Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 2001, pp. 239-40.
Abstract
This book contributes to the growing canon of historical accounts of American Indian government boarding schools that operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing specifically on the thirty-five year history of the Rapid City Indian School, Riney analyzes interactions between school administrators and Northern Plains Indian parents and their children. Organized around such themes as curriculum, discipline, cycles of days and years, employees, and BIA influence, the book describes the Rapid City Indian School's regional importance to schooling on the Northern Plains and its relationship to the larger history of US Indian education.
The most groundbreaking chapter, "Extending the Reach of the Bureau," examines how Rapid City Indian School administrators performed duties important to the overall BIA mission and to the lives of individual Indians. Riney provides numerous examples of school superintendents intervening-and interfering- in the lives of Indians in and around Rapid City in terms of financial affairs (arranging Sioux benefit packages, allotment, and grazing and mineral leasing), legal concerns (child custody, prison sentencing, and liquor prohibition), and emergency monetary requests (for travel or funeral arrangements, for instance). He argues that Rapid City School personnel went beyond their educational duties and stood in for BIA structures, providing resources to tribal members living off the reservations in and around Rapid City. Riney concludes by hypothesizing how the Rapid City Indian School might have better served its students had administrators' attitudes (and overall BIA policies) not been shaped by racial ideologies that bred distrust toward Indian parents.
The book's omission of Native voices speaking for themselves about their schooling experiences mutes the resonance found in other Indian boarding school histories, such as K. Tsianina Lomawaima's They Called It Prairie Light (1995) and Brenda Child's Boarding School Seasons (1998). While the work draws o~ transcripts of oral histories collected by the American Indian Research Project and the Warm Valley Historical Project, its primary data emphasize bureaucratic documents and letter exchanges between school administrators and students' parents, thereby limiting the extent to which the perspectives of Indian school students and their families can be represented. Nonetheless, The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 provides readers new to American Indian boarding school history a useful introduction to the policies and practices that shaped American Indian schoolchildren's lives from the late 1800s to the early 1930s.
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln