Forever Changed: Boarding School Narratives of American Indian Identity in the U.S. and Canada
This essay examines personal narratives to identify experiences at boarding schools. These collective experiences forged new American Indian identities due to a white educational system forced upon these Indian students. While stories remain part of tradition, they convey that Indian youth had changed permanently. An Ojibwa man, Ted Mato, who attended an Indian school, explained about the system established to educate American Indian students. He stated, "...the government set up an extensive system of boarding schools to bleach the red out of Indian children, to make us into white people. American Indians are forever changed." 1 As this Native man so eloquently stated, the intent of the Western educational system was to purposefully eliminate the cultural identity of American Indian people. But as the narratives will show, the students were not passive recipients of the process. One purpose of this paper is to give voice to the American Indian people who survived the Western educational system. The Native perspective of this cultural assault and the ensuing opposition to this aggression, as well as the existence and tenacity of this people, as demonstrated by the narratives of the participants, form the significance of this paper.
Whose Stories Should We Tell? A Call to Action
In his essay "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin (1969) laments the decline of the "communicability of experience," and points out that dramatic narrative is gradually disappearing from living speech. Experience, he tells us, has fallen in value, giving way to the rise of information, which lays prompt claim to verifiability. Its prime requirement is that it appear understandable in itself yet "it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it . . . (so that) it is left up to him (the reader) to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." (p. 89) More and more Benjamin tells us that there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. "It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences." (p. 83) Benjamin is right to decry the fall of experience. In the language of contemporary social science, stories are soft they do not constitute the real data of the scientific enterprise. Rather, hard facts the "information which lays prompt claim to verifiability" and I might add, to objectivity, replication, and predictibility now constitute what Merleau-Ponty (1962) has termed our second order reality. We have created a construct of science which contains all the components of a secular dogmatic orthodoxy. As Sartre (1948) tells us in his study of The Emotions , fact gathering leads to fact gathering. The isolation of body, of mind, of experience, of consciousness, leads to documentation, to a mere taxonomy of facts closed in on themselves, leading us away from, not towards, the understanding of human experience. Understanding human experience is the central task of the educational researcher. For it is in the stories of everyday lives, the drama, the meanings, the metaphors others live by, that the human science researcher must practice his or her craft of telling. But whose stories should we tell? And when the telling is done, and the voices of the voiceless are heard, does storytelling not invoke a call to action? And if I, as a researcher, become the teller of children's stories, of everyday lives lived out in institutions we call schools, is my task both teller and actor, interpreter and advocate? Let us listen to some stories about schooling. Paul Lee recollects his schooling in Hong Kong:
Self-Contained Ethnography or a Science of Phenomenal Forms and Inner Relations
This article develops a critique of ethnography in educational research. It is argued that ethnography concerns the study of the phenomenal forms of everyday life. Beyond these phenomenal forms are inner relations, causal processes, and generative mechanisms which are often invisible to the actors. A science of social totalities, deriving from Marx, is advocated which can elaborate the relationship between phenomenal forms, the world of appearances, and deeper social structural causal mechanisms. This science cannot be generated by ethnography alone but only through historical and comparative analyses of modes of production in history. The argument is illustrated by an imaginary ethnographic study of a typical “fascist” school in Germany and by a discussion of developments taking place in schooling systems in the contemporary world. A theory of reproduction is required which locates the analysis of capitalist schooling systems in a broader theory of the reproduction of all the economic, political, and ideological requirements for capitalist accumulation and the role of the state in this process. Ethnography carried out in schools informed by such a theory has a political rationale. It can lay the foundations for a critique of the world of appearances in everyday life, a necessary part of any political practice designed to produce a society in which essence and appearance are at one.