Robert Jarvenpa All Books: Declared Defective sku-408094320

Robert Jarvenpa's Declared Defective (All Books; sku-408094320) is an anthropological history of the Van Guilders, a marginalized, mixed-race Native American community in Nam Hollow, upstate New York. It also reevaluates The Nam Family, written in 1912 by Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, leaders of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement.

After investigating the rural enclave, the biologists attributed the poverty and behavior they observed to supposedly inherited indolence, feeble-mindedness, licentiousness, alcoholism, and criminality. Jarvenpa instead examines how the Van Guilders adapted to scarce resources amid political and economic change.

Their Mohican ancestors had lost land and been displaced by colonial expansion in western Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century. He argues that Estabrook and Davenport's account of innate degeneracy rested on class prejudice and ignorance of the history and mixed culture of Guilder Hollow.

The book examines the Van Guilders' lives and agency, the pseudoscience and fearmongering of Progressive Era eugenics, and contradictions of race and class in America.