In 1899 the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians came into being - at least on paper. Its "intent" was to
be a hospital dedicated solely to the 'mental illness problem' within the Native American Community at
that point in history. In actuality, this was not the first mental hospital of its kind. In 1873 the
Cherokee Council created a home for the deaf, blind and insane that was exclusively for Cherokee
use.
The brainchild of an Indian agent and Republican Senator R.F. Pettigrew, Hiawatha was considered to
be yet another medium for social change for Indian communities. Created under the reasoning that
state hospitals were for state residents and that given "Indians were wards of the government", they
were not state residents, therefore there was no place for mentally ill Indians to go, the asylum was
easily ushered into existence. While its purpose looked good on paper, in reality it proved to be little
more than an experiment in eugenics.
Hiawatha's building broke ground in 1901 in the tiny town of Canton, South Dakota. The asylum itself
consisted of a three story main building with two wings housing four wards. This building sat on a hill
outside of Canton, in front of where the Canton-Inwood hospital sits today. Over the years, several
houses were built behind the main building for employees, as well four barns and a pig shed. The
administrator was given a house to the west of the complex. In later years a surgery/hospital building
was built directly to the East of the main building, its purpose being to house TB patients or to
accommodate infirmary needs. The dining room was also located in this building.
A seven foot high fence surrounded the asylum. Designed to keep patients in and the public out, two
steel gates with the words "Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians" in wrought iron curved above them
were the only way in or out of the property.
Hiawatha accepted its first patient on December 31, 1902. A year later there were 16 patients. By
the time the asylum was closed in 1934, over 374 documented Native Americans from 50 different
tribes would have passed through its doors, many of them never seeing their homes or loved ones
ever again.
The first Administrator was a former mayor of Canton and state Representative, Oscar Gifford. The
man solely responsible for bringing the asylum to the tiny town, Gifford had no medical experience,
just a head for business. He'd drafted the land deal that secured the property upon which the asylum
sat. The Bureau of Indian Affairs deemed him worthy to run the hospital because of this and a man
with absolutely no knowledge of mental illness was placed in charge of a mental hospital.
From the start Hiawatha was poorly staffed and badly run. Kicking, striking, shaking or choking were
considered acceptable means of control, "treatment" was doing housekeeping and yard work.
The asylum lacked formal commitment procedures save the Commissioner of Indian Affairs was to
authorize all admissions. The Commissioner almost always got the referral from the Indian Agent who
ran the reservation. If the Commissioner agreed and there was an available bed, the person was as
good as committed. Hiawatha even admitted children, normally without parental consent or even
notice sometimes. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs had ultimate say over the lives of all Natives on
the reservations.
To this end, Hiawatha easily became a warehouse for 'problem' Indians, effectively turning it into a
prison.
Gifford ultimately had a brief tenure as Hiawatha's Administrator due to his incompetence but,
ironically, it was also Gifford who unknowingly provided one of the few remaining and forever present
links to Hiawatha's past - the cemetery. He ordered it started when the first patient died in 1903.
Sitting to the far east of the hospital, over a stream and on top of a hill, the cemetery was well out of
view of the hospital buildings themselves. Gifford was replaced when scandal erupted - a patient
ended up pregnant. The powers that be felt it best to replace Oscar Gifford with someone actually
possessing some medical training.
Dr. Harry Hummer replaced Gifford and the rest, as they say, is history - all of it bad. Dr. Hummer was
twenty-nine when he arrived at the asylum. An arrogant man with a megalomaniac streak, he hated
the west, hated his employees and loathed the patients he'd been sent to work with. He would spend
the next twenty years running the asylum with an iron fist.
Patients were kept highly drugged, their files incomplete or entirely missing. Patients who were
deemed worthy for 'treatment' (ie, going outside to do yard work) were allowed outside. Problematic
patients were not allowed outside at all, which no doubt proved torturous for People who lived, thrived
and worshiped out of doors.
