Declared Defective: Native Americans, Eugenics, and the Myth of Nam Hollow

'Declared Defective' is the anthropological history of an outcaste community and a critical reevaluation of The Nam Family, written in 1912 by Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, leaders of the early 20th-century eugenics movement.

Based on their investigations of an obscure rural enclave in upstate New York, the biologists were repulsed by the poverty and behaviour of the people in Nam Hollow.

They claimed that their alleged indolence, feeble-mindedness, licentiousness, alcoholism, and criminality were biologically inherited. 'Declared Defective' reveals that Nam Hollow was actually a community of marginalised, mixed-race Native Americans, the Van Guilders, adapting to scarce resources during an era of tumultuous political and economic change.