Who is Doctor Bauer?: Rematriating a Censored Story on Internment, Wardship, and Sexual Violence in Wartime Alaska, 1941 - 1944

Abstract

Abstract This article unites Indigenous women’s voices from oral histories and the archives to connect sexual violence and colonialism and to advance historical discourse on rematriation. Sexual violence, rape, and internment intersected in the Alaskan territory during the Second World War. From 1941 to 1944, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) employed the physician H.O.K. Bauer to work for the Alaska Indian Service. This physician’s power to enact sexual violence came from his position as an employee for the BIA—an institution that had a history of intimate colonial ties with Indigenous communities. Utilizing Native American and Indigenous Studies methods and ethics, making transparent the relationship between a scholar and elders in the community, and purposefully uncovering some silences while maintaining others allows this analysis of historical sexual violence to prioritize an Indigenous woman elder who advocated for the telling of a story of sexual violence. In doing so, it identifies rematriation as a process that unravels colonial power and restores power to Indigenous women.