Indian Boarding Schools Research Articles

The Making of the American Calorie and the Metabolic Metrics of Empire

In “The Making of the American Calorie and the Metabolic Metrics of Empire,” Athia Choudhury develops a far-reaching critical genealogy of caloric biocitizenship that reframes her personal experiences with calorie counting and fat-phobic discourses that stigmatize the bodies and pleasures of racialized, working-class people, especially female bodied and fem-identifying people. Tracing practices of energy management and bodily discipline from colonial military outposts, nineteenth-century domestic manuals, dietetic discourses in the Philippines, and Native American Boarding Schools to a range of reform projects that framed calories as a tool for inculcating responsible eating through the domestic practices of white, bourgeois women, Choudhury highlights continuities between colonial subjection and modern biocitizenship, as well as the ways in which the putatively objective metric of the calorie positioned the New American Woman as a powerful catalyst for policing race in the intimate domain of the home.

Hallucinations of the Spanish Imaginary and the Idealized Hotel California

Focusing on the Mission Inn and the Sherman Indian Boarding School in Riverside, this article analyzes an idealized “Hotel California” as a component of what I have called “the Spanish Imaginary.” Just as the Eagles’ song of the same name examines both the mythmaking of Southern California and the American dream, this article describes how that imaginary shapes our collective hallucinations of a time that rightfully should be mourned instead of celebrated. The Mission Inn, which opened in 1902, architecturally portrays the Spanish Imaginary and the mission themes of spirituality, hinting as well at the secular benevolence of the Mexicans and Americans who succeeded the Spanish. This article argues that the pervasive Mission Revival style of architecture that is synonymous with Southern California is a physical manifestation of the anti-Indian ideology that informed the greed and violence of European and American settlement. The newcomers eviscerated the future state’s environment, introducing a genocidal architecture that combines capitalistic culture with an historical imaginary, one that succeeded in drawing millions of settlers to California and became the embodiment of both the American dream and the American nightmare. Both continue to exert their influence: while the Sherman Indian Boarding School has moved away from its Spanish mission roots, today’s Mission Inn presents visitors with the idealized “Hotel California” version of the Golden State’s past, wrapping the reality of Indian slavery and genocide in a distinctive form of plantation nostalgia. Perhaps no other structure in California better illustrates the colonial desires of Spain (then of Mexico, then of the United States) to “civilize” Indigenous peoples than the Sherman Indian Boarding School, whose original design illustrates the collective delusion of the Spanish Imaginary. Opening its doors in 1903, Sherman intentionally drew its design from mission architecture. The choice makes sense, given that both missions and Sherman were designed to transform Native peoples. Both utilized Native bodies for their labor. Both drew sustenance from Native peoples’ difference, and from their availability as a threatening “Other” requiring physical as well as cultural control. The Sherman Indian Boarding School provides a potent site of analysis of the ways that twentieth-century Americans used architecture to harness a mythical past and then bend it to capitalist goals. Moreover, implicating Mission Revival–style architecture in American processes of mythmaking illustrates how colonizers’ notions of race undergirded their spatial colonial logics, in ways that devalued Native peoples in the past and continue to obscure their physical and cultural persistence today.

4 Decolonizing Research for My Diné (Navajo) Community: The Old Leupp Boarding School Historic Site

ABSTRACTThe Old Leupp Boarding School (OLBS) was a Federal Indian Boarding School in operation from 1909–1942 on the southwest Navajo Reservation. It currently exists as a historical archaeology site, and it is an important place to the local Navajos of Leupp and Birdsprings, Arizona. Due to the nature of cultural resource management projects on the Navajo Reservation, which occur prior to development, in‐depth research of Navajo archaeological sites and collaboration with the Navajo public does not usually occur. With the support of local Navajo communities, my decolonizing research documents the history of the OLBS from a Diné (Navajo) perspective, as I explore Diné survivance and resistance within the context of this school. I argue that children utilized their Diné traditional cultural foundations to survive and resist assimilation imposed upon them by the U.S. government at Leupp. In keeping with Navajo cultural norms, I incorporate non‐destructive research methods including oral history interviews with Navajo elders, who attended the OLBS in the early twentieth century, and archival research to investigate the history of the OLBS. My research contributes to decolonizing and post‐colonial anthropological/archaeological research, Navajo Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies.

"He Will Wipe Every Tear from Their Eyes"

This paper argues that the Catholic Church must support and participate in Indigenous-led truth and healing efforts for the ways that the Church perpetrated abuses and trauma through Native American boarding schools. The paper begins by examining the Church’s historical role in boarding schools and the ways that Native American Catholic schools today differ from their historical predecessors. The paper then discusses the lack of apology from the institutional Church for Native American boarding schools in the United States and various movements in the Church and Church teachings that support a commitment to truth and healing. Using the example of Red Cloud Indian School, the paper concludes with a vision of what the Church’s support of boarding school truth and healing could look like and why that is essential for the Church’s mission.

Affective experiences and expressions in institutional context: the case of a boarding school for Indigenous students in India

ABSTRACT The 22,500 Indigenous students attending an Indian boarding school sacrifice living with family to essentially grow up in an institutional setting, in part to receive free education but also because they believe in the school’s promise of a bright future. In this context, students’ affective expressions and experiences are moulded by an all-enveloping institutional environment. The article relies on two concepts, ‘institutions of hope’ and ‘total institutions’ to examine the institutional context in which students shape their aspirations and weigh the balance of sacrifice and opportunity. Ethnographic data were collected through on campus observation, visits to students’ villages, and interviews with former and current students, parents, teachers, administrators, and visitors. Additionally, institutional messaging on social media and the school’s website was analysed. The data paint a picture of how, within this institutional context, sacrifice is justified in pursuit of aspirations, and hope for a better future through education is internalised.

Native American Boarding Schools Historiography from the 1980s to 2010s

Native American Boarding Schools Historiography from the 1980s to 2010s

Dawnland: A Documentary about Cultural Survival and Stolen Children by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip

Reviewed by: Dawnland: A Documentary about Cultural Survival and Stolen Children by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip Ashley Elizabeth Smith (bio) Dawnland: A Documentary about Cultural Survival and Stolen Children by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip Directors Upstander Project, 2018 "YOU CAN'T HEAL SOMEONE THAT'S GONE THROUGH HELL," Passamaquoddy elder Georgina Sappier-Richardson proclaims to the Commissioners of the Maine Wabanaki-State Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). "Where was the state that was supposed to have been our guardians? . . . And how come it took so long for you all to get a group together and to see if they can help us?" Georgina's words at the beginning of Dawnland introduce viewers to the issue of stolen children and the possibilities for healing and reconciliation in Indian country. Dawnland is a powerful feature-length documentary film about the systematic disruption of Wabanaki lifeways as told through the work of the TRC. From 2013 until 2015, the TRC investigated how the Maine Child Welfare System has treated Wabanaki people since 1978. Invited by Wabanaki people, the filmmakers document the historic process of the first Indigenous-initiated and government-backed commission in the United States. The film explores key questions about cultural survival and tribal sovereignty, Indigenous resiliency, and the roles of non-Indigenous individuals and governments in processes for truth, healing, and change. Guided by TRC commissioner gkisedtanamoogk (Mashpee Wampanoag) and Esther Anne (Passamaquoddy), cofounder of the Native-led organization for change Maine-Wabanaki REACH, viewers travel through Wabanaki homelands alongside the TRC commissioners and staff as they meet with tribal members and gather stories about their experiences with Maine's Child Welfare system. Weaving together historical footage of Indian Child Welfare hearings and Indian boarding schools, clips of Wabanaki people's heart-wrenching statements, and shots of enduring cultural practices, the film locates Wabanaki experiences within a national context of assimilation policies and cultural genocide while simultaneously highlighting Indigenous survivance. The film asks viewers to consider what it might take for settler-states to transition from occupier to neighbor, especially when the [End Page 203] transition requires confronting white privilege. It shows the critical importance for government-supported processes to focus on Indigenous community needs and follow Indigenous protocols. Dawnland is remarkable for the number of Indigenous people who contributed to its production, including coproducer N. Bruce Duthu (Houma); renowned singer and composer Jennifer Kreisberg (Tuscarora), who contributed original music; award-winning documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki), and artist and educator Geo Neptune (Passamaquoddy), who consulted on the project; and Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy), senior advisor. The film features Wabanaki people, places, stories, and cultural practices well beyond its focus on the TRC. Yet, despite this Indigenous involvement, only one Wabanaki person appears in the key role of narrator and interpreter of events in the film; otherwise the non-Wabanaki commissioners hold this role. While the narrators offer vital insights, given the diversity of Wabanaki communities some perspectives on the TRC process may not be represented in the film. At a final community event, commissioner Sandy White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) tells the crowd that through their investigative process the TRC learned about the incredible strength of the Wabanaki people. I can attest to this strength from my own experiences among Wabanaki peoples in Maine. Yet, as I reflect on the scenes where Wabanaki individuals recount some of their most traumatic memories, I wonder whether viewers be able to recognize this strength after watching this film. Or will they see Indigenous people as victims? While the film does significant work to juxtapose painful, emotional footage of storytelling with scenes of cultural vibrancy through community events, cultural practices, and shots of multigenerational families, some viewers may need additional guidance to access the overarching themes of cultural survivance and tribal sovereignty. Winner of multiple awards, including an Emmy for Outstanding Research, Dawnland raises awareness about the violent assimilationist state practices aimed at Indigenous families, while posing key questions about possibilities for healing and reconciliation. The film amplifies Wabanaki people's stories beyond the TRC's final report to the state and five tribes. With proper contextualization to highlight Wabanaki diplomacy, resistance, sovereignty, and vitality, the film has broad educational potential...

Passing the Frontier

Passing the Frontier Laura Da' (bio) Terra Esonis Incognita is a phrase used in cartography to indicate an unknown or imagined world. The etymology can break down in a few ways: Land, Secret, Unknown; Mythical Hidden Land; Clouds on the Border Land; Across the Border There Is No Life. In 1887 the Dawes Severalty Act was passed under the presidency of Grover Cleveland as: "An act to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations, and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for Other Purposes." In a Commissioner of Indian Affairs report from the Secretary of the Interior, it is encouraged that Natives who resisted allotment or left their reservations should be, "harassed and scourged without intermission" and made "as comfortable on" and "uncomfortable off" as conceivable. At the end of the report, a loose accounting of the numbers of Indigenous people is divided into the following categories: Civilized, Semi-Civilized, Wholly Barbarous. Allotment promised each head of family a grant of 160 acres to be held in trust by the US government for 25 years. Agents were encouraged to urge allotments upon the tribes in any and every way possible. All around northeastern Indian Territory, registration for allotments was held out of the back of a railroad caboose. Obvious drivers of allotment included assimilation, white settlement, and resource extraction. Deeper in the dark river of the ink is permanent erasure of tribal lives and life: "It seems to me this is a self-acting machine that we have set going, and if we only run it on the track, it will work itself [End Page 79] all out, and all these difficulties that have troubled my friend will pass away like snow in the spring time, and we will never know when they go, we will only know they are gone." So wrote Henry Laurens Dawes, Massachusetts senator, about his eponymous act. Dawes was also an early proponent of national parks and was instrumental in having Yellowstone surveyed and appropriated. The removal of sacred sites was a paramount consideration to the success of the endeavor of allotment. In 1889, Congress opened seized land in Indian Territory for white settlement. The land runs thundered. Many of the settler towns created in the land runs are ghost towns now. Timber, railroads, and mining leaving a host of cavernous emptiness in their wake. What is a ghost town in a nation whose settlements, roads, and parks are directly superimposed over Indigenous cities, trails, and sacred sites? In America, the symbolic magic word for erasure is "first." I am weary of tasting the words as they leave my mouth. Turning frontiers of civilized and city and reservation and graft and outcome. Hours of scanning documents from 1833 or 1912 to make cruelties of syntax and word choice incriminate their drafters. An 1890s census report notes that all Shawnee Indians were fluent speakers of the language. The report itself was made possible by the Dawes Rolls that demanded each head of family be documented to receive an allotment. The rolls also tracked children and were instrumental in coercing families to cede their young to Indian boarding schools in the subsequent decades. Nine Indian bills became law in the 49th and 50th sessions of Congress: six railroad grants, the Dawes Act, and the Appropriation Act. Property is often defined as "objectified will" in these documents. The miles of railroad laid in that decade have not been exceeded since. The timber felled unimaginable. The invention of barbed wire was a boon for anyone with a taste for skin. Allotment was both the whip and the balm both delivered to the same hands. After the Dawes Act came the Curtis Act, which eliminated judicial and executive aspects of tribal government, and then the Burke Act, which cemented a hierarchical government control of Indigenous people on allotments. [End Page 80] Miami, Oklahoma, was plotted from land bought from Ottawa tribal members and aggressively mined for lead and zinc. Railroad lines cut through individual allotments of the Shawnee, Miami, and Quapaw, and each tribal member received about a dollar and a...

