Footnote ⁶⁵

Years later, Potchen reflected on the ethics of his experiments in nuclear medicine to refine the scanner: “I am still not convinced that the early unregulated years inflicted any harm to patients.” Ethically, the interest was whether scientists thought the procedure could harm, rather than whether a patient or a community had a right simply to know they were part of an experiment and to have the power to decide. The concern was with the result rather than with the ethics of the action. “Such an approach would be unthinkable today, and would require many years to reach the same conclusions.” It is worth noting that Potchen’s practices were not uniformly endorsed, even then. Carolyn lasted a year.

Portland, 1977: Carolyn as Story-Worker

In the thirteen years after Carolyn dropped out of Antioch, she moved more than a dozen times. After her year as a Boston lab technician, she moved to Switzerland as a nanny; later, she briefly took classes at Columbia University, where she watched the women’s movement pulse into popular awareness on the streets of New York City. She kept her Boston connection to the Quaker church and, though she was not a religious believer, she took a job with the American Friends Service Committee in 1968 in San Francisco. Within months of Carolyn’s arrival, an activist group, Indians of All Tribes, landed on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. Just a mile offshore from the city’s North Beach, the island was by 1969 a legendarily brutal maximum-security federal prison. The activists of Indians of All Tribes aligned with the Red Power movement. They organized to occupy Alcatraz to protest the US government’s policies of termination of Native communities. They carried weapons and stayed for nineteen months. Carolyn’s activist sensibilities were, however, elsewhere.

San Francisco was the context for what she came to see as her “political awakening.” In that city and that year, the war in Vietnam was the dominant target of protest and the summer of love its emblem. Her work and social life was oriented around her Christian pacifist Friends, so it was the US proxy war on Red China, not the Red Power movement, which tuned her attention. She was involved in the Movement for a New Society, which opposed violence abroad and supported Black Civil Rights at home. Yet it had less to say about war as a strategy of continental American Empire or about Native sovereignty claims. In 1973, two years after the Alcatraz occupation ended, Native groups operating under the American Indian movement stood off with federal agents at Wounded Knee, the site of the US federal massacre of Lakota people in 1890.Footnote ⁶⁶

Through another antiwar job with the Quaker church, Carolyn moved back to Boston in 1974. The same year, the US Congress passed the National Research Act in the wake of public exposure of the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies, the four-decades long racist and exploitative study of African-American men funded by the US government. Federal health agencies, led by the National Institutes of Health, had been quietly working to write policies to guide research on “human subjects” since the mid-1960s.Footnote ⁶⁷ When an enterprising journalist at the Washington Star finally followed up in 1972 on a tip about the Public Health Service-sponsored research on poor Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, the agency had already drafted a set of policies for the US Congress to adopt as law. There were other options proposed, including a centralized federal ethics review office (to encourage consistent decision-making and transparency), rather than innumerable local Institutional Review Boards, modeled on the NIH Clinical Center’s Clinical Review Committee. But Congress lined up behind the plan from the NIH proposal, to deflect legal responsibility away from the federal government and toward local research institutions.Footnote ⁶⁸

Thus, US federal protections for human subjects research – and popular knowledge of those protections (e.g., through the mass media) – bore the mark of the specific historical event that prompted the protections: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In the present day, American ethics training, as well as mass-market accounts of the importance of the field of bioethics, begins with Tuskegee.Footnote ⁶⁹

The essential feature of Tuskegee in its public iterations was that the human subjects racially identified as Black. They also lived in a rural area, earned less money than they needed, and experienced structural racism, as well as casual prejudice and interpersonal discrimination. Yet, American law and ethics about human research was coded as a set of practices especially “protecting” people who were Black – which was important but also an insufficient recognition of the structures of injustice at play. The 1974 National Research Act, in addition to requiring regulation, also mandated that a committee of experts write ethical guidelines that would translate the regulations into useable language and a moral framework. This mandate resulted in the Belmont Report, following a four-year effort in the mid-1970s, through which a team of scientists, theologians, and ethicists gathered background papers and wrote a several-hundred-page manual. This influential report and its background papers discussed Black Americans in research, but failed to mention other racial-identity groups or the political dispossession that connects them.

Carolyn was in her early thirties when she moved back to Portland to be near her aged parents and the landscape that had raised her. In 1977, as the Belmont Commission completed its work and five years after the Tuskegee Syphilis Study had hit the headlines, Carolyn went back to school at Portland’s Marylhurst Education Center (now Marylhurst University). With the hopes she might earn some course credit, Carolyn wrote up her past decade of transient work experience.

From the vantage point of 1977, she first explained her previous work at the NIH Clinical Center:

Her “principled questions” were organized around whether she, as a human subject, had been on the receiving end of an adequate informed consent process. The write-up documents that the scholarly literature emerging in the late 1970s, as the field of American bioethics consolidated, informed Carolyn’s bioethical vocabulary and analysis.

