Boarding School Experience Research Articles

A Second Wave of Hopi Migration

The current issue in the History of Education Quarterly is significant for various reasons. For the first time in the journal's history, scholars from several disciplines have converged to address topics relating to the history of American Indian education. The essays challenge historians to think of research methodologies that go beyond the traditional sources of documents retrieved from archives and other depositories. This is perhaps most clearly seen in KuuNUx TeeRIt Kroupa's essay on the Arikara Cultural Center and his attempt to understand their educational history through an Arikara lens of understanding. It is also evident in Adrea Lawrence's idea of “epic learning” and her inclusion of “Native” stories and their relationship to “place” as a frame to interpret American Indian education histories. Each of these articles, including Donald Warren's piece on Native history as education history, urges historians to think more broadly on how to create Indian education narratives. However, my intention here is not to provide a comprehensive response to all three essays. Rather, I want to briefly apply key topics in each text to help enlighten my own research on Hopis and the off-reservation Indian boarding school experience, and to offer some direction on how these issues might be applied to current and future studies.

Immigration as Cultural Imperialism: An Indian Boarding School Experience or The Peer Gynt Suite and the Seventh Cavalry Cafe

Immigration as Cultural ImperialismAn Indian Boarding School Experience or The Peer Gynt Suite and the Seventh Cavalry Cafe Tom Gannon (bio) There is a hefty memorial stone among the US Cavalry graves at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Worn from the Montana weather and sternly archaic in its typography and very discourse, the epitaph must be one of the earliest official markers to still grace this site: to the officers and soldiers killed, or who died of wounds received in action in the territory of montana, while clearing the district of the yellowstone of hostile indians.1 The place is no longer officially called the Custer Battlefield National Monument, and there are now headstones scattered along the hillsides of the site marking several fallen Lakota warriors. However, the many neat rows of cavalrymen’s white headstones in the main cemetery are the park’s most salient feature and the first and main attraction greeting the visitor upon entrance. The rest of the venue largely remains the relatively desolate rolling dry-grass prairie that it was at the time of the famous battle—or “massacre”—of 1876. And so visitors to the site are still confronted with this tribute in stone, which continues to erase the crimes of colonial aggression and land theft by way of the final damning epithet, “hostile Indians.” But now, wouldn’t you have been hostile, too, given the situation? I’m reminded of seeing the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin on one of his tv episodes, jabbing at a poisonous snake with a stick and jawing in his rich Aussie accent: “When you poke them with a stick, they tend to get irritable and aggressive” (that is—hostile). Even my seven-year-old [End Page 111] daughter had the sense to exclaim, as we watched that episode together: “Well, stop poking it, then!” Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Memorial stone and inscription, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. (Photo by the author.) After the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee—a real massacre, involving women and children—Black Elk, still one of the Oglala Lakota “hostiles,” was involved in a skirmish near Drexel Mission “about four miles north of Pine Ridge Agency.” Raymond J. DeMallie glosses this as (the later) “Holy Rosary” Mission, where I went to school—as we will see—in the third and fourth grades. Black Elk says, pretty much in passing, but with a certain degree of pride: “there are many bullets in the Mission yet.”2 The metaphorical readings thereof are rampant indeed; it’s as multivalent as a trope. For one, this essay is intended to put a few more bullet holes in that Mission. I often find myself needing to stand the topic of “immigration” on its head a bit by going back one hundred (or five hundred) years. There is even a little inside joke, you see, among us members of the Native American component of the Institute for Ethnic Studies [End Page 112] at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Every time a colloquium topic of immigration comes up, we say, “Well—we’re against it.” Of course we’re talking about a five-hundred-year history and issue, not the contemporary one that most of us talk about today. I think that the Great Plains Indian experience with immigration needs addressing nonetheless. I can’t count the times that I’ve heard radio-talk-show callers proclaim during the current debate: “After all, we’re all immigrants!” As usual, a whole lot of forgetting and historical erasure is going on with such statements. For the North American indigenous, immigration has been by and large that of Western colonization, spearheaded not only by the military forces of the Custers and Sheridans of the US Army and Cavalry, but by their complicit confreres of religious proselytizing, the Christian missionaries. Together in what I would dub a “Christo-Custer colonialism,” they performed a two-fisted attack upon the Plains Indian tribes and must have seemed a very strange Janus-faced figure, with a Winchester rifle in one hand and a King James Bible in the other—the brute force of avaricious land-grabbing conquest justified by ideological...

