Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences

Abstract

For some pupils at Indian boarding schools the experience was devastating and even fatal, as large numbers died. For others, declares the preface of this first book of scholarly essays on this system of schools, the experience produced “fond memories, sometimes mixed with melancholy, sometimes with humor” (p. xi). The editors Clifford E. Trafzer and Jean A. Keller are historians, and Lorene Sisquoc, a member of the Fort Sill Apache tribe of Oklahoma, is a museum curator; they intend the book to address the many-layered meanings of this institution. Drawing on tribal story telling, they metaphorically depict the institution as a “monster,” and depict the children who confronted it, “turned” its power, and made it useful, as heroes to their peoples (p. xiii). The first in a series on indigenous education launched by the University of Nebraska Press (a book by the reviewer will appear in the series), Boarding School Blues does not offer radically new interpretations. It is a “revisiting” of a much-studied institution that Spaniards first brought to the Americas in the sixteenth century. Most of the ten essays, by both established and new scholars, focus on the “classic” period: the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the U.S. government and Christian missionary societies cooperated to “civilize,” Christianize, and assimilate Indians. All the essays powerfully show that (in the formulation of Clyde Ellis) the schools failed to destroy Native children's tribal identities, yet simultaneously won many pupils and their kinfolk to an appreciation of English, literacy, and other useful new skills. Ironically, tribal peoples past and present—as Patricia Dixon and Trafzer suggest in the final and welcome essay on the contemporary situation—have often made this symbol of white imperialism their own, even protesting school closures.

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