Indian Boarding Schools

Boarding School Seasons offers a revealing look at the strong emotional history of Indian boarding school experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. At the heart of this book are the hundreds of letters written by parents, children, & school officials at Haskell Institute in Kansas & the Flandreau School in South Dakota. These revealing letters show how profoundly entire families were affected by their experiences. Children, who often attended schools at great distances from their communities, suffered from homesickness, & their parents from loneliness. Parents worried continually about the emotional & physical health & the academic process of their children. Families clashed repeatedly with school officials over rampant illnesses & deplorable living conditions & devised strategies to circumvent severely limiting visitation rules. Family intimacy was threatened by the schools' suppression of traditional languages & Native cultural practices. Although boarding schools were a threat to family life, profound changes occurred in the boarding school experience as families turned to these institutions for relief during the Depression, when poverty & the loss of traditional seasonal economies proved a greater threat. Boarding School Seasons provides a multifaceted look at the aspirations & struggles of real people.

Drawn from Native American autobiographical accounts, a study revealing white society's program of civilizing Indian schoolchildren.

This revised edition provides an overview of American Indian/Alaska Native education from 1928 to 1998.

Self-determination, a crucial concept in American Indian social and educational policy and the force behind Indian policy programs, is assessed here and found wanting. The volume contends that many aspects of this policy impulse are contradictory. Senese, looking at an area largely neglected by scholars of American educational policy, explores the discrepancy between the rhetoric of self-determination and its reality in Native American social settings. This study is rigorous in its analysis of the development, implementation, and language of this policy and unique in its critical perspective.

This is the spirited story of the author, an accomplished & inspiring educator in Indian boarding schools. Born in 1909, she grew up attending Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, & often visited relatives on the Shoshone Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Motivated by teachers like Ella Deloria & Ruth Muskrat Bronson, she devoted her life to teaching other Indian children. She began teaching at Wahpeton Indian School in Wahpeton, North Dakota, in 1930 & has remained active in education to the present day. Her experiences as student & teacher have enabled her to provide a detailed portrait of Indian boarding schools. We learn about daily life at Haskell & about the challenges & rewards of teaching for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Wahpeton. Above all, her life illuminates the ongoing struggle by Native teachers & students to retain their cultural identities within a government educational system designed to assimilate them. The authors developed this life history in a truly collaborative manner. They carefully document both personal history & the creation of this work. What emerges is an engaging & informative narrative about education & identity.

The dreams of a courageous Apache girl illuminate the hidden world of an Indian orphanage in this unforgettable story. Over forty years ago, Sharon Skolnick (Okee-Chee) and her sisters were removed from their Apache parents and became wards of the state of Oklahoma. She and her nearest sister made their way together through the Oklahoma Indian child welfare system. Shuttled back and forth between foster homes and orphanages, they finally ended up at the Murrow Indian Orphanage in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Here, Skolnick tells the gripping and ultimately triumphal account of the year the sisters spent there. Murrow was a place of wonder and terror, friendship and loneliness, where resilient children forged shifting alliances and conspired together yet yearned in solitude for a home and family to call their own. Skolnick paints an absorbing portrait of the world of an Indian orphanage, a world both bright and dark, vividly rendered through a child's eyes but tempered by the perspective of the woman who survived the,Indian child welfare system and became an Apache artist.