From Father to Son: Affirming Lakota Manhood in Luther Standing Bear's <em>My People the Sioux</em>

From Father to SonAffirming Lakota Manhood in Luther Standing Bear’s My People the Sioux Peter L. Bayers (bio) “I wanted to watch my father, because, as I have said before, he was my ideal” (79). This passage—from Luther Standing Bear’s autobiography My People the Sioux (1928)—refers to a moment in Luther Standing Bear’s childhood as he watched his father prepare to capture wild horses. Standing Bear’s sentiment—that his father was his “ideal”—permeates his autobiography as he recounts his childhood, boarding school experience, and postschool life. In fact, My People the Sioux underscores the centrality of Standing Bear’s relationship with his father and its role in the shaping of his Lakota manhood as he negotiated the challenges of the dominant culture and its gender expectations as it worked to “civilize” Natives through such policies as the Allotment Act of 1887 and the creation of Federal boarding schools.1 Though white advocates of assimilation expected Natives to be fully compliant to Euro-American gender norms, Natives themselves often had a more complicated response to this goal. Such is the case with the Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear, who worked to find ways to maintain traditional Lakota male gender norms as he adjusted to the historical force of assimilation. Though assimilationist policies and institutions often caused devastating psychological trauma on Natives, particularly on boys and girls who attended boarding schools, Luther Standing Bear was not traumatized by his boarding school experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. For Standing Bear the key to maintaining this psychological stability was his close identification with his father. My People, in fact, is carefully structured to first establish how Standing Bear absorbed Lakota masculine norms from his father before he was immersed in Euro-American culture. As the narrative progresses and Standing Bear describes his transition to and education at Carlisle, he describes how his father continued to play [End Page 19] a key role in how he measured himself as a Lakota man, a dynamic that continued throughout his life. As My People illustrates, Standing Bear’s relationship with his father provided the cultural anchor that allowed him to proactively sustain a distinctly Lakota manhood despite the pressures of assimilation efforts on the part of Euro-America. My People the Sioux is carefully designed to appeal to the sensibilities of a white readership, as Ryan Burt and Daniel Moos have both argued. Burt states that Standing Bear’s central goal in the narrative is to dispel white stereotypes of Natives as bloodthirsty savages (629). According to Moos, Standing Bear takes liberties with his early life in order to idealize Lakota life before “contact” to appeal to his white audience’s romantic conceptions of Plains Indians and to portray himself as someone who has successfully “bridged the gap of pre-contact and post-contact culture” (189).2 I argue, however, that Standing Bear’s autobiography is also a window into how the transition into the “post-contact” era was not necessarily a one-way street for Native peoples. His idealization of his life under the tutelage of his father is constructed to underscore how Standing Bear’s manhood was not only shaped by Lakota cultural expectations before “contact,” but also how his upbringing prepared him to negotiate the “post-contact” world in accordance with those expectations. As a student at Carlisle, Standing Bear was subjected to a curriculum that was designed to eradicate any vestige of Native cultural identity. Specifically, the superintendent of the school, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, hoped that “[i]n an isolated institutional setting, [he could] destroy what he termed ‘savage languages,’ ‘primitive superstitions,’ and ‘uncivilized cultures,’ replacing them with work ethics, Christian values, and the white man’s civilization. In sum, Pratt created Carlisle as a space to take ‘the savage-infant to the surroundings of civilization’” (Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, “Origin” 13). Though eradicating “savagery” was the goal of Indian boarding schools such as Carlisle, Native children did not necessarily succumb to this assault on their respective heritages. As David Wallace Adams explains, the success of the assimilation process at boarding schools was not seamless; rather, “the acculturation process itself could involve...

Empire: An Analytical Category for Educational Research

AbstractIn this article Roland Sintos Coloma argues for the relevance of empire as an analytical category in educational research. He points out the silence in mainstream studies of education on the subject of empire, the various interpretive approaches to deploying empire as an analytic, and the importance of indigeneity in research on empire and education. Coloma examines three award‐winning books, Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957, John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End, and David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, in order to delineate the heuristic spectrum of the use of empire in educational research. These texts are put in conversation with the interdisciplinary fields of American, postcolonial, race/ethnic, and indigenous studies where questions of empire have received considerable attention. Ultimately, mobilizing empire as an analytical category will enable researchers, policymakers, and educators to establish new connections and dispute long‐standing views about discursive, structural, and affective dynamics at local, national, and global levels.

