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7. Peers and Mediation “I remember the first day I went to school,” wrote Maurice O’Sullivan of his experience in the Blasket Islands around 1908. “Peg de Róiste brought me, holding me by the hand, and it was with great plámás [persuasive talk] she coaxed me to go.” Later in class Peg sat beside O’Sullivan, explaining the strange doings of the teacher. When offered sweets, he had “a drowning man’s grip of Peg for fear of the mistress,” as she accompanied him to the top of the class.1 Essie Horne not only encouraged her Shoshone mother to send a younger brother and sister to Haskell Boarding School. Having been away for so long, Horne hardly knew her siblings. But she knew the ropes. She returned home, accompanied them by train, and kept a special watch over her five-year-old brother. Both new arrivals were initially lonely but “seemed to adjust quickly . . . to the school routines”—partly because of pampering by personnel, but in good part, no doubt, because of the kindness of an older student, their sister.2 As he approached school for the first time, the young Charles Eastman experienced both kindness and bullying. Two older Indian pupils took him aside and explained many of the strange ways of the whites, especially their obsession with dividing the days into amazingly small pieces, and how they had “everything in books.” There were no more buffalo to chase, they warned him; “your pony will have to pull the plough like the rest.” Later that same day, however, Eastman temporarily fled the school, was called a baby by other older boys, and was jeered at as a “long hair” by more acculturated pupils, who had internalized too well the assimilatory goals of the school.3 Inthesecharacteristicvignettesex-pupilsconveyedtheimportanceofpeers to adjustment at the schools. Pupils sometimes helped, sometimes jeered and bullied each other. Sometimes they became “cultural brokers,” mediating between school, pupils, home, and the larger world. Especially in big, multitribal boarding schools, they formed into officially sanctioned extracurricular cultures, or into secret subcultures. All such arrangements intensified or problematized peer relationships; they also worked to reinforce or obstruct the assimilatory goals of the school. Many, though not all, of these processes were highly similar from Ireland to America in the period under review. I Fellow pupils did not always make things easier for each other. Indeed, although teachers could be draconic and even brutal, much of the everyday misery suffered by pupils at cnei, bia, and missionary schools was imposed by peers. An Irish informant admitted that many of the games he and his mates played in their schoolyard “were pretty rough and sometimes a boy would get a knock that would put him out of action for some days.” When the parish priest visited the school he counted eighty-four falls by pupils, any one of which was sufficient to break a boy’s bones.4 The violence at Patrick Shea’s school was more than over-enthusiastic horseplay. “I was first made aware of political conflict,” he wrote, when he and his two brothers “were suddenly attacked by a howling crowd of boys who knocked us down and beat and kicked us, calling us ‘traitors’ and ‘English spies.’” The brothers did not see themselves as anti-nationalist. Admittedly their father was a member of the ric (Royal Irish Constabulary, the regular Irish police force until independence in 1922, seen by many nationalist Irish people as the eyes and ears of British administration in Ireland). But he was actually a supporter of Home Rule, to be achieved by peaceful means. Later Shea learned more about the reasons for the assault—ric men had raided a number of local houses in search of weapons “or other evidence of rebellious intent” hidden by revolutionary advocates of Irish independence. Whatever the reasons, children beat children.5 Another folklore informant told how pupils from different villages in the 1880s engaged in fights “with stones and sods flying” between them. The unfortunate child who got a name for telling tales at school was “picked at” publicly, and “if he hadn’t sods pelted at him he’d have his ears deafened with everyone shouting around him and calling him a tell-tale.” Although the informant did not remember any “tell-tale rhymes” from her own period, her interviewer did: “Tell-tale, tell-tale hang to the cow’s tale.” This might be repeated for a...

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