MEDICINE RIVER

A concise history of Native American boarding schools and their enduring consequences.

The daughter of a boarding school survivor, the author explores a highly personal subject while tracing out its broader historical dimensions. As she notes, her aim is to understand more clearly her own Ojibwe identity, the ramifying consequences of intergenerational trauma, and “Indian people’s unparalleled ability to survive.” Elegantly weaving together her mother’s stories, those of other boarding school students, and concise accounts of federal assimilationist policies and common institutional practices, she provides an informed and unsettling perspective on the schools’ individual and collective impact. The origins and evolution of assimilationist policies are convincingly framed in relation to long-standing assumptions about what the Christian faith sanctioned in encounters with pagan lands and peoples, and we gain a striking sense of how an ethic of righteous domination shaped institutions meant to accelerate the destruction of indigeneity. Particularly compelling are the accounts of the schools’ coercive religious authority, myriad forms of physical and psychological abuse, and insistent shaming, all of which aimed at, and often succeeded in, destroying the self-esteem of vulnerable children. As we come to understand, routine cruelties coexisted with the self-professed benevolence of the pedagogical bureaucracy. Indigenous resistance is also carefully charted, especially in relation to the “sense of common purpose and pan-Indian identity” that many students managed to establish in the face of crushing assimilative pressures. Less effective is the author’s reckoning with the complex motivations of the influential school administrator Richard Henry Pratt, whose ambitions and techniques are sometimes unjustly simplified. Nevertheless, this book provides a cogent summation of the significance of boarding schools and movingly represents the resilience of the author’s family over generations.

A gripping, often harrowing account of the personal and communal toll of cultural genocide.