Caroline Lieffers

This article is a microhistorical examination of a settler medical technology in an Indigenous community: Umoⁿhoⁿ leader Joseph La Flesche’s artificial leg, which he wore from the early 1860s until his death in 1888. This case study illustrates how La Flesche’s disability and prosthesis were deeply entangled with Euro-American challenges to Umoⁿhoⁿ ways of life, including relational care, land use, and spiritual practices. Although the artificial limb, from a Euro-American perspective, was a medical technology to resolve disability, from the perspective of some Umoⁿhoⁿ the limb represented unwanted changes to their land and culture, changes that also compromised crucial community rituals and engendered new forms of “spiritual disablement.” The medical technology’s significance cannot be removed from a larger context of settler colonialism and its ableist assessment of Indigenous bodyminds, lands, beliefs, and ways of life.