GSR Today - Elizabethada Wright is researching Mother Mary Joseph Lynch, a 19th-century Sister of Mercy whose boarding school in Minnesota reflected a drive to integrate Native Americans into the dominant white culture.
320 pages
Review by Denise Low
Denise Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is a poet, jingle dancer, fabric artist, professor, and practitioner of
mazinibakanige (birch bark biting in patterns). Now she adds the role of historian to her activities in this essential book about boarding schools. It includes new research, photographs, interviews with survivors, and her own experience as a child of parents who attended boarding schools.
The boarding school system of the 19th and 20th centuries separated Native children from parents and tribal communities, often through force. They enacted assimilationist pedagogies on students as young as kindergarten age, and corporal punishment and other abuses were condoned. This amounted to a second war on Indigenous peoples, as boarding schools proliferated. “By 1887, about 14,300 American Indian children were enrolled in 227 schools,” Lajimodiere notes. The author provides a fold-out map of 366 known boarding schools and their locations.