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No Parole Today. (Original writing)
Abstract
The poems and stories in this creative dissertation reflect the lives of Native American people who spent time in government boarding schools. In the latter nineteenth century the government built these institutions with the intent of assimilating Native people into mainstream white America. Indian lands were relinquished in return for specific conditions outlined in peace treaties. Among these services were education and health care of Native people. These schools, often built long distances away from Indian reservations and modelled after military institutions, actively sought to remove young Indian children from their families and culture in order to erode the foundation of Indian life, thereby making immersion into white culture easier. These poems and stories dramatize assimilation through personal accounts by the author. One narrative given by the author's grandmother, "Once You Were Signed Up," recounts her experience as one of the early enrollees at Fort Defiance, Arizona, and at Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, during the first quarter of this century. The remainder of this work is taken from the author's experience attending a government Day School on the Navajo reservation and living at the Albuquerque Indian School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during the late 1950s' and 1960s', respectively. Using the oral tradition, the poems and/or stories narrate the themes of separation from family, culture, and homeland, alienation from the non-Indian culture and institutions, and the threat of the loss of the author's native language and voice as well as celebrations of relationships and the Navajo culture as a way of healing. The author speaks to what it means to get an Indian Education during and after the end of the U.S. Government's assimilation policy toward native people. The author addresses these given issues by protesting the treatment of Indian people within and beyond the four walls of the classroom. Translations of Navajo are given where needed.
Subject Area
American literature|Literature|Bilingual education|Multicultural education|Public administration|Education history
Recommended Citation
Tohe, Laura, "No Parole Today. (Original writing)" (1993). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9415998.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9415998