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“A Lethal Education” explores the lethal consequences of United States educational policies that removed Native American children and young adults from their homes, placed them in institutions designed to destroy Indigenous languages, cultures, and traditions, and supplanted them with non-Indigenous substitutes. In particular, this dissertation explores the loss of life associated with United States boarding schools for American Indians and Alaska Natives. It examines how and why off-reservation boarding schools promoted contagion and incubated infections with lethal consequences for many Native American students. Admitting ill students, substandard housing, overcrowding, forced labor, physical, mental, and sexual abuse, malnourishment, dietary insufficiencies, psychological trauma, and willful neglect compromised student immune systems leaving them vulnerable to pathogens. These factors also impaired immunological defenses, decreasing the chances of recovery once a student became infected. Diseases, including diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, smallpox, and trachoma, spread and epidemics swept through student populations. At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Forest Grove Indian Training School in Oregon, Chemawa Indian School in Oregon, Haskell Institute in Kansas, Perris Indian School in California, and Sherman Institute in California, recurring infectious disease outbreaks then led to elevated tuberculosis rates. Such outbreaks and infections killed hundreds of Indigenous students at these schools, leaving death, shattered families, and devastated communities in their wake. Based upon newly opened archives, this study deploys a historical epidemiological approach relatively new to Native American boarding school studies. Ultimately, the findings reveal that thousands of American Indian and Alaska Native students perished at off-reservation Native American boarding schools, while officials sent thousands more home to die. These deaths were the result of dangerous local school policies, parsimonious congressional funding, and gross negligence by federal officials in the United States Office of Indian Affairs.

In 1879, the U.S. government embarked upon a program to assimilate thousands of Native American children who were taken from their homes and sent to off-reservation boarding schools managed by federal officials. These schools were designed to destroy the connections between Native children and their lands, isolate them from their families, and divorce them from their cultures and traditions. The Stewart Indian School opened in Carson City, Nevada, in December 1890, and enthusiastically embraced its mission. Newly enrolled students were separated from their families, had their appearances altered, and were forced speak only English. They were assigned work details on campus, compelled to attend church, and placed in remedial classes and vocational training programs. The message at Stewart, particularly during its early years, was clear: assimilation meant the adoption of white, middle-class values for Native students, forgoing their connections with tribal lands and communities, and the explicit acceptance of Indigenous inferiority and white supremacy. For U.S. officials, school like Stewart would resolve the “Indian problem” once and for all by eradicating Indigenous cultures, ending U.S. treaty obligations, and allowing the unfettered expansion of white settlers into Native lands.In this dissertation, I argue that settler colonialism propelled U.S. government programs designed to assimilate generations of Native children at the Stewart Indian School. I examine the history of the Stewart Indian School from its opening in 1890vto its closure in 1980, and underscore the settler colonial underpinnings of assimilationist practices at the school. At the same time, I also employ a borderlands framework to explain how and why Indigenous students and their families subverted school rules, and to investigate tensions between federal officials and the local authorities charged with implementing their policies. I further evaluate the current status of the Stewart Indian School grounds to underscore the ongoing nature of federal and state settler colonial policies, which have focused, until recently, on erasing the trauma inflicted on generations of Native families connected to the school.Each chapter explores different periods of the Stewart Indian School’s history and connects them with trends in federal Indian policy. After a discussion of methodologies and the boarding school system, chapter two focuses on the early decades of the school, when students were subjected to harsh assimilationist policies. Chapter three examines reforms that occurred between 1925 and 1948, and argues that, despite new federal guidelines, Stewart School officials remained intent on the assimilation of Native children. The fourth chapter focuses on the implementation of the Navajo Special Program at Stewart, and connects this rigidly assimilationist program with federal attempts to terminate tribal rights and relocate Native peoples to urban areas. In chapter five, I describe student and parent-led reform efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, their connections with national self-determination movements, and Stewart officials’ continued focus on assimilation. My final chapter examines the history of the Stewart School after its 1980 closure, and illustrates how state, federal, and local officials sought to erase negative Indigenous experiences at the Stewart Indian School and replace them with an overwhelmingly positive historical narrative.

In 1542, the first Europeans entered the territory of the Caddo, the indigenous peoples of northeastern Texas and adjacent areas. Over the next few centuries, the Caddo would be drawn into new economic, social, and cultural connections with both European and indigenous newcomers, connecting them to the growing “Atlantic world”. At the same time as they were drawn into the Atlantic world, the Caddo maintained much older and deeper connections with indigenous communities surrounding them. Despite the dramatic changes European colonialism brought to their homeland, the Caddo retained sovereignty, continuing to govern themselves and their lands. This paper seeks to explore how the Caddo were connected to the world around them, both before and after colonization, and to determine how the Caddo responded to and navigated the changes brought by the European invasion. To do so, I examine a variety of historical sources, including written European sources, modern-day archaeological data, and Caddo oral history, all of which document the era through different lenses and offer insight into Caddo connections and changes across time.

