Susan Burch's Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and Beyond Institutions is a pithy yet powerful read. It examines numerous experiences of the nearly 400 Native Americans involuntarily committed to South Dakota's Canton Asylum for Insane Indians between 1902 and 1934. Burch shows how a confluence of settler colonialism, racism, ableism, and sexism led to their confinement in this federally run institution. Reservation agents sent citizens from dozens of Native nations to Canton for a wide variety of reasons, which included arguing with federal authorities, maintaining traditional family structures, not attending Indian boarding schools, speaking Indigenous languages, having epilepsy, and giving birth to children with disabilities. Almost half of the individuals committed were never released despite their communities’ and kin's active petitioning to bring them home. But even Canton's deplorable—and deadly—conditions could not prevent Indigenous peoples from forming new relationships within the institution and cultivating kinship ties that persisted across generations.

For Burch, the word “committed” encapsulates the confinement of people at Canton, tribal members’ dedicated advocacy for the return of relatives, and the enduring connections made between kin in and outside its walls. Additionally, the word underscores the book's aim of “witnessing, transferring, or documenting, as when someone commits a story to memory” (3). The author's own commitments to access and non-extractive scholarship are front and center. They include her choice of a font to maximize legibility, the decision to publish a free ebook, and the incorporation of picture descriptions that facilitate access to the book's images. Burch also provided descendants of those who were confined with copies of her archival findings. Finally, she sought their feedback on her manuscript and secured permission to use their ancestors’ names, stories, and photographs “in deference to families’ wishes and in recognition that not all knowledge is meant to be available to all people” (14).

The result is a manuscript that de-centers the historian as expert and prioritizes Indigenous voices. Asylum annual reports, medical files, Bureau of Indian Affairs correspondence, and other documents produced by United States government representatives and Western medical practitioners were the primary sources for previous institutional biographies. In addition to these conventional sources, Burch uses phone conversations, oral history interviews, correspondence, visits to tribal lands, and materials like beadwork, photographs, and clothing to illustrate that people committed to Canton were multi-faceted human beings who existed beyond their one-dimensional portrayals in medical records. She reveals the pervasive physical and sexual assault, coerced labor, and high mortality rates at Canton, countering the institution's accounts that claimed that these incidents were exceptional. Moreover, she uncovers the targeting of entire kin networks. For example, over a quarter of those sent to Canton were Dakota and Lakota. Once reservation agents recommended one individual for institutionalization, they often committed multiple members of that person's extended family in the following years.

Beyond investigating these harms against Native nations and their citizens, Burch's intergenerational narrative structure highlights what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor called “survivance” in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (2008): the creative continuance and active presence of Native people in the face of attempted elimination. Native peoples at Canton and their families outside the institution continuously articulated what was best for their kin and communities’ wellness. This fight did not end after Canton closed. Like the Indigenous students who died from mistreatment and disease in their boarding schools or residential schools, most of the 189 souls that perished at the facility were buried in unmarked graves, far from their homelands. Between 1987 and 2007, commemoration ceremonies honoring those committed to Canton maintained the spiritual and physical connection between those who had passed on and those who remembered them. Burch captures how attendees scattered across the continent pieced together genealogical information to understand their ancestors’ lives at Canton. For descendants whose ties to the Native nations and families were torn apart by the institution's violence, processing these stories together was particularly cathartic and community building. As Burch concludes, “[t]heir active presence attests that the ongoing settler project of erasure and replacement, while profoundly destructive, has not fully succeeded” (106).

Committed carves out space for Native Americans in disability studies and for disability studies within Native American and Indigenous studies. It unpacks white agents’ social construction of “insanity” to displace Native Americans who did not conform to a Western set of expectations, and juxtaposes it to Indigenous peoples’ assertions of caregiving knowledge as integral to self-determination. Burch's book models how to acknowledge painful histories of institutionalization without pathologizing the people who lived it. She encourages readers to consider Canton not as an isolated phenomenon but as part of the “transinstitutionalization” of Native Americans (16). This process sought to break down family ties through a combination of boarding schools, orphanages, asylums, and allotment of reservation lands into individual land parcels instead of collective holdings. Academics across disciplines might further flesh out this concept. They also might expand Burch's analysis of Canton to the history of Native American institutionalization in other jurisdictions across the United States and Canada. Likewise, carceral studies could benefit from addressing the “medicalized incarceration” of Native people and the relationships between settler colonialism and institutionalization, as Burch begins to do here (16).

But Committed is not only for the academy. Burch's prose is clear and concise (without endnotes and appendices it is 112 pages). She explains key terms in Indigenous studies like “settler colonialism” and avoids most technical language. Her lengthy endnotes detail Native American and Indigenous studies scholars’ influence on her work, credit her oral interviewees’ time and tremendous contributions, and point to primary sources that descendants can use to recover more information about their loved ones. Ultimately, Burch fulfills her commitments to accessibility, reciprocity, and ethical scholarship while advancing our recognition of the ableism, racism, sexism, and settler colonialism involved in Native American institutionalization and its legacies for Indigenous communities today.