Indian Boarding Schools Research Articles

Geophysical archaeology for the study of complex historical-period burial spaces: An example from the Fort Lewis military cemetery, Colorado

Geophysical methods have long been used to locate and map unmarked graves in cemeteries and burial spaces. Despite their prevalence, geophysical cemetery surveys can be extremely complex, particularly when dealing with historical-period cemeteries. Not only are there interpretive challenges from site formation processes and noncultural features, but there are also cultural challenges when seeking to study a cemetery within its historical context. Geophysical archaeology is a specialization that can guide this type of work by underscoring the cultural context for geophysical data. Beyond simply locating unmarked graves or other “anomalies,” geophysical archaeology emphasizes increasing the interpretive ability of geophysical data by situating these surveys in cultural theory. Using the example of the Fort Lewis military cemetery, which also served the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, in southwest Colorado, this paper highlights how geophysical archaeology was used to identify specific features about the cemetery, including the original fence line, number of likely graves, and two different burial contexts (casketed burials and exhumed graves).

"But Always My Thoughts Stay with Me, My Own Way": Intellectual and Creative Claims of Sovereignty by Indian Boarding School Students in The Colored Land : A Navajo Indian Book, Written and Illustrated by Navajo Children (1937)

Abstract: In 1937, Ruth K. Brandt, Supervisor of Elementary Education, in the federal Office of Indian Affairs, edited and published The Colored Land: A Navajo Indian Book, Written and Illustrated by Navajo Children with Scribner's Sons. Diné elementary school students from the Tohatchi Boarding School in New Mexico were the featured writers of much of the text with supporting illustrations composed by students from the Santa Fe Indian School. It was presented by its editors as evidence of the government's successful approach to assimilation through education. Situating their work within frameworks offered by contemporary Diné poets, I argue that these young children resisted acculturation and assimilationist efforts in the Reorganization Era by maintaining cultural values and traditions and even, in a few cases, issuing challenges to Western epistemologies and educational regimes. This early collection of published creative work by Diné writers and artists features undercurrents of resistance alongside literary and intellectual claims of sovereignty.

A Story of Resiliency and Success: Beyond the Native American Boarding School

A Story of Resiliency and Success: Beyond the Native American Boarding School

American Hegelianism and its Impact Upon Indian Boarding School Policy

AbstractIn early 2021, a Canadian investigation revealed the discovery of over a thousand grave sites of indigenous children on the grounds of Indian residential schools across Canada. These discoveries prompted US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to announce a similar investigation into the ongoing legacy and intergenerational impact of federally sponsored Indian boarding schools in the United States. In addition to documenting the legacy of abuse, neglect and dominance of indigenous peoples, we believe that such reflection upon the impact of Indian boarding schools should also include the justifications that were used to promote the government policy of compelling indigenous children to leave family, tribe, customs and even language behind to be acculturated in remote boarding schools far from home or reservation. For while in hindsight these policies can be both deplored and regretted, they were not crafted in a philosophical vacuum. Specifically, it might come as a surprise to scholars today that Hegelian thought actually featured in the support and promotion of such policies. We propose to tell at least part of this story, by focusing on the leading American Hegelian of the time, William Torrey Harris, who—as director of the famed Concord School of Philosophy and also longtime US Commissioner of Education—was highly influential in both philosophical and educational circles. In that latter capacity, Harris penned a defence of the boarding school system, which drew upon broadly Hegelian ideas and language. So while we have elsewhere defended and lauded Harris and the St Louis Hegelians for their contributions to American philosophy and democratic educational thought, here is one respect in which this influence has not stood up well to the test of time.

“We Have No Tribes” How Indigenous Boys Helped Close Philadelphia’s Indian Boarding School

“We Have No Tribes” How Indigenous Boys Helped Close Philadelphia’s Indian Boarding School

Identities Classified: Indigenous Knowledge Management Systems and Gender in the “Age of Information”

This paper explores the intersections of Indigenous knowl­edge management systems and gender in knowl­edge organization, reflecting on their potential to shape, challenge, and enrich our understanding of identity. We begin by reviewing the ways that Indigenous Knowl­edge Organization (IKO), knowl­edge management systems, and queer archival theory are converging in information spaces, before presenting two case studies of knowl­edge organization that highlight intersectional problems and tensions inherent in attempting to represent complex identities in archival and knowl­edge management systems. We discuss how two-spirit identities are challenging traditional categories of gender identity in traditional naming conventions. Second, we examine the complexity of Native American boarding schools, the inherent hierarchical structures in knowl­edge management systems, and the relational systems that can be used to create more inclusive and responsive knowl­edge structures. We explore how archival knowl­edge management systems can be made more relational, using the examples within the digital tool Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC), and the challenges of relying solely on written structures to verify embodied knowl­edge and gender identity. We consider practical interventions to modify knowl­edge systems into being more adaptable, and the tension between deconstructing and building upon existing knowl­edge structures, using queering metadata as an example.

Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Abstract: This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper , to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.

Increasing Access to American Indian Off-Reservation Boarding School Archives

The Sherman Indian Museum’s rich collection documents the student experience, institutional culture, and community history of one of the oldest off-reservation American Indian boarding schools in the United States still in operation. Efforts to better understand the complex and layered history of these schools are regularly confronted with limited and scattered histories where significant gaps in the narrative exist. This paper details the cross-institutional collaboration to process and digitize the museum’s collection for increased accessibility, focusing on the partnership formed between an Indigenous and non-Indigenous institution and the steps taken to create one of the premier online digital collections documenting the boarding school experience.

US Federal Off-Reservation Boarding Schools and Ethnocide's Benevolent Perpetrator

The United States federal off-reservation Indian boarding schools of the twentieth century have been the locale for ethnocide and cultural genocide of the Native American population. While in any critical discussion of mass atrocity crimes, such as genocide and ethnocide, the question of the perpetrators always ranks central, not much attention has been paid to the perpetrators of ethnocide who operated in these off-reservation boarding schools. Furthermore, scholarship has focused on perpetrators in genocide but has not spent much time considering the definitional nuances between perpetrators in ethnocide and genocide. In this paper, I highlight an additional perpetrator type that applies specifically to ethnocide, which is an addition to existing perpetrator typologies. This benevolent perpetrator, who is specific to ethnocidal crimes, can for instance be found in United States federal off-reservation Indian boarding schools between 1878 and 1934. Paying attention to these perpetrators and considering them as a unique type, will allow for furthering and developing our understanding of ethnocide, perpetration and complicity, and assimilation practices in off-reservation boarding schools. Furthermore, this discussion is embedded in the debate about the applicability of the terms genocide and ethnocide in a settler-colonial context.

Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915 by Marinella Lentis

Reviewed by: Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915 by Marinella Lentis Mackenzie J. Cory Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education, 1889–1915. By Marinella Lentis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xxvii + 421 pp. Marinella Lentis's Colonized through Art examines how local and federal policy decisions shaped the implementation of art education in Native American boarding schools across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the core of her analysis is Jean and John Comaroff's conception of colonization as both a physical and mental imposition, supported by Gramsci's idea of cultural hegemony, the soft policies used to maintain control across generations without physical violence. This "colonization of consciousness" influenced the actions of boarding school administrators as they sought to create a serving class of Indigenous workers with skills learned in art classrooms (xxi). Throughout the volume, Lentis also relies on Lomawaima and McCarty's "safety zone" to describe how education incorporating traditional Indigenous arts fell in and out of fashion (xxii). This inclusion serves as the keystone explaining the seemingly contradictory policies present in boarding schools and constitutes one of the most groundbreaking aspects of the volume. The volume's chapters first present an overview of the current research regarding art education and Native boarding school policies before demonstrating how these policies were actually implemented at two institutions. These case studies are followed by a broader look at how the works produced by Native students were viewed by audiences from pedagogical backgrounds and the general public, both nationally and internationally. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the development of art education pedagogy for the lower classes during the nineteenth century. Lentis argues that these efforts to develop the morality and character of children of rural and immigrant workers directly influenced boarding school policies in the last twenty [End Page 322] years of the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 presents a general discussion of how pedagogical models affected boarding school arts education during this time, strengthening Lentis's argument and setting the groundwork for the rest of the volume. These chapters provide excellent overviews of art education both broadly and in the boarding schools and allow scholars lacking familiarity with either field to form an understanding of Lentis's argument. Chapter 3 examines how the beliefs of individual boarding school superintendents influenced the policies identified in the preceding chapter. Though the ultimate goal of the superintendents was to educate Native youth into becoming productive members of industrial society, Lentis discerns considerable disagreement between administrators' opinions of the economic role of art in Native communities, the danger of preserving Native artistic motifs, and the risk of over-homogenization of Native youth. In particular, this chapter does an excellent job of demonstrating how the whiplash between superintendents with relatively short tenures and widely differing pedagogies opened the door for more local control, which is confirmed in the following two chapters. Chapters 4 and 5 present case studies of how these policies were implemented in the Albuquerque Indian School and Sherman Institute, respectively. Though it would be expected that the Albuquerque Indian School would encourage a strong arts program, given the emergence of a local Native art scene in the late nineteenth century, local administrators often defied federal calls for just that due to their belief that Native artisans were preventing the community from integrating into industrial American culture. Conversely, the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, encouraged art education, going so far as to include regional Native motifs in their lessons and encouraging performance of indigeneity for the local community and tourists. In both cases, Lentis clearly shows the influence of local administrators on their school's art education as well as the impact these choices had on other boarding schools in the region and nationally. Chapter 6 discusses the inclusion of artwork created by boarding school students at international fairs. The artworks and their creators were instrumental in producing a narrative of the United States' success in taming the North American interior while simultaneously allowing foreign visitors to experience the Other. During the early twentieth century, this belief shifted towards one of Native artwork as an essential method...

Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton

Reviewed by: Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton Emily C. Burns Elizabeth Sutton, Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. xix, 168 pp. $49.95 (paper). Histories built on comparative case studies often lead to new discoveries by focusing on examples that are both parallel and divergent. This is the model undergirding art historian Elizabeth Sutton's comparative study of Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora and the author's great-grandmother Karen Thronson, a Norwegian immigrant to the Midwest. Pairing these two figures' stories and the spaces of subjugation and assimilation that operated for both Native nations and Scandinavian immigrant communities in the [End Page 197] Midwest allows readers to consider the power of objects to engage with place, identity, culture, gender, and memory. Sutton argues that these artists, contemporaries who never met, both engaged in community-building through art production to, in Sutton's words, "connect with place and validate self and group identity" (1). The act of creating in a variety of media—and in particular engaging with long-standing practices in their respective communities—helped these individuals to navigate their identities in the context of expected assimilation. There is much to recommend in this discussion, that centers on female makers and challenges art history's traditional hierarchies that tend to devalue craft. Sutton's focus on minoritized experience recasts ongoing narratives of settler colonialism and cultural subjugation. The text also takes seriously the possibilities of "visual coding" (24, 56) as a strategy that Thronson and De Cora employed to speak to U.S. and non-U.S. audiences simultaneously. This question—what modes of cultural expression could be non-threatening to dominant culture—offers the book's key investigation of artistic agency and messaging. The text also highlights the role of organizations and publication outlets for communicating ideas of identity. The study, however, leaves some important questions tantalizingly unanswered. There is a promising synergy between the presentation of handicraft from Scandinavia and Native American design in ladies' magazine cultures (83), but this is not probed further. The crucial scholarship by art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson on De Cora's navigations of modern and Native identities is listed in the bibliography but is not cited or directly engaged in the content of the book, although the author does come to similar conclusions about how De Cora strategically sought to build a compatibly Native American and modern artistic practice. A dialogue with Hutchinson's conclusions on this topic would have also enabled greater clarity of Sutton's contributions, especially in her original research of design projects by De Cora's female students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the ways that De Cora encouraged her students to develop individual expression via a larger understanding of Native American art practices in the early twentieth century (108–116). I also would have appreciated a citation for her use of Lakota interpretations of color in the Carlisle student work (112) as well as some discussion of De Cora's painting in the Native American boarding school exhibition at the Universal Paris Exposition of 1900 when her participation in several other World's Fair displays is noted (57). Tonalism as an aesthetic practice, which De Cora employed, is never really defined or productively [End Page 198] engaged as an aesthetic (48, 65), which makes it difficult to trace the artists' adaptation of it. The project might have benefited from further integration of the main figures. Each chapter oscillates between the two subjects, and the brief conclusion does not fully show how they are complements or foils for each other. Do we really see either figure more clearly in this comparison? An extended article focusing on key similarities, such as immigration and dispossession, might have been more effective as a comparative study. Indeed, while the artists share a gender identity and the use of art to connect with their respective communities, certainly the experiences of Norwegian immigrant women and Native American women significantly diverge in...

Jane Griffith, 2019. Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools.

Jane Griffith, 2019. <i>Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools</i>.

Making “Womenly Women” or “Servants of Civilization”

This article investigates how white educators used American education in an effort to socially engineer Hawaiian acceptance of U.S. control over the islands. Examining school reports, journal articles, and official correspondence from the Kamehameha School for Girls, I explore the various strategies principal Ida M. Pope used to promote white middle-class ways of homemaking and mothering, in an effort to undermine her Native Hawaiian students’ Indigenous identities and convert them into docile Hawaiian Americans. Despite Pope’s language of female empowerment, she harbored racist attitudes toward Native Hawaiians and produced an institutional climate hostile to Indigenous identity. This article builds on previous work on white women’s maternalism in Native American boarding schools to highlight how themes of white feminity, U.S. empire, and settler colonialism manifested at the Kamehameha School for Girls. More broadly, it reveals the role of white women in Hawai‘i as agents of colonial control who actively labored toward normalizing U.S. occupation and empire.

Psychological Impacts of Historic Loss and Current Events Surrounding American Indian Boarding Schools.

Historic loss and historic loss-associated symptoms were examined in a cross-section of 60 American Indian and Alaska Native students attending a Native American serving college that is also a former Indian boarding school. To measure awareness of current events regarding finding unmarked graves at boarding schools, authors developed and used the Truth and Reconciliation Scale. Levels of self-compassion were assessed in participants to determine if there was a correlation between negative feelings towards oneself and psychological risk factors brought forth as a result of how aware students were of current events surrounding former Indian boarding schools. Self-compassion was predicted to act as a protective factor and a positive coping mechanism for those most impacted by historic loss and intergenerational trauma. Participants reported thinking about, and being psychologically impacted by, historic loss. Psychological impacts were stronger in participants who were more aware of current reconciliation efforts and those who had higher levels of negative thoughts towards themselves. This suggests the possibility that current events, such as the finding of unmarked graves at former Indian boarding schools, might be increasing trauma responses in current students. Working to reduce negative thoughts about self and increase self-compassion may help buffer the negative impacts of the current truth and reconciliation work. Researchers and practitioners are encouraged to engage in more research and practice exploring the potential benefits of self-compassion for those adversely affected by historic loss, thus improving the likelihood of cultural revitalization from a broad perspective.

Reverberations of Boarding School Trauma in Upstate New York

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices is glimpsed in Upstate NY’s Native populations. One such way of historical preservation is within the literature of the Native descendants of these schools, for example, within the poetic works of Eric Gansworth (Onondaga). Gansworth brilliantly crafts poems regarding his youth on reservations and within this youth demonstrates the last intergenerational impacts of the US boarding schools.

"Battlefield and Classroom": Indigenous Student-Soldiers and US Imperialism in the Carlisle Indian School Press

ABSTRACT: The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the beginnings of US empire abroad and simultaneously the crystallization of the US assimilation era at home. While off-reservation Native American boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918) developed national recognition, the US began to acquire overseas territories in Cuba, Hawai'i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Students at schools like Carlisle produced white-edited, school-controlled periodicals like the Indian Helper , the Red Man and Helper , the Arrow , and the Carlisle Arrow . Reading Carlisle's periodicals, this essay traces the experiences of thirty-eight Carlisle students who enlisted in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and wrote about their experiences across the US's new empire. Although such periodicals have long been read as colonial documents, these newspapers, newsletters, and magazines nevertheless offer insights into Native students' writing and Native soldiers' voices at war, including their impressions of—and, sometimes, identification with—Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Hawaiians. Carlisle's administrators often used student-soldiers' reprinted letters to demonstrate successful assimilation which promised to transform Native peoples into patriotic US soldiers. These new "war correspondents" could then provide first-hand accounts of some of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars most famous battles. Although largely meant to legitimate assimilative education systems, reprinted letters by Native student-soldiers often detail their everyday lives at war, including interactions with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities overseas. This essay ultimately argues for more generous readings of Native voices in these otherwise heavily censored letters. Despite their framing in the periodicals as willing agents of US empire, these reprinted letters by Native students underscore how the US military was likewise a site of trans-Indigenous exchange that provided the material circumstances for connection and solidarity.

Sinister Schooling: Modern-Day Implications of Hampton Model Industrial Schools and American Indian Boarding Schools

Throughout American history, the government has taken various systemic measures to monitor, surveil and control its burgeoning minority populations. In the postbellum era, these aims were primarily focused on assimilation and cultural genocide modeled, beginning with the creation of schools like the Hampton Model Schools for Black students and American Indian boarding schools for Indigenous students. Though neither remain in operation, their spirit lives, particularly as we see Native and Black students being funneled into occupational tracks in high school, having disproportionately high rates of suspension and expulsion, and being subjected to a whitewashed curriculum that positions them as victims, criminals, or non-existent. This work seeks to explore the linkages between these historical institutions and the current status of Native and Black students in modern-day schools.

Trends in public interest in child abuse in the United States: An infodemiology study of Google Trends from 2004 to 2022

IntroductionMore than 1 in 7 children in the United States experience abuse annually with rates remaining consistent over the past 2 decades. During this timeframe, several high-profile cases of child abuse and neglect were publicized in national media in addition to multiple investigations uncovering Indigenous children dying from abuse at Indian Boarding Schools. Increased media attention among other public health and medical topics has been linked to increased public interest, thus, our objective was to investigate trends in public interest from 2004 to 2022. MethodsTo assess trends in public interest, we extracted monthly relative search interest in child abuse from Google Trends. We constructed linear regression to determine the long-term trajectory of interest, and also compared the slope of the trend to other topics, such as domestic violence. Further, we compared mean relative search interest (RSI) from Child Abuse Awareness Month (April) to other months via t-test. Lastly, we assess by-state correlations of RSI and number of children abused. ResultsSince 2004, search interest in child abuse has significantly declined in the United States—more than other related search terms. Child Abuse Awareness Month showed spikes in RSI which were greater than other months. By-state correlations of RSI and abuse were moderate to weak. ConclusionDespite heavy media attention covering stories of child abuse during the past 2 decades, search interest in child abuse has significantly declined. This trend may be related to aversion to secondary traumatic stress as news broadcasts often include stories of violence—of which child abuse stories may be most provoking. Following journalism guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reporting with focus on resiliency and prevention, rather than the individuals who perpetrated the crime, may provide more community support and increased public interest.

Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions by Susan Burch (review)

Reviewed by: Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions by Susan Burch Brianna Theobald (bio) Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions by Susan Burch University of North Carolina Press, 2021 COMMITTED IS A SLIM VOLUME whose impact far surpasses its word count. On one level, Susan Burch tells a story known to historians of Native America and Indigenous studies scholars: Between 1902 and 1934, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents and other authorities arranged for the detainment of nearly four hundred Native Americans in a federal psychiatric asylum for Indians in Canton, South Dakota. In Burch's hands, however, this story reads differently. Burch decenters the institution and the individuals who ran it, instead focusing on the people who were involuntarily detained in Canton as well as their families and descendants. As the book's subtitle suggests, the history Committed tells is above all a story of kinship—how relatives cared for one another in the face of involuntary separation, how detained people enacted kinship within institutional walls, and how descendants maintained kinship obligations across generations and established new relationships in the process of honoring their ancestors' memory. Long singled out as the "only" institution of its kind, the Canton Asylum appears less exceptional in Burch's telling. When situated within the context of settler colonialism, Native American history, and individual lives, containment and institutionalization are not extraordinary but, to quote one chapter title, "Familiar." This reality is reflected in the book's structure and organization. Chapters one through four document Native individuals' and families' experiences with the Canton institution. As an institution intended to achieve the eugenic segregation of individuals deemed "defective," the Indian Asylum housed men, women, and occasionally children who were confined for reasons that extended beyond contemporary understandings of insanity. In the stories of individuals' varied paths to Canton, readers will recognize many struggles that characterized U.S.-Native relations in the early twentieth century: over sexuality, procreation, family, and conceptions of health, well-being, and healing. Similarly, the necessarily fragmented accounts of life within the institution reflect themes that also appear in scholarship on Indian boarding schools: surveillance, solitary confinement, involuntary servitude, sexualized violence, and death. Burch could perhaps make some connections between federal institutions even more explicit; an [End Page 150] endnote cites elders' recollections of having been threatened with transfer to Canton to ensure good behavior while attending boarding school. The book's final two chapters are especially original and powerful. Chapter 5 reiterates Canton's lack of singularity by tracing the trajectories of individuals' post-Canton lives—trajectories that reveal continuity with regard to confinement and institutionalization. After the death of her mother, Cora Winona Faribault, a child born at the Canton institution, lived in an orphanage, a boarding school, the homes of white families, and an institution for unwed mothers. When the Indian Asylum closed in 1934, some individuals were discharged and returned to their reservations, but most were transferred to a hospital in Washington, D.C., and some endured repeated transfers between federal institutions for the remainder of their lives. Unlike previous histories, this story does not end with the closure of a single institution; nor does it end with the deaths of those who were forced to live within that institution's walls. Chapter 6 demonstrates that the violence of incarceration echoes across generations. At the heart of this final chapter are the tribal historians and descendants who insist upon—to quote the chapter's one-word title—"Remembering," countering erasure through their presence, their stories, their artifacts, and their commemorations. This reviewer appreciates Burch's explicit engagement with the methodological and ethical questions that surround her project. Deeply rooted in both disability studies and Indigenous studies, Committed demands that scholars carefully consider which stories are told and how—and that scholars remain accountable for such decisions. The book begins with "A Note on Access," where Burch describes the steps she has taken to "cultivate access," including the use of "accessible language rather than technical terms to invite a wide range of readers" (xv). Readers may then be surprised to encounter terms like "transinstitutionalization" in the introduction, but such language is not found in the book's...

Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak by Arnold Krupat

Reviewed by: Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak by Arnold Krupat Geoff Hamilton Arnold Krupat. Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 402 pp. Hardcover, $80.00. With this follow-up to his two-volume study Changed Forever: American Indian Boarding School Literature (2018, 2020), Krupat turns to a selection of writings by former students of the Carlisle Indian School, framing these works with his own critical commentary. His broadest aim is to improve our still limited understanding of the experiences of those who attended the school and others like it, "allowing us a measure of insight into what they saw and thought and felt" (xiv). The texts, the bulk of which have not been published previously, date from the last decade of the nineteenth century to Carlisle's closing in 1918, and primarily consist of letters to administrators, responses to questionnaires, and pieces written for the school's newspapers. As Krupat notes, this archive represents only a fraction of the students who attended Carlisle—namely, those who seemingly felt positive enough about the school to carry on communication with its representatives. The texts express, in fact, a generally (and often markedly) positive view of the institution, and are identified as conforming, for the most part, to a "comic" literary structure, with the majority of former students "telling stories that, all in all, come to a moderately happy ending" (xix). With this selection bias kept in mind, Krupat explains how these writings can contribute to a fuller understanding of the role played by boarding schools in Native American lives: "There is no doubt that the schools caused pain and suffering that often lasted generations; some of their ill effects linger today. But the full story, so far as one can grasp it, is one not only of suffering and pain, loss, defeat, and abjection, but also of what Gerald Vizenor has termed Native survivance. It is a story not only of victim-subjects but of ingenious agents, a narrative not only of suffering but of creative syntheses and adaptive actions" (xvii). [End Page 349] Though the extant material Krupat has to work with is regrettably limited, his selected texts and commentary do indeed grant compelling insights into the experiences of some Carlisle students and their reactions to the world they confronted after leaving the school. We hear suggestive evidence, for instance, of the intensity of debates within Indian communities about the value of (and threats posed by) a Western education, along with the tensions felt by those who attempted to balance their new learning with traditional lifeways. At times we read of conflicts with conservative tribal authorities, and at others of a seemingly harmonious combination of cultural practices, as in a letter sent to the school's superintendent by a man named F. H. Miller from Acoma Pueblo, who reports on his successes as a potato farmer. Krupat observes here "the wonderful conjunction … of tradition and modernity in the field, where we have Miller spreading the odorless phosphate he had learned to use from Carlisle's agricultural program, and also singing songs that his Acoma people sung for generations 'so the crops will be pleased with it'" (64). Several texts speak to the diverse ways Carlisle's students negotiated the school's legacy in their own lives as they sought to leverage their education into successful careers. One striking example comes from Luther Standing Bear, by far the most well-known of the correspondents included in the book, who in a response to a questionnaire pointedly insists that, in spite of the school's opposition to Buffalo Bill shows, he has learned something of worth from performing in them. His stance models, as Krupat points out, how some correspondents expressed their gratitude to Carlisle while still affirming their intellectual independence. In letters sent to the school by Dr. Caleb Sickles, a Wisconsin Oneida who became a prosperous dentist, we find another intriguing reaction—a de facto rejection of Indigenous identity as a way of evading mainstream racial prejudices and the barriers they presented to professional advancement. Overall, the book helps illuminate former students' views on a panorama of contemporary topics, including the advancement...