“Colonized By Freedom:” Making the State, Private Property, and Race in Kansas

Abstract

State power operates through institutional attempts to define who fully counts as a person. “Colonized By Freedom: Making the State, Private Property, and Race in Kansas” examines the mechanisms of state power in Kansas in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to analyze how subjects deemed non-normative fit into a state social structure that is racialized, gendered, sexualized, classed, and ableist. In determining fitness for the ideal of full citizenship, military, medical, educational, and religious figures functioned as arbiters of normative personhood. My project draws on archival evidence from military, medical, religious, and economic institutions that sought to create what I describe as normal personhood through coercion, violence, and the creation of legitimate rule. It argues that if we evaluate that evidence alongside the violence of Indigenous dispossession, early and continued commitment to private property, imperialism, and social/political hierarchies of race, gender, and ability, Kansas becomes much less paradoxical and, indeed, helps us understand how the US state itself emerged and grew. The chapters cover: American Indian treaties in the land that became Kansas; Kansas’s establishment as a free state; the Girls’ Industrial School in Beloit; Kansas’s volunteer guard units that fought in the Spanish–American War; and liberal reforms at the institution that became Haskell Indian Nations University in the late twentieth century.