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This Benevolent Experiment

Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States

Andrew Woolford

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 09/2015
Pages: 448
Subject: Social Science
eBook ISBN: 9780803284418

DESCRIPTION

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2017   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 Experiment offers 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 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.  

REVIEWS

"Andrew Woolford's outstanding book offers fresh contributions to the field of Indigenous and settler colonial studies. His comparison of the Indian boarding schools in the United States with their Canadian counterparts yields new insights into both. He provides a sophisticated and probing analysis of whether these schools constituted genocidal policies and practices. This is a top-notch piece of scholarship that should enrich our scholarly—and national—debates for decades to come."—Margaret Jacobs, author of White Mother to a Dark Race and A Generation Removed



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