Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020 by Samantha M. Williams (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020 by Samantha M. Williams Martha Walls Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020. By Samantha M. Williams. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. xv + 344 pp. Cloth $60.00, e-book $60.00. Samantha M. Williams' Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020 explores the history and legacy of the Stewart Indian School (SIS), one of the United States' twenty-seven off-reserve boarding schools for Indigenous students, which operated between 1890 and 1980 in Carson City, Nevada. Williams argues that "it was not the humanitarian impulses of the US government that led to the boarding school system" (2) but that boarding schools were the product of "settler colonialism, including the drive to usurp and control Native American lands, destroy Indigenous cultures, and silence Native American voices" (3). While this framing of boarding schools is not new—the benevolence narrative has long been undermined by Indigenous boarding school survivors—Williams' history of the SIS, which spans more than a century, adds in important ways to boarding school history. Williams's methodology privileges SIS students and their communities above official records. In so doing, Williams considers major aspects of institutional life experienced by students but omitted from official records—for example, the punishments/abuse that profoundly shaped student experiences. Williams' centering of Indigenous perspectives is somewhat uneven. Chapter 1, covering the years 1890 to 1929, is less informed by firsthand accounts than later chapters simply because there are fewer survivors of that early era. Still, Williams' student-centering [End Page 515] methodology is critically important, as it counteracts the assimilative agenda of a system committed to erasing student identities and cultures. Drawing on the testimony of SIS survivors and their communities, and to a lesser extent on official records, Williams details how SIS policies and experiences varied over time. This longitudinal approach (the book explores five different SIS eras, including a chapter about recent efforts of survivors to create an experience-informed museum) is valuable as it identifies the usefulness of historical specificity to understand boarding school history. While Williams is clear that concepts of white supremacy and a commitment to assimilation were constant, she effectively shows how shifting foci of federal policy and institutional practices, along with evolving Indigenous critiques, resulted in school policies and student experiences that varied over time. Also crucial to Williams's study is how school policy was shaped "on the ground." Using borderlands theory, Williams shows that the SIS was contested space where federal ideals and assimilative goals butted against daily on-site interactions and collaborations between staff and students/families that sometimes resulted in the weakening or the temporary setting aside of assimilative policies. For instance, Williams notes that what was intended to be a universal long-term maintenance of students at the SIS occasionally gave way to students being permitted to return in the short term (and less commonly, permanently) to their home communities. In the context of these on-the-ground negotiations, Williams offers compelling evidence of Indigenous people pushing against the assimilative and white supremacist mandate of the SIS. Added to these negotiations were persistent student complaints and bold acts of running away—all of which sometimes led to the amelioration of SIS policy and improvements, however slight, to school conditions. Williams is careful not to overstate the impact of these acts of resistance, which she offers as evidence of student resilience and of Indigenous refusal to acquiesce to the assimilationism of boarding schools. Williams cautions that acts of SIS compromise did not signal a wavering of the essential assimilative agenda. Nor did they lessen the horrific impacts of school policies, including the disconnecting of children from their families and territories in ways that persisted over generations—a "generational trauma [that] is critical to understanding the broader context of students' boarding school experiences" (6). Despite her careful couching of the limits of resistance against powerful federal policy, Williams nevertheless demonstrates how potentially fraught it is to assess boarding school resistance against potent state power. After all, how does one reconcile small acts of resistance...