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.
American Indian Stories
""American Indian Stories" is an important collection because it represents one of the first attempts by a Native American woman to write her own story without the aid of an editor, an interpreter, or an ethnographer. Zitkala-ea presents...the pain and difficulty of growing up Indian in a white man's world." - Dexter Fisher. Zitkala-ea (Gertrude Bonnin) was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition. "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" describes her first eight yeas on the Yankton Reservation, where she was born in 1876. Her schooling in Indiana revealed a gift for writing that led in 1901 to the publication of "Old Indian Legends", also a Bison Book. For the rest of her rife, this Sioux was in the poignant but creative position of trying to bridge the gap between her own culture and the dominant white one, unable to return fully to the former or to enter fully into the latter. These pieces, largely autobiographical, were first collected and published in 1921. With their reissue, Zitkala-ea takes her rightful place among such native interpreters of Sioux culture as Charles A. Eastman and Luther Standing Bear.
Students as promoters of rural extension in aquaculture in the Marajó archipelago, Pará, Brazil
Aquaculture is the creation of aquatic organisms. An expanding activity, being of great importance its approach in rural extension. Thus, the objective of this study was to analyze the contribution of extension activities in aquaculture in the professional training of students in Marajó, Amazon, Brazil. The project “Technology transfer through training and technical assistance for tambaqui breeders, Colossoma macropomum, in the archipelago of Marajó/PA” was developed by 10 technician and under graduate students from rural education course and the technical course in aquaculture from the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Pará (IFPA) Campus Breves, in the city of Curralinho. They participated in the stages of data collection in aquaculture enterprises, training for producers and monitoring of aquaculture production, acting as researchers, instructors and extension workers, respectively. The duration of the project was from August 2019 to March 2020. At the end of the project, a questionnaire was applied to the students involved. The results showed that the aquaculture extension activities developed were relevant and significant, for the construction of knowledge in a mutual way between those involved (students and aquaculture producers). The acquired experiences will substantiate and subsidize the professional practice of these students in a concrete and effective way. In conclusion, the extension project represents an excellent tool in the teaching-learning process for students.