Unbuilt Environments and the Place of Settler Colonial Communications: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Medicine Hat

Background: Though initial construction began on a colonial boarding school for Indigenous students, known as an Indian boarding school, in Medicine Hat in 1890, the school never ended up opening due to underfunding by the federal government.Analysis: Informed by Indigenous studies scholarship on place and media, this article uncovers archival traces of this unbuilt environment to reveal how white settlers used newspapers as well as visual media to will the school into being, particularly with techniques of re-placement on stolen Indigenous land.Conclusion and implications: This article connects the history of the school that never opened with the present day, insisting on the ongoingness of settler colonial tactics in media.

Review: Finding History Where You Least Expect It: Site-Based Strategies for Teaching About the Past, edited by Jill M. Gladwell and Kathryn H. Leacock

Review: <i>Finding History Where You Least Expect It: Site-Based Strategies for Teaching About the Past</i>, edited by Jill M. Gladwell and Kathryn H. Leacock

Review: Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell

Review: <i>Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience</i>, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell

Native American Boarding School Policy

This study examines how anti-Catholic sentiment, and nativist views during the nineteenth century influenced Progressive policy makers during the Native American boarding school era to impose a militarized and patriotic system of education onto Native children. In an attempt to prove their loyalty to the United States, Catholic church policy makers adopted the federal government’s model of educating Native Children. This system unintentionally hurt the Native population because Catholic Priests and Nuns shifted their philosophy of respecting Native values to imposing patriotic values onto Native children. The federal government’s role in the boarding school era often overshadows the role of religious denominations, specifically the influence of Catholic Indian schools. The point of this study is to examine and recognize how the social environment in the U.S. during the nineteenth century influenced Native American policy and gives anyone interested in the boarding school era a more nuanced understanding as to why Progressives sought to assimilate Native children into the American mainstream.

What Do American Indian Boarding Schools a Century Ago Have to Do With Dysregulated Children Today?

What Do American Indian Boarding Schools a Century Ago Have to Do With Dysregulated Children Today?

The Racist Anti‐Racism of American Anthropology

AbstractIn 1909 Franz Boas conducted a massive study entitled Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants. In this study, he demonstrated that Eastern and Southern European immigrants to the United States were not racially different from other Europeans because of what he called “the marvelous power of amalgamation.” Boas’s study dealt a blow to scientific racism because he demonstrated the plasticity and instability of racial types. Boas chose to emphasize the enormous gulf between the white and non‐white races. His research and advocacy were anti‐racist, but the way he promoted assimilation was racist. The next year W.E.B. Du Bois invited Boas to give the final lecture at the conference where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was officially incorporated. Boas presented “The Real Race Problem,” in which he argued that the real problem was the “difference in type.” To solve it, the Negro needed to amalgamate by “encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood.” American anthropologists joined other Progressive Era reformers committed to assimilation, like the orphan train and Indian boarding school movements. They were each striving to be anti‐racist but went off the rails, contributing to the consolidation of whiteness and the perpetuation of racism.