Native American authors in the first half of the nineteenth century—the dawn of the Anthropocene in some accounts—were witness to the rapid expansion of settler-colonialism powered by new ideologies of energy and fueled by fossil capitalism. These authors, though, resisted extractive metaphors for energy and fuel, offering more organic and intimate visions of energy instead. Using energy humanities theories developed by Warren Cariou (Métis) and Bob Johnson, among others, this article will analyze Mary Jemison’s (Seneca) autobiography; Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s (Ojibwe) poem, “On the Doric Rock, Lake Superior”; and John Rollin Ridge’s (Cherokee) novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta. These works show how Native American authors defined energy as cyclical and intimate in contrast to the growing settler society’s vision of linear, unending extraction. This article argues that nineteenth-century Native American Anglophone literatures expand the scope of the energy humanities by describing energy intimacy while also extending the histories of Indigenous resistance to settler energy imaginaries. Nineteenth-century Native American literatures can make important contributions to the scope of the energy humanities and need to be integrated into the field to grasp the full scale of current environmental crises.

Various chronologies of the earliest Native American occupations have been proposed with varying levels of empirical support and conceptual rigor, yet none is widely accepted. A recent survey of pr...

During the Twentieth century Native American literature evolved from anonymity into prominence by assuming a commitment to reflect the particular challenges that faced Native American people during last two centuries. Native American Literature illuminates about Native American lives, culture and how Indian values have changed from traditional tribal to mainstream ones that threatened tribal existence. The paper seeks to substantiate that this literature documents the horrible impact of brutal federal government on Indian’s lives through policies and programs designed to subject them to degrading and confining existence both on physical and mental levels. The paper also seeks to prove that the Indians in order to adapt themselves to the mainstream Euro-American ways lost their old ones along the way but could not adopt mainstream American lifestyle. At the turn of the Twenty First century, because of the coercive strategies for assimilation, American Indians residing on reservations could not become a part of mainstream America but the way back to traditionalism was also farther away and irreversible. The paper also strives to substantiate that Native American literature documents and provokes Indians to assert their tribal identity by retaining many of the tribal ways and values.

Archaeology is in a period of change, a point of inflection in which the discipline strives to reject its colonial roots. Embracing the “ontological turn,” archaeologists are applying diverse worldviews within their interpretations, yet these worldviews continue to reintroduce colonial ideals as they emerge out of Western philosophical schools. Using Native American philosophy, a recent addition to the academy, several key themes are identified and applied to the study of Late Archaic shell rings found along the Southeast United States coastlines. Through these themes, these sites are interpreted as places where Native Americans established communication with non-human forces and eventually socialized the newly formed coastline. The use of Native American philosophy is provided as a counter-balance to the use of Western philosophy as a means of further decolonizing archaeology

The unpublished field notes on Native American Yokuts cultures and languages taken by linguist and ethnologist John P. Harrington in 1914–1942, now kept at the Smithsonian Institution, are analysed...

If we think of the nation as a table, perhaps a Thanksgiving one, who belongs around it? Who is the host, and who the guest? What are the criteria for inclusion, and who gets to decide? This articl...

Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s mythic retelling of the Hugh Glass story revises and critiques the grand narratives of American exceptionalism born of the frontier. It highlights the violence bred of racism that weaves throughout the history of westward expansion, undercuts the genre’s tendency toward white privilege through multi-lingual narratives, and centers a counter-narrative focused on Indigenous families and women. Building from and reflecting on my earlier work in Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film, this essay reads the film’s representation of Native/First Nations women as palimpsestic apparitions of the Celluloid Indian Maiden trope that are both progressive and problematic in their ability to counter white hegemonic narratives of power and ongoing racism. This reading engages the dialogical tension between Iñárritu’s representation of his two primary Indigenous women—the “ghost” of Glass’ wife and Powaqa—allowing us to explore the hegemonic power of cinematic tropes in residual form. Ultimately, as Indigenous responses are brought to bear witness, we are asked to consider our ongoing attachment to particular tropes and depictions of Indigenous women even as we attempt to critique them.

Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) advances a national model predicated on tolerance and inclusivity. The novel suggests that the oppressive strictures of Puritanism derive from the psychical trauma of banishment from England. This compels the protagonist Mary to rebel against Salem’s social codes by marrying Hobomok. Her elopement and later return as an accepted member of the community are implicated in Child’s national vision of tolerance. However, the novel’s resolution is ethno-centric as Hobomok chooses self-imposed exile while his son with Mary loses his racial identity. Exploring Child’s narrative through a postcolonial psychoanalytic lens reveals how her narrative reflects upon American identity formation which draws upon yet disavows the Native figure in nineteenth-century literature. Significantly, Child’s novel anticipates a space for Native American subjectivity, which conflicts with her national vision and casts doubt on the legitimacy of the American State.

We attempt to analyse the form and content of major Native American plays to discuss their relationship with the traditional English drama and its content. By looking at plays of key Native American playwrights, we show that the Native American tradition goes against the English tradition of drama in its form by challenging the unities of time and place and characterization. It also brings in elements of Native American tradition of storytelling such as the blend of the sacred and the profane, the use of humor, the attitude towards facticity, to the tradition of drama to carve out a unique space for itself through which it attempts to challenge the dominant narratives of history, Native American culture, and at the same time highlight the problems the Native American nations face currently.

This paper examines attitudes to sexual morality held by the Yankton Dakota author and activist Gertrude Bonnin (1876–1938), better known by her penname Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird in Lakota). Bonnin’s concerns encompass several themes: the victimization of Indian women, disintegration of Native courtship rituals, sexual threats posed by peyote use, and the predatory nature of Euro-American men. This critique as a whole — in which a ‘white invasion,’ in her words, leads to a corruption of Native sexuality — sometimes produces inconsistencies, particularly regarding Bonnin’s statements on the alleged sexual perils of peyote. Her investigations into the Oklahoma guardianship scandals of the 1920s, however, strongly buttress recent research by Sarah Deer (2015), whose study, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, highlights the tragic aspects of Native-white sexual relations under United States settler-colonialism.

The colonization of the Northern Hemisphere between 1500 and 1900 produced nearly 150 separate conflicts between colonial powers and Native American communities. These conflicts have been largely overlooked in studies of international relations, particularly the quantitative tradition of scholarship. This article introduces a new dataset on conflicts involving Native American groups and colonial actors. As a starting point, this article briefly examines how the discipline has approached Native Americans and indigenous peoples. Next, the criteria for a new dataset on Native American Conflict History (NACH) is introduced. The challenges of navigating the historical record are discussed. And finally, a descriptive statistical overview of the data is presented that explores temporal and geographic patterns in the frequency, scale, and duration of conflicts. The article notes different patterns between European state combatants and ‘settler’ state combatants. Notably, the frequency of conflict increases dramatically in both Mexico and the United States during the second half of the 19th century while the scale of conflict remains largely unchanged.

After centuries of removals and attacks, most people have assumed that no Native Americans remained in northern Texas in cities such as Dallas-Fort Worth during the twentieth century. Oral historie...

AbstractAncillary citizenship and stratified assimilation: How American Indian Education was developed to force American Indians into the United States economy as reserve laborers by Kimberly RichardsDoctor of Philosophy in Ethnic StudiesUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Thomas Biolsi, ChairIn 1933, the newly appointed director of Education for the Indian Service, Dr. William Carson Ryan, the director of Extension and Industry, A.C. Cooley, and R.M. Tisinger, State Supervisor of Indian Education of Arizona, took a tour of four Mexican States on behalf of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This trip was to assess the school systems the Mexican government had been implementing in rural indigenous communities. It was especially enticing for these progressive educators, given that the director of the program was none other than Dr. Moises Saenz, a student of John Dewey. What was it about this rural school program that was so enticing to these three men? As lead investigator of the educational section of the Meriam report, Ryan had advocated for a more progressive form of education, one that would utilize the child’s surrounding community and environment as a integral part of the learning process. However, just as Indian educational models had done in the past, progressivism, as it would be used for Native students as well as racialized minorities and newly arrived immigrants, was deeply entrenched in liberal protestant American values, norms and beliefs. In order to understand the trajectory of progressive education as it was thought to apply to Indian students, it is important to gauge the dialogue and rhetoric surrounding the transition. With this research in mind this dissertation aims to reconstruct and question the policies, practices and motivations that enabled the BIA to maintain a long-standing assimilation policy through schooling. In particular this dissertation asserts that rather than shifting policy towards an ambitious liberal agenda of cultural acceptance, the union of policy makers and educators of the progressive era further entrenched the assimilation project.Yet, only a handful of scholars have focused their analysis on the progressive era, and an even smaller cohort has been able to illuminate the longer assimilation trajectory of Indian education and BIA aspirations. This dissertation adds to this small body of work in part by arguing that the purpose of Indian schooling was to incrementally force Native peoples into American intuitions, not to usher in a new era of cultural pluralism or acceptance. Moreover, the initial steps of this assimilation educational policy, which were focused on creating a reserve labor force of ancillary citizens also laid the foundation for mid-twentieth century BIA Relocation efforts.

