This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Indigenous Education) - Softcover

Woolford, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496203860 ISBN 13: 9781496203861

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2018

Synopsis

AChoice Outstanding Academic Title, 2017

This important book, which students, scholars, and policy makers in the U.S. and Canada should read, is a testament to the quality of the work and the still limited understanding of its subject in both countries.—C. R. King, Choice

At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the “Indian problem” in both the United States and Canada. With the goal of permanently transforming Indigenous young people into Europeanized colonial subjects, the schools were ultimately a means for eliminating Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation-building. Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the “Indian problem” as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the “solution” of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences.
Inspired by the signing of the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement in Canada, which provided a truth and reconciliation commission and compensation for survivors of residential schools, This Benevolent Experimentoffers a multilayered, comparative analysis of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. Because of differing historical, political, and structural influences, the two countries have arrived at two very different responses to the harm caused by assimilative education.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Woolford is a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba and a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award. He is the author of Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty-Making in British Columbia and the coeditor of Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496203860
• ISBN 13: 9781496203861
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 450