Books:
Adams, David. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
The purpose of this book is to detail the experiences of Indian youth’s day-to-day lives in the government created institutions known as Indian schools. Adams examines the cultural and psychological forced assimilation and the different ways in which the students rejected or accepted the process.
Brant, Charles S., ed. Jim Whitewolf: The Life of a Kiowa-Apache Indian. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.
This book is mainly an ethnohistory of the Kiowa-Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. It contains valued information on the Tribe gathered during Brant’s fieldwork in the early 1950s, which made the data two decades out of date when the book was finally published. The text deals with boarding schools as a peripheral issue.
Coleman, Michael. American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.
Coleman uses over one hundred narratives of former Indian school students in this book in order to understand the experiences faced by those students. The specific focus of this work is to examine the students’ reactions to the school facilities, curriculum, as well as other students. The book has limitations due to the use of only a fraction of students’ experiences to represent thousands who attended the schools, but it is an important addition to the field of Indian boarding schools and the issue of assimilation.
Ellis, Clyde. To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
“An examination of U.S. forced assimilation policies directed at Native Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries uses the Rainy Mountain Boarding School as a microcosmic focal point. Using personal memoirs from the Kiowa students and school documents, Ellis creates a compelling view of racist government policy, and the integrity of the children who resisted its efforts to force them to become something they did not want to be--white in every way except skin color.” --Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Huff, Delores J. To Live Heroically: Institutional Racism and American Indian Education. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
“To Live Heroically examines American Indian education during the last century, comparing the tribal, mission, and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools and curriculums and the assumptions that each system made about the role that Indians should assume in society. This significant book analyzes the relationship between the rise of institutional racism and the fall of public education in the United States using the history of American Indian education as a model. The author asserts that had the federal government really wanted an educated, self-sufficient Indian population, it would have selected the successful nineteenth-century tribal models of Indian education rather than the mission or BIA schools.” –excerpt from Amazon editorial review.
Johnston, Basil. Indian School Days. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
This is an autobiographical narrative of the author’s experiences in a Canadian Indian boarding school during the 1940s. Indian School Days is a first person critique of the nine years Johnston spent in an assimilative world as a “ward of the Church and crown.” The narrative also serves as a comparative text to the experiences Indians had with boarding schools in the United States.
Knockwood, Isabelle. Out of the Depth: The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School aShubenacadie, Nova Scotia. Lockeport: Roseway, 1992.
La Flesche, Francis. The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963.
In this autobiographical narrative about his life in a Presbyterian boarding school, Francis La Flesche recounts the details of being caught between the Indian world and non-Indian world. La Flesche’s narrative takes place around the time of the American Civil War and illustrates the many pressures and difficulties places on Indian students from both parents and educators.
Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
“In recollections juxtaposed against the official records of racist ideology and repressive practice, students from the 1920s and '30s recall their loneliness and demoralization but also remember with pride the love and mutual support binding them together, their creative rebellions against petty authority, the forging of new pan-Indian identities and reinforcement of old tribal ones, the skills and trades they mastered, and the leadership they developed.” --Barnes and Noble editorial review
McBeth, Sally J. Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience of West-Central Oklahoma American Indians. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983.
This book is amongst a group of texts by anthropologists and sociologists whose works renewed interest in boarding schools in the early 1980s. McBeth’s research is based on interviews and secondary source material.
Mihesuah, Devon A. Cultivating The Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
“Established by the Cherokee Nation in 1851 in present-day eastern Oklahoma, the nondenominational Cherokee Female Seminary was one of the most important schools in the history of American Indian education. Unusual among Indian schools because it was founded by neither the federal government nor by missionary agencies, the school offered a rigorous curriculum from elementary grades through high school that was patterned after that of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Cultivating the Rosebuds is a study of acculturation, assimilation, and tribal identity, sensitively delving into the differences between progressive and traditional Cherokees and the interactions between them. It also offers insights into the school's role in the tribe's cultural transitions, the changing roles of Cherokee women, and the impact of the students' experiences upon their tribe.” --From the Publisher
Talayesva, Don C. Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, ed. Leo W. Simmons. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942.
Sun Chief is an autobiographical account that covers the life of the Hopi Indian Don Talayesva from 1890 to 1940. The narrative focuses on the traditional village lifestyle of the Hopi Indians and how the author and his people went through an intense period of change with encroachment of non-Indian settlement and forced assimilation of the Tribe.
Trennert, Robert A. The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891-1935. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
“The Phoenix Indian School is a superbly crafted, microcosmic view and analysis of the American Indian education movement as an assimilation program from 1891-1935. It is also compelling as a vision of the individual Indian experience within the larger framework of the program…The author develops the story of the efforts by officials to attract funding for the Phoenix school, and to generate political and economic support within Arizona. He also demonstrates the difficulties of attracting students and qualified faculty to the school, and of showing the hardships the students endured during their tenure at the institution…” --excerpt of review by Gregory C. Thompson in The Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 3 (Aug., 1989)
Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories. Washington D.C.: Hayworth, 1921.
“Zitkala-Ša vividly articulates her disillusionment with the harshness of American-Indian boarding schools and the corruption of government institutions ostensibly established to help Native peoples. At the same time, Zitkala-Ša's collection of autobiographical essays and short stories charts the progression of the author's estrangement from her Dakota people that her colonial education inevitably fostered. Much more than an indictment against U.S. attempts at Native deculturation, American Indian Stories portrays one Dakota woman's spirited and successful efforts to resist the restrictions she felt in both reservation life and Euroamerican assimilation.” –From the Publisher
Articles:
Coleman, Michael C. "The Symbiotic Embrace: American Indians, White Educators and the School, 1820s-1920s." History of Education 25, no. 1 (1996): 1-18.
Ellis, Clyde. "'A Remedy For Barbarism': Indian Schools, the Civilizing Program, and the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation, 1871-1915." American Indian Culture & Research Journal 18, no. 3 (1994): 85-120.
________. "Boarding School Life at the Kiowa-Comanche Agency, 1893-1920," Historian58, no. 4 (1996): 777-93.
Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. "Domesticity in the Federal Indian Schools: The Power of Authority Over Mind and Body." American Ethnologist 20, no. 2 (1993): 227-240.
”The Red Man [Morning Star Red Man and Helper]” in An Illustrated Magazine Printed by Indians. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Photoduplication Service, 1974.
Videos:
Lesiak, Christine and Mathew Jones, prod. In the White Man's Image. Alexandria: PBS Video, 1991.
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