Dr. Walker, Medicine Man: Assimilative Healthcare and Oglala Healing at Pine Ridge Reservation, 1896–1914

Abstract

This paper explores the seemingly paradoxical behaviors of Dr. James R. Walker, a physician on the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota from 1896 until 1914. As a healthcare provider for the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), Walker was part of a network of employees tasked with carrying out the era’s federal Indian policy: assimilation, which aimed to break apart reservations and annihilate American Indian culture. In his medical work at Pine Ridge, Walker partook in OIA-sponsored supervisory and educational programs designed to assimilate American Indian minds and bodies to the white, mainstream populace. But it was also in this unstable and questioning environment that Walker became an Oglala medicine man. His medicine man studies stemmed from a need to collaborate with Oglala medicine men in order to more effectively rid the reservation of tuberculosis. In “going native,” he practiced a bold and invasive research method and crossed an epistemological line many contemporary ethnographers and OIA employees did not dare cross.