Denise K. Lajimodiere. Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors

Denise K. Lajimodiere. Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors

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

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

Assimilationist Athletics: Indian Boarding Schools, Sports, and the American Empire

AbstractWhen Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in 1879, his goal was to civilize Indigenous bodies. In doing so, the school implemented a series of forceful measures including language training, Western-style dress, hair cutting, and, perhaps uniquely, sports. At the same time that Carlisle was collecting children from across the continent, the United States was expanding territorially: Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawai’i. As many scholars have noted, the United States was becoming an imperial force. Like Pratt’s students, those who fell within the American imperial network were exposed to sports as a mechanism of control. While there is extensive work on both the relationship between sport and empire, as well as the use of sport within the Indian Boarding School system of the 1870s to the 1910s, there is a dearth of historiographical work that puts the two into conversation with each other. By exploring the domineering effect that sports had in the Indian Boarding School network and contextualizing it within the larger arc of sports in American Empire, this article expands the conceptual framework of sport and empire in order to paint a more complete picture of the consistency and significance with which imperial governments imposed athletics in various geographies.

Objects, Documentation, and Identification: Materiality and Memory of American Indian Boarding Schools at the Heard Museum

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the Heard Museum’s exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, a site that documents student experiences at off-reservation boarding schools in the United States. The essay pursues questions of materiality and memory in the creation and disruption of public memory narratives. More specifically, this essay attends to the meaning-making of objects and analyzes their contributions to the exhibit’s documentation and identification work. I argue the successful use of objects in this site holds two key implications for the rhetoric of public memory scholarship: (1) that objects are a resource for the rhetorical invention of public memory, and (2) that additional possibilities for documentation and identification may rest in objects. In making this argument, I thus theorize the relationship among public memory, objects, and settler colonialism, and call for increased attention to objects in our rhetorical histories and theories.

Researching My Heritage: The Old Leupp Boarding School Historic Site

My research documents the early history of the Old Leupp Boarding School, a U.S. federal Indian boarding school in operation on the Navajo Reservation from 1909-1942. In keeping with Diné (Navajo) cultural teachings, I utilize non-destructive research methods, including a critical analysis of archival records, historic photographs, and oral history interviews with Navajo elders who attended school at Leupp, to demonstrate how Navajo students and their families resisted the U.S. federal government’s assimilationist educational policies during the early twentieth century. These accounts of Diné survivance and the continuance of k’e relationships demonstrate the importance and power of conducting oral history research in support of traditional archaeological work at historic Navajo sites.

The racialization of privacy: racial formation as a family affair.

A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the “racialization of privacy” refers to the phenomenon that family privacy, including the freedom to create a family uninhibited by law, pressure, and custom, is delimited by race. Building upon racial formation theory, this article examines three examples: the Native American boarding school system (1870s to 1970s), eugenic laws and practices (early/mid 1900s), and contemporary deportation. Analysis reveals that state-sponsored limitations on family privacy is a racial project that shapes the racial state. Performing an ideological genealogy with our cases, this article makes three contributions: it illustrates how the state leverages policies affecting families to define national belonging; it reveals how access to family privacy is patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin; and it distills how Whiteness and a national racial hierarchy are socially constructed and maintained over time. With the racialization of privacy, we identify how the state seeks to reproduce institutionalized White supremacy and the effects this has on families. We argue that families are the linchpin in state-sponsored racial projects that construct the nation and that the racialization of privacy, as a form of inequality, is a defining characteristic of the color-line.