American Indian Boarding School Experiences: Recent Studies from Native Perspectives

Abstract

In the past decade, the study of American Indian boarding schools has grown into one of the richest areas of American Indian history. The best of this scholarship has moved beyond an examination of the federal policies that drove boarding school education to consider the experiences of Indian children within the schools, and the responses of Native students and parents to school policies, programs, and curricula. Recent studies by David Wallace Adams, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Brenda Child, Sally Hyer, and Esther Burnett Home and Sally McBeth have used archival research, oral interviews, and photographs to consider the history of boarding schools from American Indian perspectives. In doing so, they have begun to uncover the meaning of boarding school education for Indian children, families, and communities, past and present. Perhaps the most fundamental conclusion that emerges from boarding school histories is the profound complexity of their historical legacy for Indian people's lives.The diversity among boarding school students in terms of age, personality, family situa tion, and cultural background created a range of experiences, attitudes, and responses. Boarding schools embodied both victimiza tion and agency for Native people, and they served as sites of both cultural loss and cultural persistence. These institutions, intended to assimilate Native people into mainstream society and eradicate Native cultures, became integral components of American Indian identities and eventually fueled the drive for political and cultural self determination in the late twentieth century. David Wallace Adams has provided the most useful general overview of Indian boarding schools in Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. The strength of Adams's book lies in its attention to several key aspects of boarding school history across a broad spectrum of schools. He begins by outlining the political and intellectual context that shaped the attitudes and assumptions of politicians, reformers, and educators and became translated into federal educational policy. Adams also discusses the implementation of that policy through a federal bureaucratic system and within individual institutions, and he explores the ways in which Indian students and parents experienced and responded to boarding school education. Adams's story of Indian people's boarding school experiences is largely one of cultural struggle. He argues that through the boarding schools, reformers, educators, and federal agents waged cultural, psychological, and intellectual warfare on Native students as part of a concerted effort to turn Indians into Americans. School admin istrators and teachers cut children's hair; changed their dress, their diets, and their names; introduced them to unfamiliar conceptions of space and time; and subjected them to militaristic regimentation and discipline. Educators suppressed tribal languages and cultural practices and sought to replace them with English, Christianity, athletic activities, and a ritual calendar intended to further patriotic citizenship. They instructed students in the industrial and domestic skills appropriate to European American gender roles and taught them manual labor. For many Indian children, this cultural assault led to confusion and alienation, homesickness and resentment. Yet Adams insists that Indian students and parents were not passive victims of the government's assimilation campaign; rather, they helped define the terms of their educational experiences in unanticipated ways. Many students accommodated themselves to the process of cultural change, some wholeheartedly, most ambivalendy and selectively. Others resisted institutional authority through covert strategies such as devising insulting nicknames for teachers, writing manipulative letters to school administrators, or perpetuating tribal traditions in secret through storytelling, dances, and games. Some students practiced overt resistance by running away, fighting, or setting fire to school buildings. Parental resistance to cultural assimilation also took several forms: refusing to send their children to school, sending orphaned or less desirable children, complaining to agents or educators about aspects of their children's educational experiences, or reinforcing tribal relationships and cultural values during visits home. In addition to Adams's overview, other scholars have researched American Indian boarding school experiences within specific insti tutions. Even more so than Adams's work, studies by K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Brenda Child, and Sally Hyer have highlighted Indian people's own perspectives on their experiences in boarding schools. Both Lomawaima and Child have personal connections to the