As part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project, I also want to collect soil from every asylum in the United States built in the 1800s, which marks the Kirkbride Era of mass institutionalization of people living with mental-health issues, cognitive disabilities, and physical disabilities.

These sites aren’t my literal ancestors, but I feel connected to them in spirit for many reasons. This aspect of the project would also include collecting soil from the psychiatric hospital in my hometown where my mother worked as a psychiatric nurse and was treated as a psychiatric patient. That hospital opened in 1895 as Oklahoma Sanitarium, with the words “Norman Institute for the Violently Mentally Insane” welded to its front gates facing Main Street.