Dec 16 – Guest Lecture: Getting Their Word Out – Native Rhetorical Strategies in the School Press of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School 🗓

Deemed the “disciples of Gutenberg” by school administrators, the Native student printers at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School were trained to be highly skilled in reproducing the assimilationist rhetoric of the U.S. government. In fact, Native student printers were innovators on their own terms, using the school press as a platform for recording and disseminating their thoughts, experiences, knowledge, and acts of resistance, as well as those of their classmates. In this class session, we will explore some of the strategies that Carlisle student printers and other Carlisle students used to advance their perspectives in the face of heavy administrative censorship. Moreover, we will link these strategies to those used by these students’ predecessors (such as in ledger drawings) and by their descendants (such as in Native code talking employed in WWI and WWII). Finally, we will discuss Indigenous methodologies for pursuing further research on the school press of Indian boarding schools in the United States and Indian residential schools in Canada.

Christianna Stavroudis is an independent researcher based in Bonn. Her latest article, “’Let My People Have a Right’: The Native Activism of Arapaho Chief Paul Boynton” will appear in the Fall issue of The Chronicles of Oklahoma.

You can download the poster for the event here.