Instead he wrote to an old friend, Henry Standing Bear, who advised them to see a doctor in Pierre and gain a referral for admittance to the “white” TB sanitarium in Custer. When she was told she only had a few weeks to live, Madonna fled her confinement without permission and returned to her family home in Cherry Creek, South Dakota.įacing the threat of quarantine again, her father refused to return Madonna to the Indian sanitarium.
Isolated there for seven years, she witnessed death on a nearly daily basis as few treatments were available. Madonna was admitted to Sioux San in December of 1944 at the young age of 16. It illustrates the disparity in facilities and patient care between the primarily Native Sioux Sanitarium and a predominately white sanitarium in Custer, South Dakota. The story of one Lakota woman’s ordeal and survival from TB is detailed in Mark St. But that took time, and many patients died while the medication was refined. Discovered in 1943, the antibiotic streptomycin would eventually be developed to effectively treat TB. Some of the patients are believed to be buried on or near the Sioux San grounds.
These years were the darkest in the institution’s history, with few therapies available other than extended rest and sunshine, and many patients succumbed to the disease and passed away at Sioux San. It opened a year later and treated solely American Indian TB patients from 1939 to the 1960s. Hoping to curb the spread of the disease and treat patients, construction began on the main hospital building of the Sioux Sanitorium in 1938. The disease persisted for decades, and by World War II, as many as 10 percent of Native Americans examined for military service tested positive for TB. The disease had long ravaged cities and towns across the nation and was prevalent among Native communities, especially in villages or boarding schools with high population densities. In the 1930’s, the federal government focused on treating TB among Native Americans.
The site was then converted into a segregated tuberculosis (TB) sanitarium for Native Americans. The Civil Conservation Corps, a federally-funded Depression-era work relief program, briefly occupied the grounds, using them to house workers and their families. The Rapid City Indian School closed in 1933, after a shift in federal policy away from forced removal to Indian boarding schools.
0 kommentar(er)
