The Indian School

The Indian School
Author: Gloria Whelan
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2009-10-06
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0061975842

A critically acclaimed historical novel by the author of the National Book Award-winning novel Homeless Bird. When shy ten-year-old Lucy comes to live with her aunt and uncle at their mission school, she's surprised at the number of harsh rules and restrictions imposed on the children. Why, she wonders, should the Indians have to do all the changing? And why is her aunt so strict with them? Then a girl called Raven runs away in protest, and Lucy knows she must overcome her timidity and stand up to her aunt—no matter what the consequences. With her trademark lyricism, spare prose, and strong young heroine, award-winning author Gloria Whelan has once again taken a chapter from history and transformed it into gripping, accessible historical fiction that is perfect for schools and classrooms, as well as for fans of Linda Sue Park and Louise Erdrich.

Indian School Days

Indian School Days
Author: Basil H. Johnston
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2022-12-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806192704

This book is the humorous, bitter-sweet autobiography of a Canadian Ojibwa who was taken from his family at age ten and placed in Jesuit boarding school in northern Ontario. It was 1939 when the feared Indian agent visited Basil Johnston’s family and removed him and his four-year-old sister to St. Peter Claver’s school, run by the priests in a community known as Spanish, 75 miles from Sudbury. “Spanish! It was a word synonymous with residential school, penitentiary, reformatory, exile, dungeon, whippings, kicks, slaps, all rolled into one,” Johnston recalls. But despite the aching loneliness, the deprivation, the culture shock and the numbing routine, his story is engaging and compassionate. Johnston creates marvelous portraits of the young Indian boys who struggled to adapt to strange ways and unthinking, unfeeling discipline. Even the Jesuit teachers, whose flashes of humor occasionally broke through their stern demeanor, are portrayed with an understanding born of hindsight.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)
Author: Sherman Alexie
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2012-01-10
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0316219304

A New York Times bestseller—over one million copies sold! A National Book Award winner A Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live. With a forward by Markus Zusak, interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney, and black-and-white interior art throughout, this edition is perfect for fans and collectors alike.

The Earth Memory Compass

The Earth Memory Compass
Author: Farina King
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0700626913

The Diné, or Navajo, have their own ways of knowing and being in the world, a cultural identity linked to their homelands through ancestral memory. The Earth Memory Compass traces this tradition as it is imparted from generation to generation, and as it has been transformed, and often obscured, by modern modes of education. An autoethnography of sorts, the book follows Farina King’s search for her own Diné identity as she investigates the interconnections among Navajo students, their people, and Diné Bikéyah—or Navajo lands—across the twentieth century. In her exploration of how historical changes in education have reshaped Diné identity and community, King draws on the insights of ethnohistory, cultural history, and Navajo language. At the center of her study is the Diné idea of the Four Directions, in which each of the cardinal directions takes its meaning from a sacred mountain and its accompanying element: East, for instance, is Sis Naajiní (Blanca Peak) and white shell; West, Dook’o’oosłííd (San Francisco Peaks) and abalone; North, Dibé Nitsaa (Hesperus Peak) and black jet; South, Tsoodził (Mount Taylor) and turquoise. King elaborates on the meanings and teachings of the mountains and directions throughout her book to illuminate how Navajos have embedded memories in landmarks to serve as a compass for their people—a compass threatened by the dislocation and disconnection of Diné students from their land, communities, and Navajo ways of learning. Critical to this story is how inextricably Indigenous education and experience is intertwined with American dynamics of power and history. As environmental catastrophes and struggles over resources sever the connections among peoplehood, land, and water, King’s book holds out hope that the teachings, guidance, and knowledge of an earth memory compass still have the power to bring the people and the earth together.

Always Anjali

Always Anjali
Author: Sheetal Sheth
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 22
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0593648854

Meet Anjali! She's the spunky star of this picture book with a timeless message about appreciating what makes us special and honoring our different identities. Anjali and her friends are excited to buy matching personalized license plates for their bikes--but Anjali can't find a plate with her name. She is often teased about her "different" name, and this is the last straw. Anjali is so upset that she demands her parents let her pick a new name! When they refuse, Anjali decides to take a closer look at who she is--beyond her name--and why being different means being marvelous. Actress and activist Sheetal Sheth has penned a deeply personal picture book about the experience of feeling othered and the journey toward embracing yourself.

Indian School Road

Indian School Road
Author: Chris Benjamin
Publisher: Nimbus+ORM
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2014-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1771082151

The scandalous history of neglect, abuse, and exploitation at a residential school for children—and the ongoing effects in the decades since it closed. In Indian School Road, journalist Chris Benjamin tackles the controversial and tragic history of Canada’s Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, its predecessors, and its lasting effects, giving voice to multiple perspectives for the first time. Benjamin integrates research, interviews, and testimonies to guide readers through the varied experiences of students, principals, and teachers over the school’s nearly forty years of operation, from 1930 to 1967, and beyond. Exposing the raw wounds of the twenty-first-century Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as the struggle for an inclusive Mi’kmaw education system, Indian School Road is a comprehensive and compassionate narrative history of the school that uneducated hundreds of Aboriginal children.

Returning Home

Returning Home
Author: Farina King
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0816540926

Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné (Navajo) boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures. This book works to recover the lived experiences of Native American boarding school students through creative works, student interviews, and scholarly collaboration. It shows the complex agency and ability of Indigenous youth to maintain their Diné culture within the colonial spaces that were designed to alienate them from their communities and customs. Returning Home provides a view into the students’ experiences and their connections to Diné community and land. Despite the initial Intermountain Indian School agenda to send Diné students away and permanently relocate them elsewhere, Diné student artists and writers returned home through their creative works by evoking senses of Diné Bikéyah and the kinship that defined home for them. Returning Home uses archival materials housed at Utah State University, as well as material donated by surviving Intermountain Indian School students and teachers throughout Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Artwork, poems, and other creative materials show a longing for cultural connection and demonstrate cultural resilience. This work was shared with surviving Intermountain Indian School students and their communities in and around the Navajo Nation in the form of a traveling museum exhibit, and now it is available in this thoughtfully crafted volume. By bringing together the archived student arts and writings with the voices of living communities, Returning Home traces, recontextualizes, reconnects, and returns the embodiment and perpetuation of Intermountain Indian School students’ everyday acts of resurgence.

The Thomas Indian School and the "Irredeemable" Children of New York

The Thomas Indian School and the
Author: Keith R. Burich
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2016-04-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0815653581

The story of the Thomas Indian School has been overlooked by history and historians even though it predated, lasted longer, and affected a larger number of Indian children than most of the more well-known federal boarding schools. Founded by the Presbyterian missionaries on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in western New York, the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indian Children, as it was formally named, shared many of the characteristics of the government-operated Indian schools. However, its students were driven to its doors not by Indian agents, but by desperation. Forcibly removed from their land, Iroquois families suffered from poverty, disease, and disruptions in their traditional ways of life, leaving behind many abandoned children. The story of the Thomas Indian School is the story of the Iroquois people and the suffering and despair of the children who found themselves trapped in an institution from which there was little chance for escape. Although the school began as a refuge for children, it also served as a mechanism for “civilizing” and converting native children to Christianity. As the school’s population swelled and financial support dried up, the founders were forced to turn the school over to the state of New York. Under the State Board of Charities, children were subjected to prejudice, poor treatment, and long-term institutionalization, resulting in alienation from their families and cultures. In this harrowing yet essential book, Burich offers new and important insights into the role and nature of boarding schools and their destructive effect on generations of indigenous populations.