Making Native Science: Indigenous Epistemologies and Settler Sciences in the United States Empire The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Nelson, Elias. 2018. Making Native Science: Indigenous Epistemologies and Settler Sciences in the United States Empire. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41129223 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Making Native Science: Indigenous Epistemologies and Settler Sciences in the United States Empire A dissertation presented by Elias William Nelson to Department of History of Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2018 © 2018 Elias William Nelson All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Ahmed Ragab Elias William Nelson Making Native Science: Indigenous Epistemologies and Settlers Sciences in the United States Empire Abstract This dissertation traces the history of Native science in the United States empire from the mid-19th through the end of the 20th century. Native science, an episteme that I propose is not synonymous with Indigenous epistemologies, but rather includes them, is particular to a settler colonial context in which settler sciences systemically and cyclically work to appropriate and terminate Indigenous bodies, lands, and knowledges in the service of capital (intellectual and economic) production and legitimacy for the settler state. Native science emerges as the knowledge production of the cast objects and tools of settler normative sciences. It is an unsettling epistemic foil to settler science and is marked by queer failures to achieve the authority of settler sciences, a vision of epistemic sovereignty reflective of political nested sovereignty, and the inclusion of diverse Indigenous bodies of knowledge, methodologies, and histories. I explore different modes and moments of Native science and the roles it has played in Indigenous survivance on Turtle Island, while also developing the history of what I propose are settler and frontier sciences. Native science has moved from an unsettling embedded practice within settler scientific hegemony, to an unnamed mechanism of navigating relations to colonized lands and bodies, to an actor’s category today. This dissertation is composed of two parts. Part I, “Red Progressives and Not-Quite Settler Sciences,” follows the figure of the native informant through the Red iii Progressive generation (1870-1932) in medicine and ethnology, focusing on Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, Dr. Carlos Montezuma, and Francis La Flesche. Part II, “Repossessing the Wilderness: New Deal and Postwar Frontier Sciences and Native Science and Technology,” looks at how Indigenous leaders, activists, and laborers have negotiated top-down settler scientific initiatives in relation to their lands and communities, focusing on frontier sciences in the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps—Indian Division in the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation and Haudenosaunee constructions of epistemic sovereignty in the postwar period. In an epilogue, I consider the futures of Native science as expressed in the history of canoes as temporal technologies that cultivate a horizon-oriented epistemology. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... ix List of figures ............................................................................................................................... xii Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Outline ......................................................................................................................... 14 PART I: RED PROGRESSIVES AND NOT-QUITE SETTLER SCIENCES .................... 18 1. Indigenous Physicians: Native Informants, Disability, and Reservation Diseases ....... 19 The Physician as a Native Informant ........................................................................................ 22 Wassaja (Signaling) Disability ................................................................................................. 34 Twin Reservation Diseases: Allotment and Addiction ............................................................. 40 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 47 2. “Playing the White Man’s Game”: the Native Informant as an Epistemic Tool .......... 51 The Conception and Manufacture of a Native Informant ......................................................... 58 On Being a Technology ............................................................................................................ 75 3. “From one who knows”: Collaborator Versus Informant ............................................ 100 4. Not Quite-Ethnology ......................................................................................................... 122 Technology, Religion, and the Location of Indigenous Knowledge ...................................... 125 Not-Quite Ethnology and the Science of Salvage................................................................... 135 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 149 PART II: REPOSSESSING THE WILDERNESS ................................................................ 153 5. Progressive Crisis and Eastern Band Technology: The Civilian Conservation Corps— Indian Division at Qualla Boundary ....................................................................................... 154 Crisis and Imperialist Nostalgia .............................................................................................. 158 Public Health ........................................................................................................................... 170 Forestry ................................................................................................................................... 175 Tourism ................................................................................................................................... 180 Leadership ............................................................................................................................... 184 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 192 Epilogue .................................................................................................................................. 196 6. Walking to the Future in the Steps of Our Ancestors: Postwar Haudenosaunee Science, Epistemic Sovereignty, and Queer Time .................................................................. 199 The Great Law and Epistemic Sovereignty ............................................................................ 203 TEK in Space-Time before 1992 ............................................................................................ 215 Rio’s Great Epistemic Break .................................................................................................. 218 Native Space at Kari-Oca........................................................................................................ 220 Queer Time and Epistemic Sovereignty ................................................................................. 223 v Coda ........................................................................................................................................ 225 Epilogue--“Hōkūleʻa is in the past”......................................................................................... 227 Disgusting Technologies: Non-Native Investigations of Canoes ........................................... 229 Hōkūleʻa: The Spaceship of the Ancestors ............................................................................. 231 Returning to Ourselves: Horizon Epistemologies and Native Science ................................... 236 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 239 Appendix .................................................................................................................................... 249 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 270 vi Making Native Science: Indigenous Epistemologies and Settler Sciences in the United States Empire At the End of the Trail by Bunky Echo-Hawk (2013) Eli Nelson vii For my father: it was enough that you stirred me to keep searching and forgive viii Acknowledgements It is a humbling experience to come to the end of your dissertation and realize you are at a complete loss for words. I simply do not know what I could say in these few short pages that would even start to speak to one debt I owe in particular. But there