Hygienic Dispossession: Allotment and the Cherokee and Choctaw Health Drives of 1917.

This article examines the 1917 public health campaigns—termed "health drives"—conducted by the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) among Cherokee and Choctaw Nations in Eastern Oklahoma, highlighting how these efforts, aimed at combating tuberculosis and other diseases, facilitated Indigenous dispossession through a process the author calls "hygienic dispossession." Under this policy, sick and disabled tribal members were pressured to sell their allotted lands to finance medical treatment and home "improvements," often resulting in loss of land and forced removal to distant sanatoria with limited care. The article situates these health drives within broader federal policies of allotment, institutionalization, and settler colonialism, demonstrating that public health interventions were integral to, rather than incidental consequences of, Indigenous land dispossession. It also details individual cases illustrating the coercive and paternalistic nature of these campaigns and underscores the ongoing impact of this history on tribal health and sovereignty.