The Boarding School as Metaphor

Abstract

37 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 The Boarding School as Metaphor Brenda J. Child For many in our society, the role of parenting was halted by boarding schools. Our great-­ grandparents were prevented from being parents. Both my grandmother and my grandfather were sent away. Then their kids were brought up in a regimented, abusive system of boarding schools. What that system has done to our grandparents, our parents, and then to us and our children is put holes in the fabric of our society. —­ Ingrid Washinawatok-­ El Issa, Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimony of Native American Women Over the years, thousands of Native children have learned the message that is implicit in boarding school education: that Native people are children of the devil who are condemned by God. This sense of worthlessness, of evil, of unlovability because they were Native was turned inward, internalized, becoming the root for some of the profound dysfunction later in life. —­ Diane Wilson, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life They are something tangible—­ mnemonic benchmarks—­ that, as with sites of Australian Aboriginal mytho-­ geography, one can point to and say “it happened there.” A visit to the school can provide a trigger or cue that takes one back to the past almost as if there again—­ a redemptive pilgrimage to an Aboriginal Auschwitz. Perhaps is it all a bit too easy. —­ Michael G. Kenny, “A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History” The JAIE editors appreciate the opportunity to reprint Brenda Child’s groundbreaking book chapter “The Boarding School as Metaphor” to anchor this special issue. The chapter has had a profound impact on the field of boarding school history. Child proposes that boarding school has become “a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor for . . . American colonialism at its most genocidal.” In her research, including members of her own Red Lake Ojibwe family who attended boarding schools, Child 38 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 was struck by the strength and resilience of Native students and alumni. Stories of homesickness, mistreatment, and abuse were mixed with stories of appreciation, enjoyment, and resistance. Child, like other authors in this special issue, grapples with how to honor that diversity of student experience in the boarding schools while critically engaging with the profound harms done within the schools in the name of so-­ called civilization . She develops a nuanced and respectful analysis that honors the range of alumni perspectives as well as the central position of boarding schools in ongoing debates about historical trauma and its impacts on Native people and communities. The boarding school experience remains a burning historical memory for American Indian people in the United States. This despite the fact that most federal Indian boarding schools closed in the 1930s, or had by then adopted policies that rejected assimilation and were more in tune with contemporary ideas about race and progressive education. While scholarly studies have espoused resistance and resilience in the historical record of students who survived an assimilationist education, boarding school is increasingly conceptualized by many American Indians as a uniquely Native usable past that links tribal people of diverse backgrounds today to a devastating common history, one that must be evoked, many argue, to understand our present conditions and social problems. Boarding school is now the ancestor in a direct genealogical line of terrible offspring—­ alcohol abuse, family and sexual violence, and other social dysfunction. It is not necessarily the job of the historian to explain how Indian people today remember the past. But the intensity with which Indian people in the present day explain and respond to the role of boarding school in the broader history of their families and communities suggests that for many, boarding school is also a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor...