Indian Boarding Schools Research Articles

Basketmaking Guides and the Appropriation of Indigenous Basketry

The first quarter of the twentieth century saw Anglo entrepreneurs rapidly develop how-to books, instructional kits, and models for the manufacture of American Indian-style baskets. Purveyors appropriated styles, stitches, and tribal names, and zealously marketed such creations as more affordable than the purchase of an Indigenous basket. Books, imported materials such as raffia and rattan, and stitching methods were disseminated not only across the country and internationally, but to American Indian boarding schools, where instruction not only resulted in appropriation, but also in deculturing the Indigenous basket and Native peoples.

“Caring for Our Affairs Ourselves”: Stockbridge Mohican Women and Indian Education in Early America

Indian education has long been acknowledged in American historiography and American Indian Studies as the primary conduit for the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. The rise of federal Indian boarding schools looms large over the long narrative of Indian education in America, often shading the way scholars interpret earlier Indian engagement with Anglo-style education. This is particularly evident in scholarship that traces the roots of American education and civilization policies to Henry Knox in the 1790s. The emphasis scholars have placed on white men and their initiatives toward "civilizing" Indian people have inadvertently erased indigenous agency and power within the early education system. Informed by indigenous feminism, this article utilizes ethnohistorical approaches to piece together how Mohican women advocated for the prioritization of girls' education in the 1790s. Their emphasis on female education resulted in greater prosperity for the nation, but their work to establish this model was quickly hijacked by white missionaries and Indian agents who took credit for the idea and Stockbridge success. The female-first strategy that was originally deployed to aid in the securing of Stockbridge land and sovereignty was later adopted by white architects of Indian education as a tool of tribal destruction. Drawing upon Mohican women's never-before-analyzed letters, Mohican craft works, and a careful reevaluation of War Department and missionary records, this piece contributes to the growing body of literature on indigenous women and power in early America while complicating the narrative of the decline of indigenous women's authority in the early years of the American Republic.

The Necessity of Lived Resistance: Reading Leslie Marmon Silko's <em>Gardens in the Dunes</em> in an Era of Rapid Climate Change

The Necessity of Lived ResistanceReading Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes in an Era of Rapid Climate Change Rebecca Tillett (bio) In its complex readings of a range of fictional gardens, gardeners, and gardening practices, Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 novel Gardens in the Dunes1 engages with and foregrounds Indigenous relationships with the Earth as powerful alternatives to the unsustainable and damaging ways that many Euro-American and European societies live today. Set at the close of the nineteenth century, Gardens focuses primarily on a single, all-female Indigenous Sand Lizard family, the only group still using the traditional dune gardens. Told from the perspective of the young Sand Lizard child Indigo, the story follows Indigo and her older sibling, Sister Salt, once they are captured by Indian agents after their mother goes missing at a Ghost Dance in Needles, Arizona, and their grandmother, Grandma Fleet, dies and is buried by her granddaughters at the old dune gardens. Declared orphans by the state, the sisters are separated with Sister Salt sent to the Parker Reservation on the Colorado River while Indigo is sent to Indian boarding school in California. The story then follows two separate strands: Sister Salt's life as a successful "business entrepreneur" offering laundry services at the site of the construction of a new river dam; and Indigo's successful escape from Indian school, her temporary "adoption" by the Euro-Americans Edward and Hattie Palmer, and her subsequent tour of the eastern United States then Europe. While both sisters battle to understand the sociopolitical situations and geographical locations in which they find themselves, both nonetheless show resistance as they aim constantly to return to the gardens in the dunes and to a future with one another guided by Sand Lizard cosmologies. In this context, Silko's depiction of Indigo and Sister Salt clearly shows how the sisters' ability to "remember the past and [End Page 188] imagine futures" helps them—and Silko's readers—"to think critically about the present" (Streeby 5). As a counterpoint to the depictions of a series of ecologically damaging Euro-American ideologies and worldviews, Gardens foregrounds Indigenous Sand Lizard gardens and gardening practices as an articulation of alternative sustainable ways of being (and of seeing) for an extra-textual world informed by the realities of climate crisis. In this context, Gardens demonstrates the necessity of an everyday lived resistance to the dangerous and potentially fatal way that we are encouraged, perhaps even required, to live in patriarchal capitalist societies. And so we see how some of the novel's diverse gardens, gardeners, and gardening practices give us templates for more sustainable and cosmopolitical ways of living that, to cite the Mississauga Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, depend instead upon a "deep reciprocity" that emerges from "respect," "responsibility," and a recognition of the "relationship" between humans and the other-than-human world.2 Reading Silko's novel from the perspective of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems (TEK), we can engage with the Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard's assertion that Indigenous TEK practices are so "deeply informed by what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms" that the term that Coulthard conceptualizes to describe them is "grounded normativity" (13, original emphasis). Silko's novel very clearly juxtaposes a range of dominating and exploitative interactions with the natural world with a series of non-dominating and non-exploitative relationships. It is these non-dominating and non-exploitative relationships that point directly to an emphasis upon reciprocity and obligation, upon the "ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others," that is evident within the practice of grounded normativity as outlined by Coulthard (13). sand lizard ethnobotanical resistance In discussing Sand Lizard resistance, it is crucial to begin with an analysis of what exactly is being resisted. Silko herself has stated that Gardens "is about what capitalism makes people do to one another" [End Page 189] (Arnold 21), and the novel clearly traces some of the attitudes that encourage unsustainable and fatally...

