Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue: Native American Boarding School Stories

Abstract

1 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue Native American Boarding School Stories Welcome to JAIE’s first issue of the 2018 volume year, a special issue on the history and legacies of the boarding and residential schools developed in the United States and Canada to allegedly “civilize” Indigenous peoples. The special issue was developed in concert with the planning for an exhibit, Away From Home: American­ Indian Boarding School Stories, planned to open at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, in early 2019. Inception of the Heard exhibit dates to the late 1990s, with planning for an exhibit titled Remembering Our Indian School Days, which opened in 2000. Originally envisioned as a five-­ year installation, what quickly became known as “the boarding school exhibit” attracted a degree of public interest and engagement by Native and non-­ Native audiences that kept it open year after year. In 2015, Heard staff began to plan an updated, refreshed, and renewed boarding school exhibit. That story is told in the article in this special issue titled “Remembering Our Indian School Days: A Landmark Exhibit at the Heard Museum.” Before we dive into the stories of boarding schools, it is important to note that this special issue and the Heard exhibits to which it is linked primarily focus on boarding schools and Native communities in the United States. The history and legacies of Canadian residential schools that enrolled First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples are intimately linked with U.S. federal and mission boarding schools, but also have had their own distinctive trajectory. Most notably, Canada in the past few decades has grappled publicly with the serious abuses documented in the residential school system through litigation in the courts, a massive court-­ ordered settlement, and the work of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). More information and an extensive set of reports on the work and findings of the NCTR can be found at http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=905. Scholarship in this issue, particularly Jon Reyhner’s overview in “American Indian Boarding Schools: What Went Wrong? What Is Going Right?” includes references to the Canadian context, but an in-­ depth comparison 2 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 of the educational systems and Indigenous experiences in the two settler nations is beyond our scope and demands further attention.1 Native experiences and histories are rooted in place—­ including the places we know as boarding schools. We turn now to discuss the place we—­ the Heard Museum and Arizona State University, home to the Center for Indian Education and the Journal of American Indian Education—­ share in Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun. The City of Phoenix Is a Native Place In the early 20th century, Phoenix was a small southwestern town established in a valley that had been home to Native peoples for millennia . The low desert valley was watered by the Gila and Salt Rivers, which enabled a flourishing agricultural economy for centuries before Spanish , and later U.S. settlers arrived. The ancient peoples known to us today as the Hohokam, or Huhugam, engineered miles of canals crisscrossing the valley floor, irrigating “between 65,000 and 250,000 acres in the Salt River Valley alone” and supporting dozens of villages (Sheridan , 1995, p. 12). Spanish colonial expansion impacted the Native peoples who farmed the valley in the centuries after the Hohokam, but new crops, especially winter wheat and barley, bolstered agricultural and trade opportunities. By the 1840s, Native nations including the Akimel O’odham (also known as Pima) and Pee-­ Posh / Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa) were supplying U.S. military garrisons and settlers with thousands of bushels of wheat every year, and their produce sustained gold rushers flocking to California (DeJong, 2005).2...