Bruce Jens Christensen, my 6th cousin, was born in 1941 and died at the Nebraska Institution for Feeble-minded Youth in Beatrice, Nebraska in 1966. I don’t know how or why he ended up there.

When I first noted his birth and death years I assumed he might have died in Vietnam. I was wrong. Instead I found yet another institution taken straight out of a nightmare.

Quoting from the mission statement of the Nebraska Institution for Feeble-minded Youth, their goals were to provide

“custodial care and human treatment for those who are feeble-minded, to segregate them from society, to study to improve their condition, to classify them, and to furnish such training in industrial mechanics, agriculture, and academic subjects as fitted to acquire”.

The Asylum Project also notes that,

By 1935, in order to assure complete separation from society, [Nebraska Institution for Feeble-minded Youth] resident’s graves were no longer marked with family names, but with numbers; families desired to disassociate themselves from their “defective” relatives by dehumanizing them.

A young couple I know had a daughter with Down syndrome earlier this year. In a Facebook post they say:

While the words certainly carried a heaviness with them at the time, due mostly to misconceptions on my part, within a few hours of receiving the news we were already talking about what a beautiful life she would have.

Parents aren’t expected, or forced, to find their children ‘defective’ anymore. Parents aren’t pushed to hide away their children at institutions. Parents are allowed to be happy, optimistic, and loving.

When I think if it I am sure that more than a couple of the students I’ve had at American universities would have been considered feeble-minded just a few decades ago. I didn’t know their exact diagnoses, and I didn’t need to know, or want to know. But what I saw was hard working kids with a-typical communication styles, who were supported by parents, teachers, and others.