DISCIPLINE, TERRITORY, AND THE COLONIAL MESH

Indigenous Boarding Schools in the United States and Canada

Andrew Woolford

To date there has been very little comparative work on Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. The extant literature tends to offer only general comparisons, as in Reyhner and Eder's (2004) American Indian Education, where a few key differences between Canadian and American boarding schools are noted amid a broader discussion of U.S. Indigenous education policy: Canadian residential schools lasted longer on average than U.S. schools; Canadian policies were unrelentingly assimilationist, since no reformist period occurred in Canada as it did in the United States in the 1930s; Indigenous parents in Canada had less say regarding to which schools their children were sent; and some Canadian religious denominations lobbied vigorously to prevent diminishment of their control over or the closing of boarding schools (Reyhner and Eder 2004). The cumulative effect of these differences is that Indigenous children in Canada typically entered boarding schools at an earlier age than their U.S. counterparts, and the Canadian system affected more generations of Indigenous children, in a more brutalizing form, than was true in most parts of the United States. However, one must also acknowledge that information about the schools has emerged from very different discursive contexts, since a public culture of traumatic memory and testimony has taken prominence through multiple class actions lawsuits and now the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (e.g., see Niezen 2013).

In the few comparative examinations of boarding schools in the United States and Canada, however, little attention is given to regional and temporal differences in the development, application, and experience of boarding school policy. Such is the case with Ward Churchill's (2004) Kill the Indian, Save the Man, which uses the term genocide to hammer all school experiences into a single block and thereby fails to capture the ebb and flow of colonial genocidal processes. Similarly, but in a wider comparison than that offered by Churchill, Andrea Smith (2009) writes about schooling and forced assimilation in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, outlining their common assimilative purpose. In contrast to Churchill's and Smith's more critical perspectives, Charles Glenn's (2011) American Indian/First Nations Schooling offers a redemptive overview of Indigenous education, treating European schooling as a good that was simply mismanaged for Indigenous pupils. Glenn falls into the trap of accepting perpetrators' claims to humanitarianism as an alibi for their role in the attempted destruction of another group.

While comparative discussion of boarding schools is sparse and, where it exists, over-general, there is a wealth of detailed historical work on Indigenous boarding schools in each country. Some authors offer a broad overview of colonial schooling policy combined with illustrative examples of how it was enacted, in addition to how students adapted to, resisted, and suffered their time at the schools (e.g., Milloy 1999; Miller 1996; Grant 1996; Adams 1995; Szasz [1974] 1999; Reyhner and Eder 2004). But more recent historiography focuses on specific Indigenous boarding schools in an attempt to capture the local particularity of the schooling experience, as well as to offer a portrait of how Indigenous groups, rather than a homogeneous "Indian" people, lived their boarding school days (e.g., Lomawaima 1994; Ellis 1996; Child 1998; Trennert 1988). Most of these authors are critical of schooling policy, but they also seek to show its uneven application across time and space. It is within this unevenness that they locate examples of students who enjoyed aspects of their schooling experience, connected with certain teachers, or eventually used their education for positive purposes unexpected by policy makers, such as by reinforcing rather than shedding their Indigenous identities (McBeth 1983; Lomawaima 1994). Others go further to emphasize that Indigenous students, parents, and communities came to appropriate boarding schools for their own purposes (Gilbert 2010; Gram 2012).

By invoking the term genocide I do not ignore the historical nuance of such scholarship. However, my effort is to show how genocidal processes are themselves uneven and uncertain because the colonial networks that generate these processes manifest in unpredictable ways. Like all grandiose modernist projects of statecraft, boarding schools were prone to inconsistencies, variable applications, resistances, and subversions. Therefore, in this chapter genocide speaks more to the process of destruction than a foregone outcome. In short, this chapter looks at the negotiation of genocide—at how groups intending to destroy other groups seek to mobilize their destructive powers, face obstacles and resistances, enroll or combat other actors (including nonhuman actors), and either succeed (in whole or in part) or fail in their efforts.

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