This study discusses Native American woman's experience of existential outsideness, which is caused by the Euro-American legislative act as represented by Louise Erdrich in her novel Tracks. This research analyzes the role of the Dawes Act of 1887 in triggering the experience of existential outsideness among the Native Americans in general and Native American women in particular. Through Edward Casey Ralph's phenomenological perspective on the notion of spatiality, the study reinterprets the representation of space and place in Louise Erdrich's Tracks. The study offers a spatial reading of a Native American woman's life to explicate how she confronts the issues related to the confiscation of her ancestral lands that trigger her experience of existential outsideness to her land. The study concludes that Euro-American policies of acculturation and assimilation thwarted spatioexistential experiences of Native American women.

The colonial enterprise of Euro-Americans, since its first contact, flourished on the false notions of Indianness, fixating the image of Native Americans as primitive and savages without any claim to civilization or history. This fixity and lack of presence involuntarily led to an absence marked by a lack of identity and subjectivity for the Indians. The current article explores Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian through the theoretical lens of Jana Sequoya, affirming bicultural subjectivity propagated by mixed-blood writers on the nexus of inside-outside as a suitable solution to the paradoxes that constitute Indian identity. Denying the rigid approach of the insularity of cultures, this bicultural work offers the possibility of Indianization of American forms and adaptation and acculturation of those dominant forms that are integral for the advancement of Indians in the modern world. The current research also deduces that such a presence can powerfully combat and confound the discursive dichotomy and representation of Indians as the binarized version of modern and civilized Whites.

During nearly five decades of working in public archaeology at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, I have witnessed and experienced the importance of public awareness of archaeology and American Indian cultures but also have seen the need to overcome stereotypes the public has about both. This has been accomplished at Cahokia Mounds through exhibits, public field schools, on- and off-site presentations, special events, lecture series, publications, social media, and events with Native American participation. I will review the philosophy and planning behind these various approaches and how they have evolved over the years.

Most nineteenth-century political debates over U.S. citizenship revolved around the claims of people, often African Americans or immigrants, who aspired to that status. But Native American citizenship’s genealogy began instead with the United States assertion of the right to purchase or conquer the territory of its Indigenous neighbors, to replace them as its sole or primary inhabitants, and to make policy for the people thereby dispossessed. These very different histories of citizenship collided in 1866, when the U.S. Senate considered how to codify that status in the Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment. This article interprets these debates as the collision of an array of distinct and divergent settler colonial processes and experiences. It argues that the ultimate resolution—a half-articulated commitment to let local settler communities decide—both contradicted the ostensible purposes of the Civil Rights Act and accurately reflected how the era’s settler colonial society understood the purposes and functions of Native citizenship.

Despite the analyses of thousands of flotation samples from Arizona and New Mexico, domesticated chili peppers are absent in the prehistoric record, and only one specimen of the chiltipine or “wild...

The excavation and reconstruction of the ca. 1638 Waterman site is providing the first comprehensive and detailed look at the architecture and household material culture of an early period Pilgrim house in Plymouth Colony. The small vernacular house was of earth-fast, post-in-ground, and palisaded-wall construction, and burned down in a catastrophic fire after only a short period of occupation. The archaeological features, artifact patterns, and historical documents are integrated with 17th-century anthropomorphic architectural metaphors to reconstruct the house’s architecture and the various domestic activities that occurred within and around the house, including foodways, expressions of gender roles, environmental adaptation, and English and Native American cultural exchange.

There are significant challenges to answering questions of Native American precontact history with data from sites in marine submerged continental shelf settings. We find seven published examples o...

“Lullaby” is a famous short story by native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. The paper examines a series of traumas Ayah and her family suffer including the loss of land, poverty and spiritual alienation. Ayah’s memory of the tribal past reveals her attachment to Indian tradition which is the only comfort and strength left with her. The postcolonial ecocritical study of the short story exposes domestic colonization the Indian people suffer and emphasizes the need to restore Indian cultural tradition to heal traumas and arouse the awakening of Indian national consciousness.

This “From the Archives” article provides the texts of two articles on Native Americans written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first, Alice C. Fletcher’s speech on “The Legal Condit...

This article examines a singular yet overlooked facet of the Indigenous reality evoked in film: the figure of the Native American athlete. The cinematic portrayal defined here as Sporting Indiannes...