Established in 1884 and operative for nearly a century, the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma was one of a series of off-reservation boarding schools intended to assimilate American Indian children into mainstream American life. Critics have characterized the schools as destroyers of Indian communities and cultures, but the reality that K. Tsianina Lomawaima discloses was much more complex. Lomawaima allows the Chilocco students to speak for themselves. In recollections juxtaposed against the official records of racist ideology and repressive practice, students from the 1920s and 1930s recall their loneliness and demoralization but also remember with pride the love and mutual support binding them together—the forging of new pan-Indian identities and reinforcement of old tribal ones.
A renowned activist recalls his childhood years in an Indian boarding school Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers an unforgettable memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. In this rare firsthand account, Fortunate Eagle lives up to his reputation as a “contrary warrior” by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike. Fortunate Eagle attended Pipestone between 1935 and 1945, just as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier’s pluralist vision was reshaping the federal boarding school system to promote greater respect for Native cultures and traditions. But this book is hardly a dry history of the late boarding school era. Telling this story in the voice of his younger self, the author takes us on a delightful journey into his childhood and the inner world of the boarding school. Along the way, he shares anecdotes of dormitory culture, student pranks, and warrior games. Although Fortunate Eagle recognizes Pipestone’s shortcomings, he describes his time there as nothing less than “a little bit of heaven.” Were all Indian boarding schools the dispiriting places that history has suggested? This book allows readers to decide for themselves.
For use in schools and libraries only. Fifteen year old John Cameron Butler, kidnapped and raised by the Lenape Indians since childhood, is returned to his people under the terms of a treaty and is forced to cope with a strange and different world that is no longer his.
When Indian University--now Bacone College--opened its doors in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880, it was a small Baptist institution designed to train young Native Americans to be teachers and Christian missionaries among their own people and to act as agents of cultural assimilation. From 1927 to 1957, however, Bacone College changed course and pursued a new strategy of emphasizing the Indian identities of its students and projecting often-romanticized images of Indianness to the non-Indian public in its fund-raising campaigns. Money was funneled back into the school as administrators hired Native American faculty who in turn created innovative curricular programs in music and the arts that encouraged their students to explore and develop their Native identities. Through their frequent use of humor and inventive wordplay to reference Indianness--"Indian play"--students articulated the (often contradictory) implications of being educated Indians in mid-twentieth-century America. In this supportive and creative culture, Bacone became an "Indian school," rather than just another "school for Indians." In examining how and why this transformation occurred, Lisa K. Neuman situates the students' Indian play within larger theoretical frameworks of cultural creativity, ideologies of authenticity, and counterhegemonic practices that are central to the fields of Native American and indigenous studies today.
What might we learn from Native American experiences with schools to help us forge a new vision of the democratic ideal—one that respects, protects, and promotes diversity and human rights? In this fascinating portrait of American Indian education over the past century, the authors critically evaluate U.S. education policies and practices, from early 20th-century federal incarnations of colonial education through the contemporary standards movement. In the process, they refute the notion of “dangerous cultural difference” and point to the promise of diversity as a source of national strength. Featuring the voices and experiences of Native individuals that official history has silenced and pushed aside, this book: Proposes the theoretical framework of the “safety zone” to explain shifts in federal educational policies and practices over the past century.Offers lessons learned from Indigenous America’s fight to protect and assert educational self-determination.Rebuts stereotypes of American Indians as one-dimensional learners.Argues that the maintenance of Indigenous languages is a fundamental human right.Examines the standards movement as the most recent attempt to control the “dangerous difference” allegedly posed by students of color, poor and working-class students, and English language learners in U.S. schools. “To Remain an Indian chronicles the resistance, resilience, and imagination of generations of Native American educators. It is a profoundly moving book that highlights the opportunities, and ethical responsibility, that educators have to expand student identities and challenge coercive relations of power in the wider society.” —Jim Cummins, University of Toronto “A must read for both seasoned and young scholars, practitioners, and others interested in culturally based education, including the importance of Indigenous languages.” —John Tippeconnic III, Director, American Indian Leadership Program, Pennsylvania State University “The development of young children’s logico-mathematical knowledge is at the heart of this text. Similar to the first edition, this revision provides a rich theoretical foundation as well as child-centered activities and principles of teaching that support problem solving, communicating, reasoning, making connections, and representing mathematical ideas. In this great resource for preservice and in-service elementary teachers, Professor Kamii continues to help us understand the implications of Piagetian theory.” —Frances R. Curcio, New York University
Alongside sixty-two of Butcher's iconic photographs, "Light on the Prairie" conveys the irrepressible spirit of a man whose passion would give us a firsthand look at the men and women who settled the Great Plains.
