Description
Book SynopsisAssimilation, Resilience, and Survival illustrates how settler colonialism propelled U.S. government programs designed to assimilate generations of Native children at the Stewart Indian School (1890–1980). The school opened in Carson City, Nevada, in 1890 and embraced its mission to destroy the connections between Native children and their lands, isolate them from their families, and divorce them from their cultures and traditions. Newly enrolled students were separated from their families, had their appearances altered, and were forced to speak only English. However, as Samantha M. Williams uncovers, numerous Indigenous students and their families subverted school rules, and tensions arose between federal officials and the local authorities charged with implementing boarding school policies.
The first book on the history of the Stewart Indian School,
Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival reveals the experiences of generations of Stewart School alumni a
Trade Review“Samantha Williams’s history of the Stewart Indian School is part of a new generation of research that brings laser focus to particular boarding schools and foregrounds their meaning to the students who attended them. . . . Williams also tells the significant story of Indigenous activists who fought to preserve Stewart’s buildings as a museum so this painful history will not be erased.”—Margaret Jacobs, author of
A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World“Samantha Williams has done an outstanding job of bringing to life the stories and experiences of the students who attended Stewart Indian School. This book is an important teaching tool to share the little-known history of U.S. boarding schools.”—Bobbi Rahder, museum director of the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center & Museum
“As we begin to more fully reckon with the history of the boarding schools and their legacy in the present, this outstanding book needs to be on everyone’s reading list. Williams provides a superbly written and extensively researched examination of the Stewart Indian School that centers Indigenous children’s experiences at the school throughout its nearly one-hundred-year history. The book, a sweeping and powerful study of a lesser-known boarding school, makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on Nevada Indigenous history and to broader conversations regarding how we grapple with the complex and challenging history of the boarding schools today.”—Amy Lonetree, author of
Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums“Beautifully written and richly documented, Samantha M. Williams’s history of the Stewart Indian School constitutes a major contribution to the literature on off-reservation boarding schools. It’s all here: the shifting federal educational policies, the forced removal of traumatized children, the nighttime sobbing in the dormitories, the multiple ways in which children resisted and accommodated themselves to the strenuous demands of classroom and institution, and finally, the concerted efforts of generations touched by Stewart to preserve the memories of an institution that continues to shape their lives and identities. This book is a remarkable achievement and merits reading by both scholars and students of Native American history.”—David Wallace Adams, author of
Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note on Terminology
Introduction: The Stewart Indian School in Context
1. Discipline, Negotiation, and Protest, 1890–1925
2. Progressive Policies and Assimilationist Practices, 1925–1948
3. Termination, Relocation, and the Special Navajo Program, 1946–1959
4. Stagnation, Self-Determination, and Reform, 1960–1980
5. Reclaiming the Stewart Indian School, 1980–2019
Conclusion: The Stewart Indian School Cultural Center & Museum
Notes
Bibliography
Index