The patient ratio was one or two employees to an entire ward, which could consist of up to 20 or 30
patients at any given time. Actual nurses were not hired at Hiawatha until its last few years. Up until
that point locals were hired to work as attendants and they were seriously outnumbered.
In spite of his distaste for the west, Dr. Hummer had no problem banding with a few enterprising town
officials from the city of Canton to make the asylum a money making property. Under the guise of
'opening his hospital to the medical community to show them his success', Hummer opened the
asylum to the public on certain days so that not only medical professionals could come view the "ill"
Indians, the public could as well.
They advertised in several newspapers, inviting vacationers to "come see the crazy Indians". For
quite a while, showcasing the Indians in a 'cleaned up area' of the hospital became a popular money
maker for both Hummer and the City.
Within the hospital, beyond the public display, the patients lived in filth, without plumbing - because
the good doctor would not allow it to be properly installed - and without electricity - not because they
didn't have it, but because Dr. Hummer would not allow it to be used.
Dr. Hummer seemed to be under the impression that if he didn't spend all of the money allotted to him
for the year by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and he sent it back, then they'd transfer him out. It
was a practice that worked against him, keeping him securely in place as hospital Administrator, in
spite of repeated allegations of sexual harassment by his employees and rumors of patient abuse.
The first major inspection came in 1923, followed by another in 1926 when Dr. Herbert Edwards,
Medical Field Secretary of the National Tuberculosis Association and a member of the Meriam
Commission, investigated the asylum. The results of this investigation became part of what is now
known as "The Meriam Report". It was this report that revealed the dark side of the asylum and
began a process of increased investigation of the hospital.
Finding the staff inappropriately accredited to work with mentally ill patients, Dr. Edwards' findings
show underhanded processes at work without even actually pointing out the wrongs in question.
For years in his annual reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hummer had blown his own
horn, praising his hospital and continued insisting upon a constant need for Hiawatha's presence, as
that there was a severe need within the Native community for mental health attention yet Dr. Edwards
found the patient records grossly incomplete.
Patients were 'diagnosed' under several headings yet showed no signs or symptoms of what they
were alleged to have. The asylum worked at over one hundred percent capacity and seventy percent
of the patient population had lived in the asylum for over five years yet there were no histories and
many of them were quite aware of their faculties. There was little or no documentation regarding their
intake, their ongoing treatment or their progression. Since Hiawatha was being touted as a place to
aid Indians in 'getting better', this stark reality points to something else entirely - ultimate warehousing.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, one of the main requirements of release from any mental
hospital was sterilization. This meant a physician qualified to handle the procedure had to be on staff
of any mental hospital. Dr. Hummer did not hire a physician for Hiawatha so release was not an
option. Whether this was intentional is unknown but it can safely be assumed that job security was an
issue. Hummer might have despised the west and his charges, but if he was going to be trapped
there, he would take the steps to make sure that his position was secure, preventing release was a
good start.
So was aligning himself with underhanded Indian agents who wanted to rid their reservations of
people they considered troublemakers or non-conformists. There is documentation that some patients
were little more than people with a drinking problem who were secured at Hiawatha, as is there proof
that horse thieves and other petty criminals made their way through Hiawatha's doors, proving that
this 'hospital' was anything but.
While this is not pointed out in the Meriam Report it is certainly alluded to and because of the Report's
publication in 1928, the fact of Hiawatha's ultimate use while in existence would be called into question
repeatedly, and with good reason.
The Meriam Report stated that "practically every activity undertaken by the national government for
the protection of the health of Indians is below a reasonable standard of efficiency". It should be
noted that the Meriam Report was an investigation into federal Indian policy, not just the asylum, but
the statement from the report spoke volumes when uttered in conjunction with Hiawatha's name.
The Commissioner of Indian Affairs found the Report disturbing enough to call a special inquest. A
doctor from the staff of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. was to go to Canton and
investigate the hospital. Dr. Hummer offered his full cooperation, not realizing that what this doctor
would find would be the beginning of the end.
The doctor from St. Elizabeth's, Dr. Samuel Silk, would go to Hiawatha with an open mind and walk
away appalled.