P4.026 Indian Boarding School Experience and HIV Sexual Risk Behaviors Among Urban Two-Spirit American Indian/Alaska Natives

Background As part of a systemic effort of assimilation between the late 19 th and mid-20 th centuries, thousands of American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) children were placed in residential Indian boarding schools. To understand the impact of forced attendance in Indian boarding schools on HIV risk, we explored sexual risk behaviours, STI diagnosis, and substance misuse among AIAN two-spirit (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) adults who had attended Indian boarding school as children compared to those with no history of boarding school. Methods The current investigation was part of a comprehensive multi-site, cross-sectional national health survey of 447 AIAN two-spirit people from seven metropolitan areas in the U.S. To minimise selection bias, multiple sampling strategies were used including targeted, partial network, and respondent-driven sampling (RDS) techniques. Results Eighty-two (22.9%) respondents had a history of Indian boarding school attendance. Compared to others, respondents who attended boarding school were more likely to have a diagnosis of alcohol abuse or dependence (58.5% vs. 44.9%, p p p p p p p Conclusion Findings from this study provide some of the first data on boarding school experience and HIV risk among an urban two-spirit AIAN community sample and underscore the need for increased HIV/STI prevention efforts in AIAN communities. In addition, advanced statistical models are needed that identify mediational pathways to health outcomes and risk behaviours.

Home away from home? Boarding in Australian schools

Currently, Australian boarding schools undertake to provide a home away from home for around 20,000 adolescents. Research documenting the boarding school experience is scarce, and, with few exceptions, exists as a less significant aspect of more general research into private school education. Such school-based research focuses on the positive, character-building benefits of the boarding experience. However, case studies of former boarders paint quite a different picture. In order for boarding schools to best support boarders’ development, it is vital that adults who fulfil a parenting role undertake appropriate training. This paper draws together available information to present a comprehensive picture of boarding in Australian schools, with a focus on the challenges faced by the in loco parentis role of staff. It is apparent that more skills-based training is vital to better equip staff in this very important role.

Native American boarding schools

A broadly based historical survey, this book examines Native American boarding schools in the United States from Puritan times to the present day. * Draws upon actual student letters and documents relating to boarding school experiences * Presents biographical profiles of such key figures as Col. Richard Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian School; and Jim Thorpe, American athlete and Carlisle graduate * Provides a chronology of Native American boarding schools in the United States from the 1600s to the present * Supplies an annotated bibliography of key research resources on Native American boarding schools * Includes a glossary defining hundreds of terms relating to Indian culture and history

Musical Education of American Indians at Hampton Institute (1878–1923) and the Work of Natalie Curtis (1904–1921)

The education of American students, particularly that which occurred at boarding schools during the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, has been covered extensively in many studies. However, these works mention little about the musical education of American students. The goal of boarding schools run by the federal government during this time period was to break down tribal relationships. (1) As a result, Native customs, including Native music, were not allowed on boarding school campuses. Students at these boarding schools learned music just as students at many public schools did, through general music classes and through band and orchestra programs. (2) One school did break with federal mandates and not only allowed students to sing their Native tunes in their Native tongue in full costume but featured them in concert. (3) This school was Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which educated students during the years 1878 through 1923. General Samuel Armstrong Chapman (1839-93) founded Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in 1868. (4) The founding is well documented in the school's archives. Annual reports of the principal, (5) the school's magazine, The Southern Workman, and Talks and Thoughts, a monthly magazine written by and for the students at the school, as well as personal letters and memos, photographs, memoirs, music programs, and school catalogs were used in this research. Review of Relevant Literature The history of the Hampton Institute has been well documented. Hampton and Its Students by Armstrong and Ludlow, published in 1874, provided detailed insight on day-to-day activities at the school during its first six years. (6) More recent histories cover a broader view of developments through the present day: Hampton University: A National Treasure by Martha Dawson, Education for Life: The Story of Hampton Institute by Francis Greenwood Peabody, and Hampton University: Our Home by the Sea by Mae Barbee Boone Pleasant. (7) While these books cover the arrival of students, they make no mention of their musical education. Two books about the Indians at Hampton, Lead and Serve: American Education at Hampton Institute, 1878-1923 by Mary Lou Hultgren and Paulette Fairbanks Molin and Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923 by Donal L. Lindsey briefly touch upon music education but do not provide detailed information. (8) How Hampton musically educated students and the extent to which Hampton allowed Indians to perform has not been discussed in any of these books. In her doctoral dissertation, To Win the Heart: Music at Chemawa School, Melissa Parkhurst discusses how Native music was disallowed at Chemawa, while Western music was used to promote governmental ideals. (9) The approach to musical education at Hampton Institute was in direct opposition to what occurred at Chemawa. Margaret Archuleta devotes one chapter to music education in general in Away From Home: American Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000. (10) She states that the Office of Affairs, which was in charge of the boarding school system, viewed students' participation in an Indian performance as a failure of their educational program, further emphasizing the desire to thwart any efforts to maintain tribal alliances by students. (11) Music at the majority of boarding schools was meant to help civilize students by indoctrinating them with patriotic music, American folk tunes, and Western art music. (12) This study will provide a look at a boarding school that celebrated the culture, in contrast to other boarding schools and in violation of governmental policies, as well as a view of music education and performances not seen in other studies. Background on Hampton Institute Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, now known as Hampton University, is located in Hampton, Virginia, near Old Point Comfort, where the first African slaves arrived in 1613. …

Indian Boarding School Experience, Substance Use, and Mental Health among Urban Two-Spirit American Indian/Alaska Natives

Background: Systematic efforts of assimilation removed many Native children from their tribal communities and placed in non-Indian-run residential schools. Objectives: To explore substance use and mental health concerns among a community-based sample of 447 urban two-spirit American Indian/Alaska Native adults who had attended boarding school as children and/or who were raised by someone who attended boarding school. Method: Eighty-two respondents who had attended Indian boarding school as children were compared to respondents with no history of boarding school with respect to mental health and substance use. Results: Former boarding school attendees reported higher rates of current illicit drug use and living with alcohol use disorder, and were significantly more likely to have attempted suicide and experienced suicidal thoughts in their lifetime compared to non-attendees. About 39% of the sample had been raised by someone who attended boarding school. People raised by boarding school attendees were significantly more likely to have a general anxiety disorder, experience posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, and have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime compared to others.

Pear Trees and Poetry: Crafting Identity in a Private Boarding School

This phenomenological study uses personal narratives to reveal the lived and shared experiences of two African American women who, as adolescents, attended Logan Academy, a private boarding secondary school. Revealing the experiences of myself and Malika, I share how the private boarding school experience shaped our consciousness as African American female high school graduates. I use womanism as a theoretical framework to share the high school reflections of my peer Malika as well as to present my own at Logan Academy. The findings of this phenomenological study reveal themes of psychological injury, community, and the importance of African American literature in helping to manage the challenges of a predominantly white, private secondary school for us as African American students.

The Piney Woods School: An Exploration of the Historically Black Boarding School Experience in Shaping Student Achievement, Cultural Esteem, and Collegiate Integration

This qualitative case study explores the cultural impact the Piney Woods School, a historically Black independent boarding school, had on the social and academic experiences of four of its graduates in attendance at two traditionally White universities. The article discusses the collegiate experiences of four students: Samantha, Ira, Tony, and Bobby. Though their individual collegiate experiences markedly differ from each other, their experiences reflect overall the historically Black boarding school experience as instrumental in shaping student achievement, cultural esteem, and sense of belonging. Studies that explore the secondary school experience, such as the historically Black boarding school, continue to provide other contexts in which to examine how school environment can negatively or positively influence African American students’ achievement in college, particularly at traditionally White colleges and universities.

