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.
Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa
An energetic Hopi woman emerges from a traditional family background to embrace the more conventional way of life in American today. Enchanting and enlightening a rare piece of primary source anthropology.
Historias de mi barrio: contemporary art in a community at high risk of social exclusion
Abstract Historias de mi barrio is a piece of pedagogic research aimed at highlighting the way art can articulate the relationship between the educational context and a neighbourhood at high risk of social exclusion. The starting point for this study was to ask whether this type of research, centred around the arts, was suitable in complex contexts and whether it might eventually lead to pedagogic improvement. The results gathered, and indeed the work carried out by the artists and university lecturers involved, together with pupils 6–12 years old and their instructors in a state school, provide evidence of a positive answer – and notably of the necessity of knowing about the socio-economic reality of the student cohort when planning learning projects and of the importance of the arts as a crucial element in education.