Patients were found poorly clothed. Many of them were tied to their beds or found handcuffed to
pipes or radiators. One woman was found lying in mounds of her own feces infested with maggots.
Yet another was found gagged inside a locked room. Those that were coherent attempted to escape
or tried to fight for their release by writing to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs only to have their
requests dismissed when Dr. Hummer stepped in and made up a good excuse for their continued
committal.
Hospital equipment was not used appropriately or at all. The surgery built in the separate hospital
building was used for coal storage. TB patients were not sequestered, nor were their utensils or
clothing sterilized as required. Menus were not kept but the food served to Dr. Silk was barely edible
for animal consumption, let alone human consumption, and was described in its grisly detail in his
report.
There were several babies born at Hiawatha, all claimed to be the children of the inmates, even
though the wards were supposed to be kept completely separate. There was speculation then, as
there is now, as to how many pregnancies there actually were, if the attendants or Dr. Hummer had
anything to do with any of the pregnancies and how many were terminated without anybody knowing.
The children that were born there had little hope. There were four or five actually recorded births
during Hummer's tenure. One child, Winona Fairbault, whose parents were both patients in the
asylum, lived until adulthood. Kept at the asylum as an "experiment" for Dr. Hummer, Winona lived at
Hiawatha until she was three or four years old, well after her mother's untimely death. When it became
evident that his theory of "idiot Indians will have idiot Indian children" would not be borne out - Winona
was a perfectly normal child - Dr. Hummer was forced to release the child to family in the southwest.
The rest of the babies born in the asylum were not so lucky, most of them died there.
As mentioned before, there was plumbing but no fixtures, bathrooms meant to house toilets housed
people instead. The coal furnaces blasted a thin film of coal dust over everything, even in the
summer, leaving bedding and the sparse linens available a dingy gray.
The wards were filthy and many patients were kept inside locked rooms with nobody but themselves
for company. Many times attendants would lock the patients in and go on break, leaving them alone
for considerable periods of time.
be a hospital dedicated solely to the 'mental illness problem' within the Native American Community at
that point in history. In actuality, this was not the first mental hospital of its kind. In 1873 the
Cherokee Council created a home for the deaf, blind and insane that was exclusively for Cherokee
use.
The brainchild of an Indian agent and Republican Senator R.F. Pettigrew, Hiawatha was considered to
be yet another medium for social change for Indian communities. Created under the reasoning that
state hospitals were for state residents and that given "Indians were wards of the government", they
were not state residents, therefore there was no place for mentally ill Indians to go, the asylum was
easily ushered into existence. While its purpose looked good on paper, in reality it proved to be little
more than an experiment in eugenics.
Hiawatha's building broke ground in 1901 in the tiny town of Canton, South Dakota. The asylum itself
consisted of a three story main building with two wings housing four wards. This building sat on a hill
outside of Canton, in front of where the Canton-Inwood hospital sits today. Over the years, several
houses were built behind the main building for employees, as well four barns and a pig shed. The
administrator was given a house to the west of the complex. In later years a surgery/hospital building
was built directly to the East of the main building, its purpose being to house TB patients or to
accommodate infirmary needs. The dining room was also located in this building.
A seven foot high fence surrounded the asylum. Designed to keep patients in and the public out, two
steel gates with the words "Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians" in wrought iron curved above them
were the only way in or out of the property.
Hiawatha accepted its first patient on December 31, 1902. A year later there were 16 patients. By
the time the asylum was closed in 1934, over 374 documented Native Americans from 50 different
tribes would have passed through its doors, many of them never seeing their homes or loved ones
ever again.
The first Administrator was a former mayor of Canton and state Representative, Oscar Gifford. The
man solely responsible for bringing the asylum to the tiny town, Gifford had no medical experience,
just a head for business. He'd drafted the land deal that secured the property upon which the asylum
sat. The Bureau of Indian Affairs deemed him worthy to run the hospital because of this and a man
with absolutely no knowledge of mental illness was placed in charge of a mental hospital.
