Changed Forever: American Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat

Abstract

Reviewed by: Changed Forever: American Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat Lydia Presley Arnold Krupat, Changed Forever: American Boarding-School Literature, Volume 2. Albany: SUNY P, 2020. 436 pp. Hardcover, $95. Arnold Krupat’s second volume of American Indian boarding school scholarship builds on the strong foundation established with the publication in 2018 of the first volume by SUNY Press. This followup book comes at a time when we are seeing websites emerge with a view toward education, reconciliation, and healing. With the growing presence of these digital humanities projects, Krupat’s gathering and writing of additional stories from the boarding school [End Page 335] era is even more pressing and urgent. Changed Forever: American Boarding-School Literature, Volume 2 joins a conversation that is ongoing and timely, including books such as Denise K. Lajimodiere’s Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors (2019), Sarah Klotz’s Writing Their Bodies: Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School (2021), and Jacqueline Emery’s Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (2018). In this second volume Krupat moves east from the first volume’s focus on the Navajo and Hopi boarding school experiences to focus now on Dakota and Ojibwe autobiographies and stories. In this expansion this volume joins the first to further provide a contextual, thorough examination of stories that re-story the whitewashed histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the education of American Indians. In this way Krupat addresses what Brenda Child has described as “a tension between history and memory” that exists “between the historical record and the ‘way in which American Indian people remember [boarding school] experience’” (xxiii). Through the compilation of these volumes Krupat summarizes and draws into focus the stories that he argues have become a “genre of the oral tradition” that “speak of a range of experiences” (xxv, xxvi). Volume 2 addresses seven Dakota autobiographies (Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear, Zitkala-Ša, Walter Littlemoon, Tim Giago, Lydia Whirlwind Soldier, and Mary Crow Dog), seven Ojibwe autobiographies (John Rogers, George Morrison, Peter Razor, Adam Fortunate Eagle, Dennis Banks, Jim Northrup, and Edna Manitowabi), and what Krupat labels as a “range” of seven autobiographies (Thomas Wildcat Alford, Joe Blackbear, Carl Sweezy, Ah-nen-la-de-ni, Esther Burnett Horne, Viola Martinez, and Reuben Snake). Also included are nineteen illustrations that display places, people, and moments in time represented in the texts covered. Like the first volume, Krupat continues to expand on tracing a “range of experiences” that reference “scenes of initiation or initiatory loci” and a “number of topoi.” Each discussion of the autobiographical texts traces back to these terms in a way that helps to open up understanding of the nuances of this genre of oral storytelling [End Page 336] and, in this way, Krupat contributes valuable knowledge for those interested in learning of the “range of experiences” from those who emerged from the United States Indian boarding school system. Additionally Krupat provides a much-needed gathering of autobiographical sources for the growing field of Indigenous boarding school studies. The accounts addressed in this volume provide a thorough discussion of the contents of each story and, as a result, contextualize the complexity of the range of accounts that emerge from each individual’s personal history of their time at the schools. This volume, along with the first, are valuable resources that not only address the historical times and places of events and relationships from the voices that experienced them but also looks at similarities in how those experiences interacted with both the places and items that surrounded the authors. In this way Krupat’s Changed Forever has established a place of significance in any collection that seeks to explore knowledge, reconciliation, and the stories of boarding school histories. Lydia Presley University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2022 Western Literature Association