Words Have a Past: The English language, colonialism, and the newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools by Jane Griffith

Words Have a Past:The English language, colonialism, and the newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools by Jane Griffith. Un article de la revue Ontario History (Volume 112, numéro 1, spring 2020, p. 1-131) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Fighting for the Taste Buds of Our Children

In this commentary, I focus on the impacts of Indian boarding school food on American Indian foodways and community as a source of acculturation that has a lasting effects even in the present day. From the introduction of specific foods that now make up the modern diet of many American Indian communities, to the generational cycle that begins in utero, the taste buds of American Indian children are still subject to the “American Indian Boarding School experiment” that began in the late 1800s. Only American Indian communities can determine when that experiment stops. See the press release for this article.

A Systematic Review of Indian Boarding Schools and Attachment in the Context of Substance Use Studies of Native Americans.

This PRISMA style literature review was used to explore substance abuse studies focused on Native American populations in the context of historical trauma (from experiences at Indian boarding schools) and the critical loss of family relationships from colonization. It was found that while Indian boarding schools are recognized as being important research topics related to substance use, they are usually mentioned as a part of the colonization process rather than examined for their specific historical/personal impacts. Furthermore, social science may fail to recognize how detrimental the loss of family relationships was to the traditional bond of a Native American family. Beginning with an extensive list of 402 articles, two criteria were used to arrive at a systematic list of research in the topic areas: the acknowledgment of Indian boarding school attendance and the impact on family relationships. The final list included 27 studies which looked at Indian boarding schools and family relationship's relation to substance use among Native Americans. Overall, this review revealed that family discord should not be singled out as a causal link for Native American families; rather, it should be included in the argument to explain the relationship between Indian boarding school attendance and substance use.

Along a Continuum: Spirally-woven Beadwork of the Tlingit, Wasco, and Pit River Peoples

This presentation explores the impact of introducing glass beads on the weaving practices of three Pacific Northwest Indigenous groups. Although Native Americans made and used beads of bone, shell, seed, and stone prior to contact with Western European culture, the 18th-century introduction of glass beads brought new elements of sparkle, regularity, and color to native art and inspired creative expressions. Faced with the challenge of integrating these new materials, women turned to familiar basketry techniques for ideas, adapting traditional basket-making methods to weave beads and native-made fibers into bags, caps, straps, and hair ornaments. Visual evidence for this can be seen in the motifs found on 19th-century woven bead work from the Pacific Northwest, which correlate directly to those used by women on their baskets and flat bags. This presentation will provide examples of loose-warp woven beadwork from three Native American tribes in the greater Pacific Northwest: the Tlingit of Southeastern Alaska, who focused more on embroidered beadwork than loose warp weaving; the Wasco of the Columbia River Valley, who wove beads until about 1915 at which point loose warp weaving techniques were gradually replaced by beading “on a frame;” and the Pit River Indians of Northern California, who created some of the most idiosyncratic objects, shaping their tubular bags in unusual ways. Over time, native-made fibers of sinew, Indian hemp, and nettle were replaced by commercially available cotton and linen thread. In addition, standards were influenced by needlework instructors at Indian boarding schools and Anglo imagery came to predominate over ancient basket motifs. Understanding the history of native woven beadwork and its techniques helps us understand the sweep of change in native societies and reveals the choices individual women made as they incorporated unusual materials into their visual lexicon and technical repertoire, creating colorful works to adorn their families and homes.

Testing the Limits of Colonial Parenting: Navajo Domestic Workers, the Intermountain Indian School, and the Urban Relocation Program, 1950–1962

Abstract Closely examining the experiences of mostly female Navajo students, this article demonstrates that the Intermountain Indian School played a pivotal role in carrying out postwar Indian Policy. Like Progressive Era Indian boarding schools, its gendered curriculum prepared students to assimilate as low-status workers into American society and move away from their reservation communities. However, beginning with the first graduating class, Navajo students took advantage of the training but did not necessarily conform to policy makers’ expectations.

“Broken Threads of Varying Colors and Tones”: A Souvenir Album of the Phoenix Indian School (1904)

In spring 1904, the United States Indian Industrial School in Phoenix, Arizona printed a booklet with ninety-four photographs of campus life and local landmarks for sale to the city’s burgeoning tourist market. The Phoenix Indian school’s agenda of acculturation, and the racial power relations it reified, permeate the album’s representations of Native American students as “civilized” bodies that are uniformly docile and disciplined. However, a careful reading of the photographs alongside the voices of Native pupils opens up alternative meanings incompletely repressed by the institution’s photographer. This article weaves student writings from the campus newspaper and other sources back through the album’s imagery to identify anonymous children and glimpse their personal stories of growth, struggle, and cultural resilience in the official visual archive of the Indian school. By arguing that the identities and agencies of the Phoenix students can be rediscovered within the limits of the album, this study challenges the conventional interpretation that such pictures simply evidence and enact various forms of oppression, both concrete and symbolic. More broadly, it extends recent scholarly efforts to recover and celebrate those individuals who persevered in federal Indian boarding schools during the era of assimilation.

All We Own Is Ourselves

All We Own Is Ourselves Noelle Garcia (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Email print-out, 2009. Courtesy of Noelle Garcia [End Page 405] What We Inherit In 2011 I created an exhibition titled What You Left Me, at the Clark County Cultural Center. I showcased photographs, artifacts, and documents that told the story of my dad. Or rather the exhibit told the story of my research on my father and my understanding of where he fit into the history of the United States of America. I exhibited his private documents, his letters, photos of him posing with his prison baseball team, and family portraits shot in a Nevada prison visiting area. One of the most important artifacts was a printout of an email I received from the Nevada Department of Corrections that described the crime my father committed that landed him in prison. Yet the exhibit’s aim was beyond the life of my father: it was a gesture or an attempt to tell a story of contemporary indigenousness. I wanted people to consider that the mistreatment of American Indians is not something that happened in the distant past. And I wanted to ask, why was I left with this resounding emptiness? When I planned this exhibition, I was uncomfortable. Was it okay to tell my dad’s story? As many love tragedy, I knew What You Left Me would get attention. Yet if he were alive, he would have been mortified. I was airing his, and our family’s, dirty laundry. During his life he never told me why he was in prison. If he didn’t want his daughter to know, I doubt he would want strangers to know. I was also concerned that one of my family members might hear of the show and reprimand me. I thought about my discomfort surrounding this project for a while. Legally, perhaps, I do “own” the rights to my father’s story. I inherited this painful story from him. I was born with a broken heart. Perhaps it was not only my right to tell this story, but it was my responsibility to tell this story in the context of a history that tries to disappear Native Americans. I wanted the viewer to consider why being Native American had anything to do with my father being in prison. I wanted the viewer to see the image of my father as a young boy in an Indian boarding school and ask how that trauma may have affected his future alcoholism and rage. In creating this exhibition, I asserted some power in a narrative where I was previously erased. My work asks audiences to recognize that how the US government treated my father shaped his predisposition to depression, substance abuse, and violence. Yet will audiences make a connection between my father’s histories of violence and, for example, the images of the children in US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) camps? How will the young children forcibly taken away from their families develop into adulthood? Would a stronger collective [End Page 406] recollection of past forms of structural violence perpetrated by the state in any way create a stronger tool kit to intervene in contemporary, and parallel, atrocities? Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Detail from What You Left Me Installation (Prison Visit). Courtesy of Noelle Garcia Who Owns Your Stories? In 2014 I had an artist residency at ACRE Projects in a rural community in Steuben, Wisconsin. Many other artists in residence and staff members loved going tubing down the river. Although I was invited a few times, I said no. I was scared of water babies. Water babies are spirits in Paiute communities that pull people into the water. Why should Paiute folklore scare me? I’m not religious or spiritual. When I was little, the other Paiute kids would tell frightening stories about water babies. I never went water tubing. A few years later one of the white ACRE staff members drowned while tubing. Something in me whispered, “water babies.” I learned about water babies in Nevada. Do they exist also in Wisconsin? I met the ACRE staff member [End...

The Impact of Individual and Parental American Indian Boarding School Attendance on Chronic Physical Health of Northern Plains Tribes.

This study investigated the relationship of American Indian boarding school attendance and chronic physical health. We hypothesized boarding school attendance would be associated with an increased number of chronic physical health problems. We also examined the relationship between boarding school attendance and the 15 chronic health problems that formed the count of the chronic health conditions. American Indian attendees had a greater count of chronic physical health problems compared with nonattendees. Father's attendance was independently associated with chronic physical health problems. Attendees were more likely to have tuberculosis, arthritis, diabetes, anemia, high cholesterol, gall bladder disease, and cancer than nonattendees.

Hopi Trailblazers Expand Meanings of Running

Hopi Trailblazers Expand Meanings of Running Farina King (bio) Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain Between Indian and American. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. xvii + 276 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Running speaks across different languages and cultures. To some, running is a prayer that transcends the physical. My Diné ancestors learned to greet the sun each morning with a prayer and run toward the rising sunbeams. They learned to run for both physical and spiritual strength. Running was a survival tactic for my father who tried to escape an Indian boarding school in the 1950s. As Hopi scholar Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert of the Village of Upper Munqapi explains in his book, Hopi Runners, U.S. officials incarcerated Native Americans by sending them to boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial Institute, where they continued to run literally and figuratively. Carlisle was one of many boarding schools that trained some of the most celebrated Hopi runners, including Louis Tewanima, who earned the silver medal in the 10,000-meter run of the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. The indigenous peoples of the Southwest have since time immemorial respected Hopis as among the best runners in the world. Gilbert primarily focuses his study on Hopi runners, or warik'aya, during the transitional era of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. He dispels the image of a running "brave" frozen in time by placing Hopis in a historical context where they performed in school uniforms and on Olympic tracks, competing against the fastest runners from around the world. He shows how Hopis have always traveled and traversed worlds, but their experiences reflect change and impacts as trailblazers. Warik'aya have always held honor and respect among their own communities. Gilbert explains that they "ran as representatives of their clans and believed that their swiftness of foot would benefit their people with much-needed rain and a bountiful harvest" (p. 6). This belief allowed the warik'aya to cultivate perseverance, resilience, ingenuity, and humility. Gilbert delineates how these qualities and values have embodied Hopi traditions of running, while Hopi runners have pushed boundaries and navigated new spaces through generations. [End Page 622] In Paths in the Rainforest (1990), Jan Vansina expounds on an allegory that applies to Hopi Runners: tradition is a "two-faced" Janus with both the "petrified face of continuity and the mobile face of change" (p. 33). Hopi runners carried traditions from the past but changed them on their courses as trailblazers. The book focuses on the celebrated generations of male Hopi runners from 1886–1940, which was a time of major transformation among Hopis, as the United States asserted governance over and eventually extended citizenship to Hopis and other Native peoples. A new era for Hopis brought with it new challenges. With new running opportunities, Hopis remembered for whom and why Hopis ran despite forces to capitulate to the United States and its citizenry. Although American education and sports upheld promises of citizenship, regardless of the realities of voting restrictions and ongoing wardship status for Native Americans, Hopi runners' allegiances and identities remained first tied to their people and families. At school, running served as a form of constant resistance, and when they returned home they ran through desert landscapes, from the mesas to broader horizons, marking new trails along the way. In her praise of Hopi Runners, Hopi linguist and cultural expert Sheilah E. Nicholas, of the Sunforehead Clan from the Village of Songoopavi on Second Mesa, stressed a Hopi concept that epitomizes the book and its focus on warik'aya. Nicholas notes: "In the Hopi perspective, these individuals as, runner scouts as well as messengers, assumed a purposeful role captured in the Hopi word, màataknawisa—to go out into the larger world to reveal and demonstrate—this understanding of running and expression of humility."1 Hopi runners embody màataknawisa, and implicit from its definition is the trailblazing legacy that the warik'aya upheld, prior to and during their entanglements with boarding schools and other U.S. systems. Gilbert refers to the "wave of migrations," which contextualizes the broader history of Hopi movements. Hopis have passed on...