From the start Hiawatha was poorly staffed and badly run. Kicking, striking, shaking or choking were
considered acceptable means of control, "treatment" was doing housekeeping and yard work.
The asylum lacked formal commitment procedures save the Commissioner of Indian Affairs was to
authorize all admissions. The Commissioner almost always got the referral from the Indian Agent who
ran the reservation. If the Commissioner agreed and there was an available bed, the person was as
good as committed. Hiawatha even admitted children, normally without parental consent or even
notice sometimes. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs had ultimate say over the lives of all Natives on
the reservations.
To this end, Hiawatha easily became a warehouse for 'problem' Indians, effectively turning it into a
prison.
Gifford ultimately had a brief tenure as Hiawatha's Administrator due to his incompetence but,
ironically, it was also Gifford who unknowingly provided one of the few remaining and forever present
links to Hiawatha's past - the cemetery. He ordered it started when the first patient died in 1903.
Sitting to the far east of the hospital, over a stream and on top of a hill, the cemetery was well out of
view of the hospital buildings themselves. Gifford was replaced when scandal erupted - a patient
ended up pregnant. The powers that be felt it best to replace Oscar Gifford with someone actually
possessing some medical training.
Dr. Harry Hummer replaced Gifford and the rest, as they say, is history - all of it bad. Dr. Hummer was
twenty-nine when he arrived at the asylum. An arrogant man with a megalomaniac streak, he hated
the west, hated his employees and loathed the patients he'd been sent to work with. He would spend
the next twenty years running the asylum with an iron fist.
Patients were kept highly drugged, their files incomplete or entirely missing. Patients who were
deemed worthy for 'treatment' (ie, going outside to do yard work) were allowed outside. Problematic
patients were not allowed outside at all, which no doubt proved torturous for People who lived, thrived
and worshiped out of doors.
The patient ratio was one or two employees to an entire ward, which could consist of up to 20 or 30
patients at any given time. Actual nurses were not hired at Hiawatha until its last few years. Up until
that point locals were hired to work as attendants and they were seriously outnumbered.
In spite of his distaste for the west, Dr. Hummer had no problem banding with a few enterprising town
officials from the city of Canton to make the asylum a money making property. Under the guise of
'opening his hospital to the medical community to show them his success', Hummer opened the
asylum to the public on certain days so that not only medical professionals could come view the "ill"
Indians, the public could as well.
They advertised in several newspapers, inviting vacationers to "come see the crazy Indians". For
quite a while, showcasing the Indians in a 'cleaned up area' of the hospital became a popular money
maker for both Hummer and the City.
Within the hospital, beyond the public display, the patients lived in filth, without plumbing - because
the good doctor would not allow it to be properly installed - and without electricity - not because they
didn't have it, but because Dr. Hummer would not allow it to be used.
Dr. Hummer seemed to be under the impression that if he didn't spend all of the money allotted to him
for the year by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and he sent it back, then they'd transfer him out. It
was a practice that worked against him, keeping him securely in place as hospital Administrator, in
spite of repeated allegations of sexual harassment by his employees and rumors of patient abuse.
The first major inspection came in 1923, followed by another in 1926 when Dr. Herbert Edwards,
Medical Field Secretary of the National Tuberculosis Association and a member of the Meriam
Commission, investigated the asylum. The results of this investigation became part of what is now
known as "The Meriam Report". It was this report that revealed the dark side of the asylum and
began a process of increased investigation of the hospital.
Finding the staff inappropriately accredited to work with mentally ill patients, Dr. Edwards' findings
show underhanded processes at work without even actually pointing out the wrongs in question.
For years in his annual reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hummer had blown his own
horn, praising his hospital and continued insisting upon a constant need for Hiawatha's presence, as
that there was a severe need within the Native community for mental health attention yet Dr. Edwards
found the patient records grossly incomplete.