Imagining Navajo in the Boarding School: Laura Tohe'sNo Parole Todayand the Intimacy of Language Ideologies

In this article I investigate Navajo poet Laura Tohe's uses of metapragmatic terms in three literary works found in her bookNo Parole Today. Tohe's book focuses on the boarding school experience and is especially concerned with issues of language use. I argue that Tohe uses metadiscourses that both dramatize language use but also create affectively potent relations between speakers and the languages they use. These metadiscourses are implicit metadiscourses. Rather than explicitly stating that Navajo should be the language of social intimacy for Navajos, Tohe dramatizes such relationships. Such implicit metadiscourses gain added import when understood within the larger social fields of the Navajo Nation and current ideologies about the Navajo language. [Navajo, poetry, metapragmatics, affectivity, metadiscourses, language ideologies]

Breathless (review)

Reviewed by: Breathless Deborah Stevenson, Editor Warman, Jessica . Breathless. Walker, 2009 [320p]. ISBN 978-0-80279-849-7$16.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 8-12 The one thing Katie loves is swimming, and the one person she's loyal to is her older brother, Will. Will, however, is increasingly losing the battle against bouts of psychosis, and after he makes a particularly public and violent suicide attempt, he's sent off to an institution and Katie to a boarding school in another state. Unable to bring herself to mention the truth about her brother, she lets people at school think that he died. As she carves out a new life for herself there, with a close roommate (the only schoolmate who knows the truth), a sweet boyfriend, and the captaincy of the swimming team, she vacillates between rejection of and yearning for the downward-spiraling brother that most people don't even know she still has. So far, that sounds like a fairly typical YA novel of family angst, sure to lead to tearful acknowledgment of flawed but precious loved ones and the importance of being true to oneself. Warman, however, delivers something quite different. As the story follows Katie from sophomore to senior year, it focuses not simply on her feelings about Will but on her growth in general, as her isolation at school brings her a whole new set of relationships to negotiate; she follows a real-life pattern of foregrounding first one, then another, and moving in and out of acceptance and rejection with just about all of them. Her feelings about Will shift from protective loyalty (she's his defender against accusing parents), to annoyed embarrassment (he repeatedly phones her at school in the middle of the night), to shocked reconsideration (he holds their father at gunpoint), but even when his violence finally results in someone's death, that protective faith in her brother is her first, mistaken response. Yet that drama simmers underneath the more immediate story of her school experiences, and Warman allows Woodsdale Academy to become a full and complete world of its own, where Katie is initially a mysterious novelty who quickly rises to swim-team star. The tight, insular school atmosphere is palpably authentic, thick with secrets and unchallengeable hierarchies and heady, risky freedoms. Though there's plenty of weight in the plot, this isn't a book about events so much as human dynamics, and characterization is vivid and exquisite. Katie is achingly real, and her relationship with her ferocious, guarded, and superbly faithful roommate, Mazzie, is one of the most tender and intimate platonic friendships in YA lit. Katie's boyfriend, Drew, is frustratingly condescending, amusingly self-focused (a committed Christian who won't have intercourse before marriage, he proudly announces to her when he's ready for her to begin providing oral sex), and a genuinely kind and forgiving guy. Behind it all, though, always lurks the family life that tethers Katie, and the brother who has essentially destroyed her family ("Never have children. . . . They'll break your heart," her mother bluntly advises her). The book deftly handles [End Page 99] Katie's changing understanding of his impact, and there's a tacit contrast between problems she has no control over (Will) and problems she could have controlled (she loses a scholarship to Yale, her dream school, by slacking off and partying during a summer program there), a differentiation that's hard to learn save through experience. Since readers make the journey with Katie, they'll sympathize with her choices and failures, and they'll be glad to see, in the closing epilogue from ten years on, that she learns to find her own stability while remaining connected to Will ("He will always be with me"). Along the way to that hard-fought end, they'll find the boarding-school experience enviable, the family situation poignant, and Katie a protagonist they'll understand, support, and forgive. (See p. 132 for publication information.) Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Voices from Haskell: Indian students between two worlds, 1884-1928

Institute of Lawrence, Kansas, first opened its doors in 1884 to twenty-two Ponca and Ottawa children, sent there to be taught Anglo-Protestant cultural values. For a century and a quarter since that time, this famous boarding school institution has challenged and touched the lives of tens of thousands of Indian students and their families representing a diverse array of tribal heritages. Voices from Haskell chronicles the formative years of this unique institution through the vivid memories and words of the students who attended.Drawing on children's own accounts in letters, diaries, and other first-hand sources, Myriam Vuckovic reveals what Haskell's students really thought about the boarding school experience. By examining the cultural encounters and contests that occurred there, she portrays indigenous youth struggling to retain a sense of dignity and Indian identity - and refusing to become passive victims of assimilation.Vuckovic focuses on issues that directly affected the students, such as curriculum, health, gender differences, and extracurricular activities. She doesn't flinch from the harsh realities of daily life: poor diet, overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and students forced to work to maintain school facilities and often subjected to harsh punishments. In response to this hostile environment, students developed a subculture of accommodation and resistance - sometimes using sign language as a way around the 'English only' rule - that also helped break down barriers between tribes. Many found a positive experience in the education they received and discovered new sources of pride, such as the Native American Church, Haskell's renowned football team, and its equally accomplished school band.Haskell is the only former government boarding school to evolve into a four-year university and still boasts a unique intertribal character, providing a culturally diverse learning environment for more than 1,000 students from 150 tribes every year. The first in-depth study of the school from its founding through the first quarter of the twentieth century, Voices from Haskell is a frank look at its history, a tribute to its accomplishments, and a major contribution to studies of the Indian boarding school experience.