Beyond School Walls: Indigenous Mobility at Sherman Institute

This article examines the centrality of mobility within student experiences at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. Archival information and autobiographical accounts show that during the early twentieth century, students at Sherman moved between their campus and surrounding cities and towns to work odd jobs, take classes at local colleges and universities, and socialize. Narratives from beyond the walls of Sherman Institute join a growing chorus of scholarly voices that push back against popular and scholarly depictions of Indigenous people during the so called Reservation Era, which have often painted Native communities as isolated within the confines of boarding schools and reservations, frozen in time and space. I argue that Native people at Sherman Institute and elsewhere made mobility a central component of their lives and cultures as they faced head-on the challenges of life at a boarding school. Exploration of this student mobility reveals new layers of Indigenous agency within boarding school experiences and exposes yet-unexplored forms of neglect by administrators who failed to protect students from the dangers they experienced beyond the walls of Sherman Institute.

Indian Boarding Schools, Before and After: A Personal Introduction

11 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 Indian Boarding Schools, Before and After: A Personal Introduction K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Editor, Special Issue “ Squirrels,” my dad declared, “love hard candy.” Ha! Indians! What acute observers of nature! Every spring at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in the 1920s and 1930s, my dad and other boys would climb tall trees, into the big shaggy nests of leaves, and capture squirrel babies to raise. Oklahoma squirrels sport a semi-­ rare black color phase and my dad, Curt, and his friend Charlie were among the squirrel-­ raising elite at Chilocco. They knew where the black squirrel nests were, and they always had black squirrel pets. That made them special. You’re special! An Indian child growing up in a federal Indian boarding school rarely, if ever, heard that message. The institutions were designed, after all, to communicate to Indian children how not special they were, every hour of every day. My dad named the candy: all-­ day suckers—­ hard and shiny as glass. The little squirrel curled up in his shirt pocket during the day and every so often poked his head out for a shard of broken-­ up all-­ day sucker. I wonder what that felt like? The warm young squirrel curled up all day in the shirt pocket over his heart? Only young squirrels. My dad said, “You couldn’t keep them. Squirrels are wild animals after all and you can’t really tame them.” The day would always come when the squirrel was ready to go. The boys always let them go, and back they went, to the catalpa grove, to the big trees along Chilocco Creek. I wonder, was that part of the appeal? To be a temporary squirrel holder, for a few weeks out of all the weeks in the long year, and see the squirrel go free? “Squirrels,” my dad told me, “love hard candy.” My dad loved candy, too, especially chocolate-­ covered cherries. I wonder, when did he first taste a chocolate-­ covered cherry? Many questions rise up when we think about Indian boarding schools and Indian children and Indian nations. Does a question about chocolate-­ covered cherries seem an odd place to start? It certainly was not the 12 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 first question that came to my mind in 1984, when I began to interview my dad and about 60 other survivors of Chilocco. I grew up with my dad’s stories of his childhood, as many children do. As many children do, I thought our family was normal. I believed my dad was brilliant, and loving, and handsome. He was all of those things. You’ll have to take my word on the first two, but you can see for yourself how handsome he was (Figure 5). Compared to other fathers of other children I knew in the mostly White public schools my sister and I attended, however, he was not “normal.” I was in my teens before I began to realize the full character of the institution he had survived, its impacts on him as an adult, and on our family as well. I was in my twenties, at least, before the realization began to sink in that his brother Robert had not survived (Lomawaima, 2016). The question about chocolate-­ covered cherries did not occur to me until about 4:00 a.m. on September 28, 2017, after I woke bolt upright out of a dream and sat down to write about my dad, about Chilocco, and about boarding school survivors in a very different way than I have written before. Some of those results are in this personal introduction. From sometime in 1984 to fall 2017: 33 years and change. About five and a half years after my dad died in early...

