Display explains history and use of boarding schools to destroy Native American culture
By Will Collette
“Away from Home” is a travelling exhibition on the role
Native American boarding schools played in the ill-conceived attempt to “assimilate”
Natives into American culture by taking children far away, sometimes by force,
to these schools. Tomaquag and URI are co-sponsoring the Rhode Island showing
of the program.
Here’s a more detailed description of the program:
Beginning
in the 1870s, the US government attempted to educate and assimilate American
Indians into “civilized” society by placing children—of all ages, from
thousands of homes and hundreds of diverse tribes—in distant, residential
boarding schools.
Many were forcibly taken from their families and communities and stripped of all signs of “Indianness,” even forbidden to speak their own language amongst themselves. Up until the 1930s, students were trained for domestic work and trade in a highly regimented environment. Many children went years without familial contact, and these events had a lasting, generational impact.
Native
Americans responded to the often tragic boarding school experience in complex
and nuanced ways. Stories of student resistance, accommodation, creative
resolve, devoted participation, escape, and faith in one’s self and heritage
speak individually across eras.
Some
families, facing increasingly scarce resources due to land dispossession and a
diminishing way of life at home, sent their children to boarding schools as a
refuge from these realities. In the variety of reactions, Ojibwe historian
Brenda Childs finds that the “boarding school experience was carried out in
public, but had an intensely private dimension.”
Unintended
outcomes, such as a sense of “Pan Indianism” and support networks, grew and
flourished on campuses, and advocates demanded reform. Boarding schools were
designed to remake American Indians but it was American Indians who changed the
schools.
After
graduation, some students became involved in tribal political office or the
formation of civil rights and Native sovereignty organizations. The handful of
federal boarding schools remaining today embrace Indigenous heritage,
languages, traditions, and culture.
This
exhibition explores off-reservation boarding schools in its kaleidoscope of
voices. Visitors will explore compelling photographs, artwork, interviews,
interactive timelines, and immersive environments, including classroom and
dormitory settings.
Objects
such as a period barber chair and a young Seminole girl’s skirt, as well as
reproduction elements poignantly illuminate first-person accounts. Stories of
tragedy and familial love and friendships intersect.
Experiences
of gaining things useful and beautiful out of education, despite a formidable,
fifty-year agenda that mostly maligned Native American capabilities, call us
closer; each trial, each turning of power seeded in human survival,
strengthening Indigenous identity.
This
exhibition is made possible by NEH on the
Road, a special initiative of the National
Endowment for the Humanities. It was adapted from the
permanent exhibition, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School
Stories, organized by The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. It was adapted and
toured for NEH on the Road by the Mid-America Arts Alliance.
Away
from Home: Native American Boarding School Stories, will run
November 10, 2021 - January 7, 2022 located on the URI campus, 95 Upper College
Rd Kingston RI and will be open 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., Tuesday – Saturday.
Admission is free, donations are appreciated.
Click HERE for parking instructions.