Carolyn also analyzed her earlier job as a research technician in Boston. Among other things, her responsibilities included:

Carolyn explained from the vantage of 1977 what she learned from the job in Boston. “This was one of my early exposures to medical deception,” she wrote. “I did not at this time, link this up with my having been an ill-informed subject of medical experimentation at NIH.” Carolyn affirmed that by 1977 she did not connect her earlier experience at NIH as a “human guinea pig” with that of her research subjects in Boston. Carolyn’s 1977 write-up shows how she reframed her past with tools of the field of American bioethics that emerged in this decade.

Carolyn also thought back to her work in Sacaton with the Akimel O’odham people. What is worth noting is what was left unstated under the frame of American bioethics:

Unlike her accounts of her experiences in Boston and Bethesda, Carolyn did not articulate her experiences in Sacaton in terms of questionable consent or possible coercion. Unlike the other two medical research experiences, she did not see a similarity between herself at the Clinical Center, her human subjects in Boston, and her research subjects in Sacaton – the Akimel O’odham people. In her 1977 report to Marylhurst, Carolyn described each of the three work experiences in chronological order. To draw the ethical connection between Boston and Bethesda as she did, Carolyn had to leapfrog her work with Native research subjects.

The puzzle is how it was possible for a person like Carolyn to fail to draw a connection. She was a deeply compassionate and educated person: she was informed about the ethics of research on people, had been employed in anti-imperial work for social justice, and was lucid in her memory of her part in research on the Akimel O’odham people (“Pima Indians”). Based on her 1977 account of her earlier experiences in Boston, Bethesda, and Sacaton, I want to suggest that Carolyn enunciated the formally sanctioned American bioethical frame. She is a best-case scenario not merely of what was allowable but what was perceptible under the dominant bioethical frame – which is a frame that set the structure of bioethical thinking that continues to dominate white American sensibilities today. To support justice through the work of history, it is important to precisely identify how and why the research setting that was most overtly characterized by racialist imperial power dynamics could be illegible within such a solid frame of ethical analysis. Carolyn is an indicator of what American bioethics made morally imaginable and legible as a matter of ethics.

Conclusion

Carolyn’s story testifies to the embeddedness of modern American bioethics in a logic of colonialism. Dominant strains of modern science have invented and stabilized purportedly natural categories, such as race, which settler states and other global actors have used to naturalize difference, universalize place-specific relations, and justify political rule. No doubt, territorial expansion, forced labor, and violence are tactics shared beyond settler states; Indigenous groups have used these tactics, too. What is distinctive of Euro-American settler states, however, is their enlistment of formal science in the service of setter logics and practices.

At the same time that settler states have operated through science, in the twentieth century, the field of bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science.Footnote ⁷⁰ Instead of operating as place-specific, responsive practices of valuation, American bioethics reproduced the ontologies of the human sciences, life sciences, and clinical sciences that it claimed to hold to account. Bioethics functioned to uphold the settler logics of the sciences it claimed to regulate because it was a product of those sciences – designed to allow them to continue racialized, extractive practices without serious question or reform.Footnote ⁷¹ The implication is that research with people, even in the most formally ethical conditions among well-intended people, can enact this colonial logic.Footnote ⁷² To the extent that professional history has uncritically absorbed the discourse of modern American bioethics, the field – even in its best efforts – can rearticulate a colonial moral logic.

Carolyn’s story materializes the perfect functioning of bioethics’ settler logic. It reveals that the formally sanctioned and globally dominant American bioethical frame actively makes imperial situations illegible as such. In doing so, it defuses the settler past that structures the possibilities of action in a given situation, and the possibilities of scientific research in the first place. The imperial power dynamics of the Sacaton research situation was illegible in Carolyn’s moral imagination, even from the vantage of 1977. With Carolyn as a guide, it is possible to recognize that the dominant American bioethical frame is marked by its origins in the US federal government – as a historically specific outgrowth of the Tuskegee exposé, which allowed elite actors to narrow ethics concerns, to emphasize racial discrimination as a preeminent issue, to organize ethics of race around a Black–white binary, and to exclude consideration of settler colonialism.Footnote ⁷³

This points to the framing of bioethics as an issue of safeguarding civic individualism, rather than dismantling anticolonial logics. It also suggests the bioethical frame is organized around expectations of citizenship and the demand that the state observe individual civil rights. Thus, the possibility that sovereignty is at stake, rather than civil rights, is not part of the officially sanctioned American bioethical frame. An imagination of the United States as an empire is inactive. Projects on research justice, such as CARE, as well as new critical histories of human experimentation, offer strategies reengaging research as an ethical relational practice.Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition to promises that have not yet been met, there are solidarities yet to activate between movements for Native sovereignty and against anti-Black racism, both grounded in the bioethics of the US state.