Uniform Indians: Personal Reflections on the Eastern Band Cherokee Boarding School Experience

Uniform Indians: Personal Reflections on the Eastern Band Cherokee Boarding School Experience Sarah Margaret Sneed (bio) My sister and I grew up away from our people, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, but our bedtime stories were most often about my mother’s days as a student at the Cherokee Boarding School. The stories were retold often and furnished us a bond to our tribe that was sustained during the time our family lived out west. Our mom, born Mary Smith, told about how one day around 1920, while picking blackberries, she and her sister, Rosie, were scooped up by John Crowe, a tribal lawman and truant officer, placed into the back of a wagon with other children and taken to the Cherokee Boarding School. Her widowed mother, Lucy Ann, had not given consent, nor was she notified, that her daughters had been taken to school. Mom never mentioned her oldest sister, Annie, when she told this story. Indeed, Annie may well have been away working as a servant in a white family’s home, as part of the boarding school program known as “Outing,” in which students were placed for employment. Mom said that, once at school, she had been immediately abandoned by Rosie, who, having started school two years earlier, had fallen in easily with her classmates. One of the first meals Mom was served at school was macaroni. She had never seen the likes of this strange food, but having had some experience with intestinal parasites, thought she was being asked to eat a plate of worms. Her rejection of the food was met with a knuckle rapping by a fierce, yonega-ageya dormitory matron. Mom was five years old and couldn’t understand why Lucy Ann didn’t come to take her and Rosie home, away from this terrifying environment. An account that caused me great distress was of how Mom had been told only after the fact that her mother had come to the school to see if her daughters were there. Mom would not see her mother until later that year at a Christmas program to which families were invited. Having been raised on stories of Mom’s attendance at the Cherokee Boarding School and later at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in [End Page 49] Kansas, I was especially honored to be selected to document the boarding school experiences of our people under a project Principal Chief Michell Hicks initiated through the Kituwah Preservation Education Program of the Eastern Band. Aside from the obvious negative impacts boarding school education effected, Chief Hicks has observed that forced removal in youth from families and from the Qualla Boundary may well have fostered values deeply held among Eastern Band elders, including the closeness they feel toward others of their generation and their devotion to the Eastern Band’s lands. In 2005, Chief Hicks initiated the publication of an Elders’ Yearbook, an album of photographs of and quotations from Eastern Band senior citizens, regarding memories from their youth, including a section regarding life at boarding school. This effort was subsequently expanded to include the development of a permanent compilation of materials regarding the Eastern Band boarding school experience. Photographs and videotaped interviews compiled through this project were mounted, and received very positive acclaim at the 2008 Tribal Fair in Cherokee. Interviews conducted with elders eighty years of age and older reflected the official strategies of Indian boarding school education of the day. Some shared experiences of harsh treatment by dorm matrons and teachers and most acknowledged that their experiences when first placed at the Cherokee Boarding School were frightening and confusing. But the interviews deviated in one dominant respect from the literature regarding boarding school experiences elsewhere. Eastern Band members in this age group expressed, and in a number of cases insisted that it be emphasized, that their bad experiences at the Cherokee Boarding School were balanced by positive outcomes, good things had come to them as a result of their education at the Cherokee Boarding School. Those elders seem to have genuinely taken an educational regime designed to break their tribal identities and reformed the school environment as their own. Their spirit in so doing is all...

Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (review)

Reviewed by: Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star Ron Briley Tom Swift. Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 339 pp. Cloth, $24.95. In Chief Bender's Burden, journalist Tom Swift provides an entertaining biography of Charles Albert Bender, who was elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame in 1953. Nevertheless, Swift often relies upon conjecture to discuss the response of Bender as a Native American to the racial stereotypes of baseball and American society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Relying primarily upon newspaper and periodical accounts of Bender's life and baseball career, Swift paints a picture of an athlete who attempted to assimilate into the dominant white culture, but who finally succumbed to societal pressures and sought solace in alcohol. The major problem for Swift's study is that the taciturn pitcher rarely shared his innermost thoughts about topics such as race, so the author is often reduced to assuming how Bender must have felt when subjected to racial profiling and caricature. Swift frames his account of Bender's life around the pitcher's final disastrous appearance for the Philadelphia Athletics during the 1914 World Series against the Boston "Miracle" Braves. The flashbacks to episodes in Bender's [End Page 158] early life are developed in a somewhat cinematic fashion as the reader is returned at the end of each chapter to the struggling Bender on the mound attempting to retire the Boston lineup. The larger historical and cultural context in which Bender lived is best developed in the chapters on the young Native American before he entered professional baseball. Charles Albert Bender was born on 5 May 1884 in Minnesota. His father was of German-American descent, while his mother was a member of the Chippewa nation. The family lived in difficult economic circumstances on the White Earth Indian Reservation. Bender often quarreled with his father, and in 1896 he left his family for the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Rather than being forcibly separated from his family and culture through the Indian boarding school experience, Swift observes that Bender embraced the opportunity to leave his troubled family structure. At Carlisle, Bender was exposed to the assimilationist policies of school founder Richard Henry Pratt, who, along with legendary coach Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, believed that sport provided an opportunity to instill character in the school's Native population. Based upon examination of some compositions prepared by Bender during his Carlisle years, Swift concludes that the athlete internalized Pratt's philosophy or prudently pretended to have adopted his ideas. Swift writes, "Carlisle was a place where American Indians learned to self-censor and where incorrect behavior was sometimes met with a lashing. Besides, Charley [Bender] knew he wanted a place in the dominant culture, so he was willing to tell the dominant culture that he accepted, or at least conceded, its version of the narrative" (55). After graduation from Carlisle in 1902, Bender pitched for Dickinson College and the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Athletic Club. Appearing with the Harrisburg club, Bender defeated the Chicago Cubs 3–1 and gained the attention of major league scouts. After signing with the Philadelphia Athletics and their manager/owner Connie Mack, the nineteen-year-old Bender won seventeen games as a rookie in 1903. Off the playing field, Bender established a reputation as the stoic Native American, unflappable and taciturn. Swift argues, Given that this sensitive unheralded rookie happened to be an American Indian trying to dispel a set of stereotypes that were so pervasive they might as well have been written on the outfield wall, it's not hard to understand why he chose his words carefully. He would have enough doubts without making more with loose lips. (97) Between 1903 and 1914, Bender won 193 games for the Athletics. He played an essential role in the 1905, 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914 American League pennants garnered by the team, as well as the world championships of 1910, 1911, and 1913. Swift maintains that during Bender's heyday with the Athletics, [End Page 159] the athlete apparently embodied the assimilationist ideas of Carlisle Indian...

The Smell of the White Man Is Killing Us: Education and Assimilation Among Indigenous Peoples

The Smell of the White Man Is Killing Us: Education and Assimilation Among Indigenous Peoples James T. Carroll Introduction A cursory glance at Euro-colonial encounters clearly illustrates the close connection between assimilating indigenous peoples1 and educating them. In North America the Spanish, French, and English all carried similar attitudes about the “savagery” and “barbarism” of the indigenous peoples and believed that the twin engines of Christianization and education would produce a people more palatable to European sensibilities. In the case of Australia, the colonizers transplanted attitudes and ideas about indigenous peoples and benefited from the English experience in other parts of the empire. There exists a wide array of scholarly works on colonization and colonialism, yet only a handful of scholars have focused on the importance of institutions, namely boarding schools, in realizing the economic and philosophical goals of the dominant colonizing powers. Moreover, much of the scholarship considers a single area or cultural group and does not utilize transnational comparisons.2 [End Page 21] The value and future importance of transnational history was highlighted in a series of summer conferences convened in Florence, Italy, between 1997–2000 that brought together an international array of scholars to discuss theories and practical applications of globalizing American history. The intellectual product of these deliberations was “The LaPietra Report: A Report to the Profession” which was endorsed by the Organization of American Historians and provided a number of recommendations and directives for U.S. historians. The report advocated the blurring of fixed national boundaries, using a cross-cultural approach in teaching and research, and incorporating a wider range of historical narratives into the scholarly discussion of events. The challenges presented have resonated with scholars of indigenous peoples in North America for over two decades due to the complex intersection of colonial powers, tribal cultures, and linguistic groups that affect indigenous history in North America. The comparisons between Canada and the United States, and to a lesser extent Mexico, are obvious to scholars in the field. To extend these comparisons to a wider geographic scope and to a larger sampling of indigenous cultures, however, requires a broad command of national histories, theory (post-modern, post-colonial, and post-structuralist), imperialism, and indigenous history, to name a few.3 The task of comparing (and by its very nature contrasting) indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Australia require new modes of thinking about research and a very clear theoretical structure. The process of comparing two societies, albeit quite similar in some respects, and their approaches to indigenous education requires understanding differing definitions and goals of assimilation, considering different notions of race and racism vis-à-vis indigenous peoples, interpreting government policies affecting indigenous people, and determining the cultural value that each nation places on education as a “civilizing” agent. The scholarly and theoretical challenges involved in this study are significant, yet the robust intellectual discourse that will emerge makes the effort worthwhile and enriching.4 In addition, as Richard Slatta recently noted, “to limit the subject of historical inquiry within national boundaries is always to invite the charge of narrow perspective and historical nationalism.”5 The comparison of indigenous boarding schools provides an appropriate venue and opportunity to generate meaningful transnational comparisons. [End Page 22] In order to identify the points of comparison between mission schools in the United States and Australia, a group of questions will focus and clarify the analysis. While the role of education in the process of cultural assimilation raises a wide range of important issues, this essay will consider five points: (1) “How was the philosophy of indigenous schools affected by prevailing notions of race and ethnicity in the United States and Australia?” (2) “What role did the forces of “Anglo-conformity”—christianization, cultivation, and civilization—play in school curriculums and the aspirations for assimilation?” (3) “How did the various religious denominations assist in forcible assimilation?” (4) “How did indigenous students respond to the assimilationist efforts in the schools?” and (5) “How did the indigenous student population interpret the boarding school experience and to what extent did they preserve their traditional cultures?” The response to these questions will be organized in five broad areas of discussion. First, some...

The ‘spirit of education’ in Indonesian Pesantren

This paper employs Foucauldian theory to consider Islamic boarding school experiences in Indonesia. For some pupils ‘the spirit of education’ – a dimension of pleasure – comes to be highly valued, creating a lifelong passion for the pursuit of knowledge. Two school principals (both pesantren [Islamic boarding school] graduates themselves) articulated strong commitment to the ‘spirit of education’. Yet their respective boarding schools were very poor, not only by western standards but compared with Indonesian public schools, and conditions were austere. The embodiment of pesantren discourse as high academic achievement is illustrated by the example of Khadija – a young female pesantren graduate now studying at doctoral level in the United Kingdom. Explaining the embodied production of the ‘spirit of education’ demands looking at charismatic pedagogy, strict rules, austere conditions and sparse provision of learning resources as regimes of truth and power–knowledge relations that inhere in pesantren as lived experiences of pupils.

<i>Learning to Write “Indian”: The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature</i> (review)

<i>Learning to Write “Indian”: The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature</i> (review)

Hopi Resistance, Hotevilla, and the Survival of All: The Right to Be Left Alone is the Beginning of Freedom

This paper examines the history of the Village of Hotevilla and the nature of Hopi resistance. Hotevilla split from Oraibi in 1906--the nature of conflict management and social organziation is discussed. Resistance to the dominant culture extends well back from the common idea that the 1960s Red Power movement advanced American Indian causes. Hotevilla had distinguished itself by resisting many modern conveniences that the government and others want to force on them. Comparison of Yoder v. Wisconsin with the forced boarding school experience of American Indians is examined. The liberal philosophy that would mandate forced English learning and schooling is questioned in light of the practices, history, and culture of the Hotevilla Hopi. Discussion of Hopi prophecy. Division of progressive and traditional is questioned. Effects of wage economy. The right to be left alone is asserted for a people that have never treatied with the United States.