"To Take Care of My People": Healing Work in Kiowa Communities, ca. 1867-1920

Abstract

“To Take Care of My People” is a study of healing practices employed by Kiowas, members of a Great Plains tribal nation, during their first sixty years of reservation life. Kiowa Nation faced major moments of sociopolitical fracture between 1867 and 1875, when the U.S. government confined them to a reservation under federal administration, and in 1901, when that reservation was allotted. In the interim, representatives of federal assimilation policy worked to reform Indigenous subsistence, residence patterns, religion, and mobility. These changes restricted Kiowa people’s access to healthful food, housing, ceremony, and economic opportunity, producing long-term health disparities between Kiowas and settlers. This dissertation explores how, between 1867 and 1920, Kiowas evaluated the tenets and practices of multiple faiths and healing philosophies. From community to community, Kiowas assessed and integrated these practices into an expanded, pluralistic Kiowa way of healing that resisted colonial efforts to control, confine, and divide their people. “To Take Care of My People” employs an ethnohistorical methodology, analyzing manuscripts and government documents alongside oral tradition, oral history, and ethnographic research to approximate Kiowa people’s shifting understandings of health and healing over time. “To Take Care of My People” explores the latitude for negotiation that emerged between the OIA’s production and implementation of medical policy, analyzing both Indigenous healing and western allopathy as tools of survival and renewal for Kiowa people. Despite the reservation era’s assault on Kiowa medicine men and healing ceremony, Kiowa healers maintained their healing knowledge and, through intertribal interaction, adopted new health-seeking relationships with peyote and other spiritual beings. While western medicine acted as a vehicle for colonial violence in Indigenous communities, Kiowa people influenced and, at times, directed collaborations between themselves and western doctors, nurses, and missionaries. These relationships allowed Kiowa communities to add western healing practices to their own medicine ways.