Juliet Larkin-Gilmore, Ph.D.

Dr. Larkin-Gilmore is a social and cultural historian of medicine with a focus on American Indian life in the early twentieth century. Health is my preferred lens to understand the past. She is particularly interested in the ways public health policies and practices worked on, with and sometimes against federal policies aimed at controlling Native mobility, labor, and assimilation.

Her current book project is titled Mobile Medicine: Public Health and Indigenous Lives on the Lower Colorado River, 1880–1940. Mobile Medicine centers on disease in Native history to show how mobility blurs neat conceptions of spatial and racial order. Between the 1880s and 1930s, U.S. Indian policies tried to eliminate tribal sovereignty and, in the process, created medical crises for tribal nations across the country. Along the Lower Colorado River, tribes responded through purposeful movement that gave them freedom from surveillance, the opportunity to make a living, and the ability to maintain strong community bonds and sacred customs and relations to the land—in short, the ability to maintain their health. Diseases often link communities in new and complicated ways; their trajectories outline the contours of colonization in its many unwieldy forms. Through disease, Mobile Medicine tracks the liminal and powerful roles of Indigenous people and their health in US history.