Books in the Indigenous Education series

Like the figures in the ancient oral literature of Native Americans, children who lived through the American Indian boarding school experience became heroes, bravely facing a monster not of their own making. This volume shows how American Indian boarding schools provided both positive and negative influences for Native American children.

In the first full comparison of American and British government attempts to assimilate ""problem peoples"" through mass elementary education, Michael C. Coleman presents a complex and fascinating portrait of imperialism at work in the two nations.

Tells the fascinating story of how generations of Hopi schoolchildren from northeastern Arizona "turned the power" by using compulsory federal education to affirm their way of life and better their community. Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert draws on interviews, archival records, and his own experiences growing up in the Hopi community to offer a powerful account of a quiet, enduring triumph.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Native American families moved to cities across the US, some via the government relocation program and some on their own. In this study, Stephen Kent Amerman focuses on the educational experiences of Native students in urban schools in Phoenix, Arizona, a city with one of the largest urban Indian communities in America.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School offers varied perspectives on the school by interweaving the voices of students’ descendants, poets, and activists with cutting-edge research by Native and non-Native scholars. These contributions reveal the continuing impact and vitality of historical and collective memory, as well as the complex and enduring legacies of a school that still affects the lives of many Native Americans.The Carlisle Indian School (1879–1918) was an audacious educational experiment. Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the school’s founder and first superintendent, persuaded the federal government that training Native children to accept the white man’s ways and values would be more efficient than fighting deadly battles. The result was that the last Indian war would be waged against Native children in the classroom.More than 8,500 children from virtually every Native nation in the United States were taken from their homes and transported to Pennsylvania. Carlisle provided a blueprint for the federal Indian school system that was established across the United States and also served as a model for many residential schools in Canada. The Carlisle experiment initiated patterns of dislocation and rupture far deeper and more profound and enduring than its founder and supporters ever grasped.

Analyses the formulation of the "Indian problem" as a policy concern in the United States and Canada, and examines how the "solution" of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space.

Created in 1887, Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana is home to the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples. This title investigates how historical understandings of literacy practices challenge Indigenous language revitalization efforts on the reservation.

Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival is the first book to explore the trauma of the boarding school experience at Steward Indian School and the resilience of generations of students who persevered there under the most challenging of circumstances.