Berkeley Geography
Spring 2022 Colloquium
Wed, March 9 | 3:30pm | 575 McCone & Zoom
Settler Colonialism is a Sickness: How Federal Indian Health Failed Native Women
Caitlin Keliiaa (she/her)
Assistant Professor, UC Santa Cruz
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This talk focuses on the question of Indian health among Native domestic workers in the 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Keliiaa examines tuberculosis cases in the Bay Area Outing Program and demonstrates the difficulties Native women experienced in accessing health care and especially tubercular care. She shows how the fickle benevolence of the outing program’s leadership intersected with federal negligence, and the dangerous inadequacies of Indian health care services that cost Native women’s lives. She traces the federal response—or lack thereof—to Indian healthcare and wellness and closely analyzes cases of outing women who became critically ill while in the Bay Area. In her analysis she comments on our current moment in a global pandemic. To this end, Dr. Keliiaa uncovers state violence shrouded as federal neglect, demonstrating how officials chose who they considered deserving of health care.
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Bio: https://humanities.ucsc.edu/academics/faculty/regular-faculty.php?uid=ck...