Patients were 'diagnosed' under several headings yet showed no signs or symptoms of what they
were alleged to have. The asylum worked at over one hundred percent capacity and seventy percent
of the patient population had lived in the asylum for over five years yet there were no histories and
many of them were quite aware of their faculties. There was little or no documentation regarding their
intake, their ongoing treatment or their progression. Since Hiawatha was being touted as a place to
aid Indians in 'getting better', this stark reality points to something else entirely - ultimate warehousing.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, one of the main requirements of release from any mental
hospital was sterilization. This meant a physician qualified to handle the procedure had to be on staff
of any mental hospital. Dr. Hummer did not hire a physician for Hiawatha so release was not an
option. Whether this was intentional is unknown but it can safely be assumed that job security was an
issue. Hummer might have despised the west and his charges, but if he was going to be trapped
there, he would take the steps to make sure that his position was secure, preventing release was a
good start.
So was aligning himself with underhanded Indian agents who wanted to rid their reservations of
people they considered troublemakers or non-conformists. There is documentation that some patients
were little more than people with a drinking problem who were secured at Hiawatha, as is there proof
that horse thieves and other petty criminals made their way through Hiawatha's doors, proving that
this 'hospital' was anything but.
While this is not pointed out in the Meriam Report it is certainly alluded to and because of the Report's
publication in 1928, the fact of Hiawatha's ultimate use while in existence would be called into question
repeatedly, and with good reason.
The Meriam Report stated that "practically every activity undertaken by the national government for
the protection of the health of Indians is below a reasonable standard of efficiency". It should be
noted that the Meriam Report was an investigation into federal Indian policy, not just the asylum, but
the statement from the report spoke volumes when uttered in conjunction with Hiawatha's name.
The Commissioner of Indian Affairs found the Report disturbing enough to call a special inquest. A
doctor from the staff of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. was to go to Canton and
investigate the hospital. Dr. Hummer offered his full cooperation, not realizing that what this doctor
would find would be the beginning of the end.
The doctor from St. Elizabeth's, Dr. Samuel Silk, would go to Hiawatha with an open mind and walk
away appalled.
Patients were found poorly clothed. Many of them were tied to their beds or found handcuffed to
pipes or radiators. One woman was found lying in mounds of her own feces infested with maggots.
Yet another was found gagged inside a locked room. Those that were coherent attempted to escape
or tried to fight for their release by writing to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs only to have their
requests dismissed when Dr. Hummer stepped in and made up a good excuse for their continued
committal.
Hospital equipment was not used appropriately or at all. The surgery built in the separate hospital
building was used for coal storage. TB patients were not sequestered, nor were their utensils or
clothing sterilized as required. Menus were not kept but the food served to Dr. Silk was barely edible
for animal consumption, let alone human consumption, and was described in its grisly detail in his
report.
There were several babies born at Hiawatha, all claimed to be the children of the inmates, even
though the wards were supposed to be kept completely separate. There was speculation then, as
there is now, as to how many pregnancies there actually were, if the attendants or Dr. Hummer had
anything to do with any of the pregnancies and how many were terminated without anybody knowing.
The children that were born there had little hope. There were four or five actually recorded births
during Hummer's tenure. One child, Winona Fairbault, whose parents were both patients in the
asylum, lived until adulthood. Kept at the asylum as an "experiment" for Dr. Hummer, Winona lived at
Hiawatha until she was three or four years old, well after her mother's untimely death. When it became
evident that his theory of "idiot Indians will have idiot Indian children" would not be borne out - Winona
was a perfectly normal child - Dr. Hummer was forced to release the child to family in the southwest.
The rest of the babies born in the asylum were not so lucky, most of them died there.
As mentioned before, there was plumbing but no fixtures, bathrooms meant to house toilets housed
people instead. The coal furnaces blasted a thin film of coal dust over everything, even in the
summer, leaving bedding and the sparse linens available a dingy gray.
The wards were filthy and many patients were kept inside locked rooms with nobody but themselves
for company. Many times attendants would lock the patients in and go on break, leaving them alone
for considerable periods of time.
A Brief History Of The Hiawatha Asylum
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