American Indian Boarding Schools: What Went Wrong? What Is Going Right?

Boarding schools for Indigenous children in the United States and Canada have a deservedly bad reputation for mistreatment and abuse. However, faced with rapid loss of land and ways of life, some Indigenous families intentionally sent their children to school to learn English and to cope with new realities. Experiences in the schools varied. Some students endured traumatic experiences, while at times boarding schools served as a place of refuge from the harsh realities of life on Indian reservations and reserves. Assimilationist policies and practices attacked Indigenous languages, cultures, and identities in the boarding schools. Today Indigenous nations are reclaiming the education of their children, promoting strong Indigenous identities through culture-based education and language immersion.

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

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

The Boarding School as Metaphor

37 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 The Boarding School as Metaphor Brenda J. Child For many in our society, the role of parenting was halted by boarding schools. Our great-­ grandparents were prevented from being parents. Both my grandmother and my grandfather were sent away. Then their kids were brought up in a regimented, abusive system of boarding schools. What that system has done to our grandparents, our parents, and then to us and our children is put holes in the fabric of our society. —­ Ingrid Washinawatok-­ El Issa, Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimony of Native American Women Over the years, thousands of Native children have learned the message that is implicit in boarding school education: that Native people are children of the devil who are condemned by God. This sense of worthlessness, of evil, of unlovability because they were Native was turned inward, internalized, becoming the root for some of the profound dysfunction later in life. —­ Diane Wilson, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life They are something tangible—­ mnemonic benchmarks—­ that, as with sites of Australian Aboriginal mytho-­ geography, one can point to and say “it happened there.” A visit to the school can provide a trigger or cue that takes one back to the past almost as if there again—­ a redemptive pilgrimage to an Aboriginal Auschwitz. Perhaps is it all a bit too easy. —­ Michael G. Kenny, “A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History” The JAIE editors appreciate the opportunity to reprint Brenda Child’s groundbreaking book chapter “The Boarding School as Metaphor” to anchor this special issue. The chapter has had a profound impact on the field of boarding school history. Child proposes that boarding school has become “a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor for . . . American colonialism at its most genocidal.” In her research, including members of her own Red Lake Ojibwe family who attended boarding schools, Child 38 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 was struck by the strength and resilience of Native students and alumni. Stories of homesickness, mistreatment, and abuse were mixed with stories of appreciation, enjoyment, and resistance. Child, like other authors in this special issue, grapples with how to honor that diversity of student experience in the boarding schools while critically engaging with the profound harms done within the schools in the name of so-­ called civilization . She develops a nuanced and respectful analysis that honors the range of alumni perspectives as well as the central position of boarding schools in ongoing debates about historical trauma and its impacts on Native people and communities. The boarding school experience remains a burning historical memory for American Indian people in the United States. This despite the fact that most federal Indian boarding schools closed in the 1930s, or had by then adopted policies that rejected assimilation and were more in tune with contemporary ideas about race and progressive education. While scholarly studies have espoused resistance and resilience in the historical record of students who survived an assimilationist education, boarding school is increasingly conceptualized by many American Indians as a uniquely Native usable past that links tribal people of diverse backgrounds today to a devastating common history, one that must be evoked, many argue, to understand our present conditions and social problems. Boarding school is now the ancestor in a direct genealogical line of terrible offspring—­ alcohol abuse, family and sexual violence, and other social dysfunction. It is not necessarily the job of the historian to explain how Indian people today remember the past. But the intensity with which Indian people in the present day explain and respond to the role of boarding school in the broader history of their families and communities suggests that for many, boarding school is also a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor...

Revisiting the Hopi Boarding School Experience at Sherman Institute and the Process of Making Research Meaningful to Community

In the early 1900s, U.S. government officials began sending Hopi pupils from northeastern Arizona to Sherman Institute, an off-reservation Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. At Sherman, the Hopi pupils received instruction in several disciplines and occupations, including language arts, math, industrial work, and domestic training. While the author of this essay has published extensively on Hopis at Sherman in the past, he uses this opportunity to revisit the topic by describing the path he took to study this history in graduate school. Relying on personal recollections, secondary sources, historical newspaper accounts, and interviews he conducted with former Hopi students, the author highlights the ways his research moved beyond the archive and into village communities to create a history that was both useful and meaningful for his people.

