Provides a history of the Phoenix Indian School from 1930 until the graduation of its final class of nineteen students in 1990. Dorothy Parker tells how the Phoenix Indian School not only adapted to policy changes instituted by the federal government but also had to contend with events occurring in the world around it, such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the advent of the "red power" movement.
"The story of the Phoenix Indian School tests the assumptions of those who analyze federal policy from a broad perspective. It is easily apparent that western schools developed a personality of their own, were affected by pressures not recognized by policy makers, and did not always follow national trends. Trennert's study is broken down into three parts. First is an administrative history of the school, centering around the superintendents who dominated the institution and implemented federal policy. Also included is a study of the unique relationship between the city of Phoenix and the school, which was purposely located in an urban area where interaction with whites was an important part of the assimilation program. White citizens had financial and other reasons for cooperating, and their role in Indian education is thoroughly explored. Finally, the study presents an in-depth look at the effect of assimilationist education on native children. From the Indian perspective, Trennert analyzes how the federal school program affected individuals. Surprisingly, he concludes that Indian schools such as the one in Phoenix were not all evil, and they failed educationally in good part because the federal government was unwilling to provide adequate support"--Book jacket.
This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnston’s family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver’s school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury. “Spanish! It was a word synonymous with residential school, penitentiary, reformatory, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks, slaps, all rolled into one,” Johnston recalls. But despite the aching loneliness, the deprivation, the culture shock and the numbing routine, his story is engaging and compassionate. Johnston creates marvelous portraits of the young Indian boys who struggled to adapt to strange ways and unthinking, unfeeling discipline. Even the Jesuit teachers, whose flashes of humor occasionally broke through their stern demeanor, are portrayed with an understanding born of hindsight.
Between 1893 and 1920 the U.S. government attempted to transform Kiowa children by immersing them in the forced assimilation program that lay at the heart of that era's Indian policy. Committed to civilizing Indians according to Anglo-American standards of conduct, the Indian Service effected the government's vision of a new Indian race that would be white in every way except skin color. Reservation boarding schools represented an especially important component in that assimilationist campaign. The Rainy Mountain School, on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in western Oklahoma, provides an example of how theory and reality collided in a remote corner of the American West. Rainy Mountain's history reveals much about the form and function of the Indian policy and its consequences for the Kiowa children who attended the school. In To Change Them Forever Clyde Ellis combines a survey of changing government policy with a discussion of response and accommodation by the Kiowa people. Unwilling to surrender their identity, Kiowas nonetheless accepted the adaptations required by the schools and survived the attempt to change them into something they did not wish to become. Rainy Mountain became a focal point for Kiowa society.
Happily consumed with her academic career, Professor Avery Wainwright never planned on becoming sole guardian of her octogenarian Aunt Birdie. Forced to move Birdie-and her failing memory-into her tiny apartment, Avery's precariously balanced life loses its footing.Unearthed in the chaos is a stack of sixty-year-old letters. Written in 1951, the letters tell of a year Avery's grandmother, Alma Jean, spent teaching in the Indian school system, in the high desert town of Winslow, Arizona. The letters are addressed to Birdie, who was teaching at the Phoenix Indian School. The ghostly yet familiar voices in the letters tell of a dark time in her grandmother's life, a time no one has ever spoken of.Torn between caring for the old woman who cannot remember, and her very different memories of a grandmother no longer alive to explain, Avery searches for answers. But the scandal and loss she finds, the revelations about abuses, atrocities, and cover-ups at the Indian schools, threaten far more than she's bargained for.
The last "Indian War" was fought against Native American children in the dormitories and classrooms of government boarding schools. Only by removing Indian children from their homes for extended periods of time, policymakers reasoned, could white "civilization" take root while childhood memories of "savagism" gradually faded to the point of extinction. In the words of one official: "Kill the Indian and save the man." Education for Extinction offers the first comprehensive account of this dispiriting effort. Much more than a study of federal Indian policy, this book vividly details the day-to-day experiences of Indian youth living in a "total institution" designed to reconstruct them both psychologically and culturally. The assault on identity came in many forms: the shearing off of braids, the assignment of new names, uniformed drill routines, humiliating punishments, relentless attacks on native religious beliefs, patriotic indoctrinations, suppression of tribal languages, Victorian gender rituals, football contests, and industrial training. Especially poignant is Adams's description of the ways in which students resisted or accommodated themselves to forced assimilation. Many converted to varying degrees, but others plotted escapes, committed arson, and devised ingenious strategies of passive resistance. Adams also argues that many of those who seemingly cooperated with the system were more than passive players in this drama, that the response of accommodation was not synonymous with cultural surrender. This is especially apparent in his analysis of students who returned to the reservation. He reveals the various ways in which graduates struggled to make sense of their lives and selectively drew upon their school experience in negotiating personal and tribal survival in a world increasingly dominated by white men. The discussion comes full circle when Adams reviews the government's gradual retreat from the assimilationist vision. Partly because of persistent student resistance, but also partly because of a complex and sometimes contradictory set of progressive, humanitarian, and racist motivations, policymakers did eventually come to view boarding schools less enthusiastically. Based upon extensive use of government archives, Indian and teacher autobiographies, and school newspapers, Adams's moving account is essential reading for scholars and general readers alike interested in Western history, Native American studies, American race relations, education history, and multiculturalism.
