ABSTRACT
This book explores Native American literary responses to biomedical discourses and biomedicalization processes as they circulate in social and cultural contexts.
Native American communities resist reductivism of biomedicine that excludes Indigenous (and non-Western) epistemologies and instead draw attention to how illness, healing, treatment, and genetic research are socially constructed and dependent on inherently racialist thinking. This volume highlights how interventions into the hegemony of biomedicine are vigorously addressed in Native American literature. The book covers tuberculosis and diabetes epidemics, the emergence of Native American DNA, discoveries in biotechnology, and the problematics of a biomedical model of psychiatry. The book analyzes work by Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, LeAnne Howe, Linda Hogan, Heid E. Erdrich, Elissa Washuta and Frances Washburn.
The book will appeal to scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies, as well as to others with an interest in literature and medicine.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |22 pages
Introduction
part I|66 pages
Tuberculosis
chapter 1|30 pages
Virgin soil theory, boarding schools, and medical experimentation
chapter 2|34 pages
Tuberculosis, biopower, and embodied resistance in Madonna Swan:
part II|42 pages
Diabetes
chapter 3|18 pages
Developing Indigenous models of diabetes
chapter 4|22 pages
Beyond the biomedical model of diabetes
part III|42 pages
Blood and genes
chapter 5|23 pages
From blood memory to genetic memory, and the emergence of Native American DNA
chapter 6|17 pages
“We remember our ancestors and their lives deep in our bodily cells”
part IV|55 pages
Indigenizing biomedicalization