Who Gets to Tell the Stories? Carlisle Indian School: Imagining a Place of Memory Through Descendant Voices

Who gets to tell the stories of our loved ones? Most Indian boarding school research emphasizes student experiences. When descendants are considered, the intergenerational impacts on subsequent generations are emphasized. The discussion in this article privileges descendant voices. I analyze a descendant survey paying attention to how descendants recollect their family's experience at Carlisle. I argue stories passed on to descendants become our own stories, informing how we make sense of boarding school history and integrate narratives into our lives. Memories and recollections are co-constructed, reconstructed, and sometimes contested while making significant contributions to Carlisle's legacy. Ownership and responsibility for our stories must be considered as we look at possibilities for creating a heritage center at the Farmhouse located at the U.S. Army War College.

Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy, Building Our Children to Be Good Relatives

Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy, Building Our Children to Be Good Relatives Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn (bio) INTRODUCTION Motherhood is a term used to describe the ability for a woman figure to take on the role of mother. Mothering on its own is no easy task and requires balance and care. When we examine the added layer of Indigenous identity and motherhood, we become a part of Indigenous motherhood. Holding the sacred role of being an Indigenous mother and then pairing that with a role in the academy combine to create a unique balance of honoring one's identity, which includes the scars of the past and the push against the western culture that pervades higher education institutions. A part of the pushing back includes living our values in the effort to build our children into being good relatives.1 Indigenous communities value relationships as well as the embodiment of our tribal cultures and upbringing. These values are the exact opposite of campus climate and culture at many higher education institutions. In this article, as an Indigenous mother I conceptualize and analyze how Indigenous motherhood is impacted by historical trauma. Then, I move on to how we heal and create a pathway for our children, the seeds of our future. After, I define the concept of Indigenous motherhood and then proceed to discuss Indigenous motherhood in the academy, including ways we can counter the institutional culture while raising children. Finally, I conclude with implications and recommendations. [End Page 62] OVERVIEW OF INDIGENOUS MOTHERHOOD AND THE IMPACT OF HISTORICAL TRAUMA In this section, the following areas are discussed: colonization and settlers, boarding school, loss of parenting and languages, forced sterilization, and loss of community. Each of these forces has contributed directly to impact Indigenous motherhood on a broader level, while some continue to manifest in various ways within institutions of higher education. In the discussion of historical trauma, it is not the focus on the past but the naming of that which came from our oppressors and colonizers to help us learn how to heal. Each of those, which are named, also have profoundly impacted the current state of Indigenous motherhood.2 Colonization and Settlers While colonization within the United States began in the 1400s, for some tribal communities that contact began as late as the 1800s and continues to permeate our systematic structures and ways of living daily, including the notion and value of individualism and capitalism. The first onslaught of colonizers in touching ground in the Americas used the spirit of relationship building, which was an inherent part of the Indigenous/tribal peoples' ways of living, in order to decimate and cause harm to our communities.3 The notion of relationships from this point forward was forever impacted within our tribal communities. Settlers' interactions with the community included the physical violation of many women through the rape or trade of women for something of "value," resulting in the dehumanization of women in our communities.4 Not only were the relationships and role of women impacted, but the core values that had at one time guided our communities and societies have been influenced, to some degree, by western and settler cultural values.5 More than 56 percent of Native American and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence in their lifetimes and one in three will have experienced violence over the course of a year.6 Native women face murder rates at ten times the national average as well. The impact that colonization has had on our communities in all parts of the Americas, and specifically the United States, continues to be felt in my generation, my children's generation, and their children's generation. Boarding Schools The first American Indian boarding school was established by Captain Richard Pratt in 1879 as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.7 This school was one of the first recognized to have forcibly removed Indigenous children from their parents, families, and [End Page 63] communities and assimilated them by cutting their hair, stripping them of their traditional clothing, and "training" them in industrial programs. There were numerous other religious-based, government-supported, or privately owned boarding schools that had attempted...