Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat, and: Changed Forever, Volume 2: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat

Abstract

Reviewed by: Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat, and: Changed Forever, Volume 2: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat Tadeusz Lewandowski Arnold Krupat. Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. 406 pp. Hardcover, $95.00; Paper, $33.95. Arnold Krupat. Changed Forever, Volume 2: American Indian Boarding-School Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. 436 pp. Hardcover, $95.00; Paper, $34.95. Arnold Krupat prefaces his two-volume study of American Indian boarding-school literature, Changed Forever, with a question posed by K. Tsianina Lomawaima in her award-winning book They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (1994): “What has become of the thousands of Indian voices who spoke the breath of boarding-school life?” Krupat is not the first who has tried to recover these voices. Others, such as Brenda Child in Boarding School Seasons (2000) and Amelia Katanski in Learning to Write “Indian” (2005), and more recently Jacqueline Emery in Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (2017), have done their part to answer Lomawaima’s query and revive a literary legacy marginalized within the Euro-American canon. What Krupat offers, however, is an act of recovery and more: the first attempt to establish boarding-school writing as a distinct subgenre of American Indian literature, replete with its own unique loci and topoi. Both volumes of Changed Forever begin with lengthy and in-depth introductions laying out the history of Indian boarding schools, with an emphasis on Richard Henry Pratt’s (in)famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879 and shuttered in 1918. Krupat documents the types of abuse, both physical and sexual, that plagued some of these institutions, but at the same time he highlights the affection many students held for Pratt personally, while noting examples, such [End Page 400] as the Albuquerque Indian School, of which students recorded positive experiences. Also emphasized is the apparent gratitude expressed by some Indian parents for the education provided their children. This discussion goes beyond black-and-white renderings of Indian boarding schools as places of unmitigated horror—what Krupat calls “reductive generalizations”—and allows us to appreciate the often messy, gray area and complex implications of assimilationist efforts (Volume 1, xv). Such attention to nuance is reflected in the diversity of texts that Krupat has selected for analysis, some widely studied, some entirely obscure. What these boarding-school writings have in common, however, is what Changed Forever seeks to distinguish, almost in a structuralist vein. In offering an interpretive framework, Krupat points to the regularities of expression characteristic of such literature. Referring to “voices” that “speak of a range of experiences,” he indicates how “a number of scenes of initiation or initiatory loci, and also a number of topoi,” thematically undergird each. Initiatory loci comprise the Dining Room, the Clean-Up (including hair-cutting), and the Dormitory, while topoi encompass Discipline, Clock Time (or “Living by the Bell”), Food, Religion, Resistance, Outing Labor, Running Away, Identity, and even Sex (Volume 1, xxix–xxx, 6). In explicating and defining these loci and topoi, Krupat provides further basis for boarding-school literature’s status as a subgenre, and establishes analytical tools with which to approach such texts. Given the variety, scope, and combined length of Krupat’s essays, a detailed account of both volumes is impossible within the short space of one review. Volume 1 treats six book-length Hopi boarding-school autobiographies—written by Edmund Nequatewa, Albert Yava, Don Talayesva, Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Helen Sekaquaptewa, and Fred Kabotie—and four Navajo autobiographies authored by Frank Mitchell, Irene Stewart, Kay Bennett, and George P. Lee. This volume also includes an essay on Stories of Traditional Navajo Life and Culture, an edited collection published by the Navajo Community College Press in 1977, containing twenty-two “life histories” dating from between 1882 and 1920, fourteen of which discuss boarding school experiences (217). The study concludes with three appendices that give greater context to the preceding chapters: a history of the 1906 Orayvi Split, a “climactic event” in Hopi history brought on by the US government’s...