Boarding Schools
On Tuesday, April 3, we talked about Boarding Schools.
the readings came from this site
About Indian Boarding Schools
the source of a few of pages is
Assimilation Through Education: Indian Boarding Schools in the Pacific Northwest
part of the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections.
Most of the other pages have the source at the bottom of the page, and even if the link is broken, they list the full citation.
We also talked a little about corporal punishment as part of everyday American culture at the time of boarding school, so that what the Indians were being subject to was probably no different than what non-Indian children got. However as Alex Grill pointed out, most Indian group did not use corporal punishment to control their children so that Indians were not used to nor understand this kind of treatment.
We also talked about how other groups have had to deal with cultural genocide, although probably not by the same means or to the same extent as Indians.
We listened to the oral histories of Harriett Nahanee and Virginia Baptiste recounting their experiences in residential schools in Canada--the equivilent of the US boarding schools--from Hidden from History: Voices of the Canadian Holocaust
Here are images of the Cherokee, North Carolina boarding school, particularly nice since they are dated, from Donna Beck at Western Carolina University.
It is hard to teach the boarding school material--there is no way not to have an emotional reaction--as instructor i have to go past that reaction to present the material in class. While no one in my immediate family when to boarding school, i mentioned in class how my grandmother, whose own mother died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, sent her cousin/brother to the Indian boarding school St. Boniface in Banning, California where she lived at the time. Eventually we lived up the street from the school on the edge of town in the 1960s. My grandmother sent her brother/cousin there because she was a teenager and responsible for him after her mother's death. She wanted to give him an education.