Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1999, pp. 35-52.
Abstract
In the past twenty-five years, historical studies on Indian boarding schools have proliferated, ranging from analyses of federal policies regarding Indian education (Adams, Coleman, Prucha) to particular institutional histories such as They Called It Prairie Light, The Phoenix Indian School, Cultivating the Rosebuds, To Change Them Forever, and Out of the Depths. While the specifics of instititional practices may differ, for the most part scholars of American Indian education agree that the boarding school experience was and continues to be a seminal moment for generations of Indian families. Although initial histories of federal Indian boarding schools mainly relied upon official bureaucratic documents that focused on government assimilation policies, recently scholars in Native American studies have begun to question and critique this focus. Using reproduction theories of education, scholars have begun to theorize how federal off-reservation Indian boarding schools served as sites of cultural production and to examine how students and teachers resisted these sites through strategic acts.
They Called It Prairie Light, for instance, analyzes oft-repeated tales told by Chilocco alumni, such as the "bloomer story," to illustrate how daily practices were contested and subverted, resulting in "a symbolic marker of Indian identity for Chilo ceo alumni." Celia Haig-Brown analyzes thirteen life histories of former students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School to explore "the resistance movement which the students and their families developed against the invasive presence of the residential school," and Patricia Carter describes how six Indian Service teachers resisted the monolithic and oppressive mandates of Bureau of Indian Affairs policy to negotiate their own responsibilities and to address their students' needs.
Despite this abundance of scholarship, however, few studies of federal Indian boarding schools have focused on literacy as a central term for investigation. Although literacy studies is necessarily interdisciplinary and contributes to insights about the relationship between language and, in Levinson and Holland's words, the "cultural production of the educated person," few Indian boardingschool histories have focused on the significance of particular literacy practices for understanding Indian students' school experiences. When literacy is discussed, it is usually in terms of the federal "English only" requirement that prohibited Indian languages or the drill and rote exercises used in the primary language curriculum. Few scholars have examined the texts used in the curriculum or the written texts that students produced within these classrooms.
And yet, as Deborah Brandt suggests, literacy artifacts reflect how individuals intersect "at a certain time with the ongoing, official history of mass literacy and the institutions that have controlled it," representing "a complex, sometimes cacophonous mix of fading and ascending materials, practices, and ideologies.'' Examiningliteracy artifacts from a particular school, then, offers historians of education and Great Plains scholars a case study for understanding how federal policies regarding education were enacted, resisted, and remade by students and teachers in local and personal ways.
This essay focuses on literacy practices at one off-reservation government boarding school: the Genoa Industrial Indian School at Genoa, Nebraska (1884-1934), the fourth and one of the largest of the almost thirty Indian government boarding schools built in the United States. In particular, I focus on three types ofliteracy artifacts: (1) literary texts that students read, (2) students' writing within the curriculum, and (3) student writing outside the curriculum. In examining these literacy artifacts, I find Mary Louise Pratt's metaphor of "the contact zone" useful. Pratt suggests that literacy artifacts can be read as contact zones or "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination." Rather than reading these literacy artifacts solely as a barometer of how Genoa students were assimilated, I suggest that they can be read as contact zones which illustrate how Genoa students' reading and writing practices served as spaces to name, define, and claim (or reject) identities in relation to the larger cultural discourses that surrounded them.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln