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This presentation, part of a new research project on Indigenous writing in the aftermath of residential schools in four settler states, has two interrelated goals: first, to think about the possibilities and limitations of writing/literature about traumatic experiences by residential school survivors and their children in North America in both theoretical and pedagogical terms;  second, to interrogate the politics of settler-colonial uses of images of indigenous children in boarding and residential schools in the US and Canada. Part of a larger settler-colonial project of elimination through education, boarding and residential schools aimed to “kill the Indian and save the man” (US) and to “kill the Indian in the child” (Canada). Of the 150,000 Aboriginal children who attended residential schools in Canada between 1876 and 1996, 6,000 are documented to have died of malnutrition, disease, physical abuse, and suicide. Many others lived to tell their stories, surviving the imprint of what Patrick Wolf has called “total institutions,” and giving voice to that painful history. As early as the 1880s, Native children in US boarding schools were writing for the student papers; twentieth and twenty-first century survivors continued to write about residential schools in genres from autobiography and poetry to drama and the novel. Despite the saturation of “Indian”-inflected images in settler colonial representations, Indigenous and First Nations people in North America are still, for the most part, invisible. As Maori scholar Linda T. Smith has argued, Indigenous communities have struggled for centuries to exercise a fundamental right: “to represent ourselves.” In the last three decades, indigenous artists have engaged in what Michelle Raheja calls visual sovereignty, the creative self-representation of Native artists, turning the archival absence into presence. I end with a case study– The exhibit “the Legacy of Hope,” which traveled to major TRC events, displayed photographic and documentary evidence along with transcribed testimony to raise awareness about the legacy of residential schools nationally. The coherent pictorial and textual narrative of the exhibit—supplementing recorded survivor testimonies, some broadcasted live—tells a story of survival and resilience Besides pointing to a traumatic past—rooted in the loss of family, language, culture, and often hope—they gesture towards re-visioning a national narrative by imagining a resilient future.

This talk turns to print culture, zooming in on a key archive: the records of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federally-funded off-reservation boarding school started in 1879 in Carlisle, PA. I argue that print culture—although part and parcel of the settler colonial project—enabled Native students to think, dream, and act toward a present and future beyond the confines of their (forced) industrial education. Examining surviving student writings, letters, and publications at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and several other federal boarding schools, I argue that Indigenous students’ work in print and epistolary form offers a glimpse into a tumultuous period of forced assimilation and Americanization, where student involvement in writing and reading practices mitigated some of the damage that industrial training did to Native education. Competing visions for Native education and print culture shaped this key period in the American Indian intellectual tradition, when emerging writers, editors, lawyers, and politicians started a print debate over American citizenship in the publications of Carlisle Indian School. Revealing editorial intervention and control of the students’ narratives in pamphlets, letters, student files, and the Carlisle magazines, I read student writing as complicit with the institution’s ideology, popularized by the school’s founder, R.H. Pratt, and yet critical of the very demands that the institution made of its students. Education for Americanization aimed to erase tribal identity and instill patriotism in students; yet, Native students integrated indigeneity into their writing and expressive culture at Carlisle in subtle ways. Although the authorship of the students’ writings is often difficult to ascertain, given the controlled environment in which they lived and wrote, as well as the constraints of colonial archives in collecting, preserving, and curating materials produced by Native students, this archive is worth studying for its contributions to what Osage critic Robert Warrior calls the American Indian Intellectual tradition. Following Warrior, in this chapter I read what he calls “Native educational texts”—a category where I also include the writings of students—a “microcosm of Native literary history,” a necessary point of departure not only for understanding how students negotiated Americanization in print, but also for our critical conceptualization of Native American written tradition as part of a continuum. Ultimately, I argue, the beginnings of the boarding school experiment and the removal of Native children to these institutions starting in 1879 coincided with the beginning of modern American Indian intellectual history, as well as the emergence of the first generation of intertribal activists and scholars.

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff are linked by common structural features as well as cultural concerns. Held side by side, both story cycles illustrate a regional history of downward mobility, as documented in Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash (2016) and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Phenomena unheard of in turn-of-the-century Winesburg, such as war trauma, dementia, drug addiction, and systemic violence dominate Knockemstiff. In complex ways both story cycles feed into current discussions of critical regionalism (Kenneth Frampton, Klaus Benesch, Klaus Lösch, Heike Paul) cultural mobility (Stephen Greenblatt), slow violence (Rob Nixon), and cruel optimism (Lauren Berlant).